Entry tags:

bands, happiness, love, memory lane, music, my past, shows

play that funky music, white boy
I love my obnoxious new journal layout.



Sweet times last night at the Knife Party/Agnostic Front show. The London Music Hall is this weird hidden place that I never even knew existed in London. Like, I knew OF it, by name, but I didn't realize what it was and how fucking big and awesome it is. It's like the Kool Haus (I still call that place "The Warehouse". It's just what I'm used to!) or Arrow Hall. Totally weird! I got inside and saw the stage and how big it was and I was just like "BUH? Am I in the right place???" Pretty rad to see the boys at such a big venue. Their new songs were amazing, and the kids were all really into it, which was so wicked. Knife Party was like, the only good band though. The Carrier SUUUUUCKED and looked like 5 loser douchebags, and I hate Agnostic Front pretty much entirely BUT! it was still fun because of how many people there were just so excited for AF. Downside? 95% of Agnostic Front's fans are crazy skinheads. Oh the circle pits and testosterone! It was almost choking me! haha. Matty was being SO hilarious: he took his shirt off and was stomping through the pit all chest-puffy and angry, and basically making total fun of the skinheads. I believe at one point he was even skipping around cowboy/cow-wranglin' style? Ah. That was the highlight of AF's set for me.

It'd be cool to see more shows at that place because, while I am totally accustomed and still enamoured with Call the Office aka my second home due to its small size and seedy feel and legendary rock'n'roll status... a big club just feels so fun once in awhile. It takes me back to my younger days. The days of "concerts". You know? I started going to concerts when I was 11 years old. My dad is a huge music fan and so he got me and my brother started at a very young age. When I was 11 he took me to see Live, PJ Harvey and Veruca Salt at the Molson Amphitheater in Toronto. I will never forget that show. After that, he started taking me to everything. I saw so many concerts with my dad, from Tool to B.B. King. I'd also go to concerts with friends all the time. My favourite big concert of all time, the one that sticks out in my head the most for so many reasons, is when I saw Nine Inch Nails in... I THINK 1999 or 2000? Maybe it was 1998 actually? I don't know, it was for the first tour they did for The Fragile, and they hadn't toured since The Downward Spiral... so it was like this HUGE deal, because in case you didn't know, from the time I was 13 until I was 16 I was like totes huge goth Trent Reznor-worshipping girl. Nine Inch Nails was like god to me. Everything I owned was plastered in NIN pictures, lyrics, imagery, magazine articles, you name it. When my friend Ruth and I heard they were coming to Toronto, it was about a year past the time where I sort of "got over" NIN (I've never fully gotten over them completely - I still think they're amazing and that they make some of the sexiest music ever written) but because them touring was SUCH a freaking enormous deal, we obviously were ecstatic and went decked out to the fuckin' nines and BLASTED "Pretty Hate Machine" all the way on the drive to Toronto.

Man, that concert was unbelievable. The crowd was insane and SO dedicated back then - Nine Inch Nails weren't a mainstream radio/Myspace staple the way they are now, so the fans were like hard core. Ruth and I miraculously got right up to the very front, right in front of Robin Fink, and during "Terrible Lie", Trent Reznor actually touched my hand, and I remember crying during a song - I can't remember now what song it was - and it was just the best fucking night of my life up to that point. I was an awesome wreck.

That was the best concert of my life, because of my huge dedication to NIN, but there were so many other amazing concerts I saw that just had me reeling. I've seen pretty much every single band I like live, some 3 or 4 times (I think my record for seeing a band I love is 10, which is ashamedly Deftones hahahaha!). All I EVER used to do was go to concerts like every single weekend almost. I remember we'd drive to Buffalo to see them sometimes too, if a band wasn't coming to Southern Ontario at all. And it's all thanks to my dad... I'm glad he got me so into music at such a young age and encouraged me to see as many live shows as possible. It was his hobby that he passed onto my brother and I. I've seen some AMAZING bands, especially Motorhead, I saw Judas Priest twice in two weeks, I've seen The Misfits with Michael Graves on vocals three times, I saw Slayer which just fucking blew my head off, the Psychedelic Furs which was just so amazing... there are literally hundreds more I could ramble on about.

