051113 Big Mama, Ottawa, ON
Though musicals and opera aren’t really my thing sometimes theatre and music can meet up in a way that tickles my entertainment bone, and this show was one of those times…
Author: Todd Snelgrove
I've been having a lot of fun these past fifty-odd years. I've busked and bicycled through more places I can count, taught music and caught dengue fever, managed a band that toured all over North America and worked with Canada's National Orchestra for two decades. I've traveled countless miles to see a thousand concerts, played hundreds of gigs, won in Vegas and lost in Estonia, worked as a concert promoter, university instructor, janitor, and entertainment writer, seen the Grateful Dead and hiked the Dogon Valley, ran the stairs of the CN Tower and pedalled across Scandinavia once and Newfoundland twice. I've visited the graves of Alexander the Great and the great Robert Johnson, drunk excessively with some of the best and worst people you can imagine, and I've slept in some very, very weird places. Several years ago I started writing some of it down, and much of it is collected here for your perusal.
051011 Neil Young/Bert Jansch, Toronto, ON
Leave it to Neil Young to book folk legend Bert Jansch (1943-2011) to open the show – a classy pairing that would prove to be one of Bert’s last tours…
050906 Drums & Tuba/Dave Lauzon, Ottawa, ON
I believe this might mark the last time I saw Drums & Tuba, a quirky-by-definition trio that first came to my attention at an Ani DiFranco concert on this exact date in ’99…
050816 Pearl Jam, Ottawa, ON
It’s great to see a band when they are still on top of their game, even if they’ve been there for a quarter of a century. I don’t know how it took so long for me to jump on this band’s wagon but I will definitely be seeing Pearl Jam again and again and as often as I can from now on…
050715 Miami Auto Museum at the Dezer Collection, Miami, FL
I love classic cars, I’m really into movie memorabilia, and I’m a sucker for a good museum visit so with a few days to kill in Miami I was happy to dedicate a full afternoon to the Dezer Collection…
Sandboarding in Peru
This is me taking the inaugural run down the first (and smallest) hill of the afternoon. The best part is when the guy filming says “poof” by chance at the very moment that I wipe out. And if you look really closely, I come out of my tumbling somersault on my feet like a gymnast landing a routine…
Folkalarm, 5
A review I wrote long ago of 5, the fifth album from Kevin Breit’s acoustic ensemble Folk Alarm. Reprinted courtesy of jambands.ca (not like I asked them or anything)
050414 Dead Feat, New Orleans, LA
The concert was a conglomeration of musicians called Dead Feat, a ‘super-group’ of sorts that pairs members of Little Feat and The Grateful Dead with a few local heroes solely for a single (albeit annual) New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival aftershow…
050314 Dr. John Tribute, New Orleans, LA
The lineup for this amazing tribute concert was scheduled to include the likes of Mavis Staples, Jimmie Vaughan, Gregg Allman, Lucinda Williams, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Warren Haynes and so many more, not to mention the man himself, Dr. John…
050209 The Tragically Hip, Montreal, QC
On May 2nd, 2009 I drove from Ottawa to Montreal to see The Tragically Hip at Metropolis. Although Montreal has a lot of great small-to-midsized venues, when bands come to town that ought to be playing the Centre Bell but wants to play somewhere more intimate they always seem to book into Metropolis. The semi-regular opportunity to see arena-level bands in a nice, 2,000-person capacity balconied theatre easily pushes Metropolis to the top of my preferred Montreal concert halls…
