071704 Keb’ Mo’, Ottawa, ON

Back when I was exchanging daily Ottawa Bluesfest reviews for a free all-access festival pass I took my amateur journalistic role pretty seriously.  I would arrive onsite every day as early as I could and stay until closing time, scouring each and every stage for a paragraph or two.

Every night I would get home around 11:30pm or so, crack a beer or three and get writing.  Given that I didn’t know what I was doing (still don’t) those reviews would take hours to write.  It’s not like I learned any formats or tricks (or anything, for that matter) in journalism school, because I didn’t go to journalism school.

Let’s just say I’d be lucky if I was finished a review by 3am.  Usually I’d be sending them in around 5am, give or take.

I’ve been in the presence of live music in a myriad of situations; as a musician, a fan, a manager, a conductor, a roadie, a promotor, a reviewer…and in every role the impact, feel and overall musical experience is quite different.  Take for example the experience of playing a show versus the experience of reviewing a show, or the bliss of enjoying a concert as a fan versus the stress and distraction of promoting the same event. 

Now this might be a bit hard to explain, but when I was immersed in delivering ten consecutive daily Bluesfest reviews I would spend more mental energy jotting down angles, phrases, and highlights to write about than actually logging internal memories about those shows.  It’s more like I wasn’t watching the concerts as much as I was analyzing them. 

Here’s a perfect analogy: Often when I was teaching guitar a student would come in, hand me a CD and ask to learn a song I’d never heard before.  I would get busy play-stop-rewinding, play-stop-rewinding and learning the guitar parts and invariably at some point the kid would ask me, “Do you like the song?”

“I don’t know,” I would answer, “I haven’t listened to it yet.

Then I would explain how I was so focused on the component parts that I hadn’t yet heard the song as an entity, like someone who might be tasked with analyzing colour mixtures in a painting might be unconcerned with the subject matter of the art itself.

Reviewing a show is something like that.

Anyway, all this is just preamble to tell you that despite the fact that my ticket book tells me I saw Keb’ Mo’ at the Bluesfest on July 17th, 2004 absolutely nothing of what I’m sure was an excellent performance has been retained in my memory banks whatsoever.  I guess I got home, wrote the (probably glowing) review and completely discarded the show from my brain in preparation for the next night.

It’s interesting to note that I can’t seem to find any of these reviews anywhere online, neither the ones I wrote for jambands.ca nor the ones I wrote for the Bluesfest website, which is too bad; I’m sure they would jog a lot of memories.  They say that once something is uploaded to the ‘net it can never go away.  Fear not, I’m here to tell you that this is simply not true.