Daily ticket stories
On March 21st, 2012 I drove thirty kilometres or so to my local arena to see Van Halen. I had seen the band in Montreal about five years previous and had a great time at the show so I was anxious for another chance to see Van Halen (almost) as they were intended to be seen…
In the Spring of 2016 I spent three weeks in the French Quarter of New Orleans. One morning I was perusing the local paper (as is my habit when on vacation) and I read about an upcoming event that I found very intriguing. It was a modernized version of The Passion of The Christ adapted by Tyler Perry, it was to be broadcast live on television as it was acted out in real time, it was all happening right in the French Quarter and best of all it was free…
Seeing this ticket stub from the March 16th, 2012 game between the Ottawa Senators and their despised rivals the Montreal Canadiens has jarred a memory free from my clogged mind (which I suppose is the main objective of this typing exercise). No, it’s not that the game ended with the Sens winning…
On March 15th, 2015 I went to the wonderful Capitol Theatre just this side of NYC to celebrate the 75th birthday of my favourite living bass player – Phil Lesh – with a concert by…Phil Lesh…
On March 14th, 2017 I drove out to my hometown rink to watch the Ottawa Senators take on the Tampa Bay Lightning. Being mid-March the weather was starting to warm up a bit but with the thermometer still hovering around ten below zero my journey from the parking lot to the front door of the venue was fast and targeted…
Big Sugar mounted the temporary stage and turned the boring, accordion-walled conference hall into a barrelhouse barroom with a guitar-driven blues-tinged slab of sound that was a mile thick…
This is the last concert I saw. Covid was just ramping up when I attended this wonderful show featuring Angela Hewitt playing the music of Bach, and while I enjoyed it immensely I sure am looking forward to seeing another concert sometime soon. Not since I started going to concerts at the age of fourteen have I gone a year without sharing a live musical performance with thousands of strangers, and I’m dying to do it again.
I was in line for a Jack & Coke when the music started. I could hear that it was Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes playing the great Duane Allman instrumental track Little Martha. Drink in hand I flew up the stairs and caught the last bit of the opener as I was finding my seat…
March 7th, 2009 was the middle night of Phish’s triumphant comeback run at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia, a super-fun sold out string of shows that marked the end of the band’s second hiatus. In addition to spending the weekend attending a trio of great concerts I spent a whole lot of time socializing and meeting m’lady’s US concert buddies for the first time…
As part of Canada’s 150th birthday celebrations Red Bull sent their crew to Ottawa for the first time. They spent a month setting up a downhill ice-skating track on top of the Rideau Canal locks next to the Château Laurier hotel that was nothing short of an engineering wonder. Complete with jumps, bumps, twists, and turns, it looked like a frozen Coney Island roller coaster but instead of two metal rails running it’s length the iced track was painted into four positively suicidal skating lanes…
Todd Man Out 