022104 Mickey Hart, Ottawa, ON
Buckle up kids, this little torn piece of paper has a lot of stories attached to it…
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.
022010 Olympic Curling: Canada vs Great Britain, Vancouver, BC
As the Vancouver 2010 Olympics approached I did a little wheelin’ and dealin’ with our ticket package (solely through the official Olympic ticket-trading site – I’m no back-alley scalper) and ended up dumping snowboarding tickets and a pair to one of the nightly closing ceremonies (featuring icky Hedley) and ended up with passes to a curling competition…
021810 Neil Young Tribute, Vancouver, BC
This was the first of two nights for this one-off project (oxymoron intended), a congregation of eclecticity under the helm of an equally eclectic record producer best known for directing tribute concerts to an incomparably eclectic string of artists that includes Tim Buckley, Randy Newman, Bill Withers, Walt Disney and the Marquis de Sade…
021414 Walt Disney World: Hollywood Studios/Epcot, Orlando, FL
One of the many, many commonalities shared between m’lady and I is our general nonobservance of common mating rituals such as celebrating Valentine’s Day or things like anniversaries. Heck, we don’t even know the date of our anniversary…
021220 Five O’Clock Bells, Ottawa, ON
On one of my final laps around the internet before leaving St. John’s I discovered an interesting tidbit of a musical happening coming up at the tiny Gladstone Theatre: a one-man play that delved into the life and career of one of my favourite guitar players of all time, the inimitable and quite incredible Lenny Breau…
021117 The Assad Brothers, Ottawa, ON
Right around the time I was starting to scramble for a Secret Santa gift for my guitar-playing friend Dave I received an email announcing Ottawa’s upcoming annual Chamber Music Festival…
020919 Kevin Breit, Ottawa, ON
After a stellar show the night before (following a less-than-stellar show the night before that) on February 9th, 2019 I committed to see Kevin Breit’s third and final show at the Ottawa Jazz Festival’s brief winter fest. The last-minute decision to attend the show was augmented by my promise to Kevin the night before that I would…
020816 Senators vs Lightning, Ottawa, ON
Well, looky-here! Another Sens home game, this time against my other hometown team, the Tampa Bay Lightning. Not like I live in Tampa Bay or anything, but…
020717 Drive-By Truckers, Montreal, QC
On February 7th, 2017 m’lady and I drove to Montreal to see the Drive-By Truckers. Before the show we had a drink in our hotel lobby bar and decided to walk to the show. It was fairly mild for a February night and the walk was relatively short and quite pleasant…
020216 Bruce Springsteen, Toronto, ON
On February 2nd, 2016 I drove to Toronto to see the mighty Bruce Springsteen at the Air Canada Centre. It was a quick in-and-out mission utilizing a free hotel stay on points at a dingy EconoLodge downtown, but one thing I’ve learned is to never, ever miss a Bruce Springsteen concert…
Todd Man Out 