Things just aren't the same anymore! Nowadays, I get mad if I have to go see a band in a big venue. I LOVE seeing a really mind-blowing band in a tiny venue like Call the Office! It is the best thing ever. It's so intimate and incredible and you can see every bead of sweat... you just don't get that in arenas and stadiums! One of the times I saw C'mon, I was standing in front of Ian Blurton and he was playing so hard that his hand got all cut up, but he kept on playing like a motherfucker and there was blood all over his guitar and blood kept getting on my shirt because I was so close to him... you can't get that kind of intimate, personal experience outside of small clubs! I have had so many great moments like that at Call the Office... so many ridiculously awesome memories of shows there. Robin Black pulling me onstage to play tambourine for his band, The Spunks getting me to come up and play guitar while the guitar player ran around on the floor in the crowd with a buzzing vibrator, getting Danko Jones' sweat and spit all over my face while we sang into a mic together, standing at the back of the stage while The Queers played taking pictures of the insane moshpit full of screaming, happy kids, seeing my future husband Jon Spencer just walking around the club (!!!) before Heavy Trash's set (hello! he's a fucking MUSICAL GENIUS and he's just passin' me by, givin' me a smile and a wink! ack!)... there is nothing like the high you get from a show in a small club.
When I saw the Immortal Lee County Killers play, there was me and maybe four other people watching them and I swear to god I almost had a fucking orgasm during their set. It was magical. When the club is full and buzzing with people and a big crowd all sweating together, it's damn cool, but even cooler than that is getting to see one of your favourite bands with only a handful of other people, like a private performance. When The Death Set played, they set up their equipment on the floor instead of the stage and ten of us just stood around them while they played and the guitar player ran around like a maniac, trashing the drumset and getting us all to scream into the mic randomly... or the first time Priestess played there and it was me, Jeff, Tony and a few of our friends, no more than 20 at best, and they played as if there were 10,000 of us. And watching The Icarus Line with Tony and pretty much no one else and they were so terrific and mesmerizing, and the guitarist asked me out during one of their songs, haha. Ahh.

Some of the best memories in my life are from shows. Going to punk rock and hardcore shows in Hamilton back when I was still in highschool. My friends bands would always play at the Transit Union room and the Sonic Unyon basement, and we always knew it was gonna be an awesome weekend when there was a good show at one of those "clubs" (i say that loosely, haha). Back in those days, when George didn't even KNOW the other dudes from Alexisonfire yet and he had a band with Sean St. Laurent, Bob Beamer, Steve Brisbois and Matt Leach called Condemning Salem, ahahaha... and Scotty was still in At The Mercy Of Inspiration and not yet in the Cancer Bats... so many guys from all of those bands back then got into pretty famous bands. I remember seeing Every Time I Die at freaking Sonic Unyon!!! GOD I miss those days! I even made a music video for Rise Over Run, I still have it on a VHS tape somewhere, hahahahahaha!!! I miss all those venues like Transit, Sonic Unyon, The Pine Room in Oakville, Gord's in St. Catharines, Red Square... Those shows were the backdrop for so many of my teenage scenarios... love, crushes, drunken shenanigans, drama, apathy... they are were the foundation for a lot of friendships... I look back on those days with such fondness and happiness. And then there was Jen's whole stint with Scarlet Sins and Chris and I pretty much tagged along for the whole thing, show to show. And basement shows! Sigh.
So much of my life has been spent watching live music; almost everything I do is based around music and live shows. Every aspect of my life. At least two nights out of the week I am at Call the Office... even if there's nothing to do, I know there will always be a show going on. I met Dave at a show. I met some of my best friends because of music, and shows. Jeff and I used to live and breathe live shows. We wrote about them and photographed them. It was natural that my photography would drift into mostly live bands. I have always been obsessed. To try and capture the intense feeling I get from seeing an incredible band... it's one of my favourite things to do. I try to do the bands justice and photograph them in a way that looks the way they sound to me. It's worked out well, and I think one of the reasons I'm so good at photographing bands is because the way that I am just obsessed with music and everything to do with music is so overwhelming and kind of just exists in every corner of my body. Music comes naturally to me, I somehow always tend to drift towards musicians as friends, I want to see music, taste music, touch music, be music.

It's really fun to look back at the musical phases in my life. They define my memories and my past. I heard the other day that in some parts of the Middle East it is illegal to listen to music and the government will basically throw you in jail, shun or even execute you for listening to any form of music. I couldn't even wrap my head around it. If it weren't for music - listening to it, being in bands, going to shows, watching my friends bands live, talking about it, singing it, playing it, crying to it, crying because of it, getting drunk to it, fucking to it - I don't even know who I'd be. I'm dead serious. Like, a life without the things I have experienced, musically, is just completely unfathomable.

I'm actually getting a little emotional about this! I won't say the typical cliche things about how music is my best friend/saved my life/changed me, whuteva whuteva. But really...



I guess my original topic was shows. One of the points I was trying to make was that sometimes I miss getting so excited about a big arena show, because now I am so used to seeing bands at Call the Office, which is so small in comparison, and never having to pay for shows and always expecting to be able to stand in "my spot" (right in front of the left side of the stage, between the stage and the speaker) and getting cranky when I can't. I'm so spoiled now that I forget about the excitement of huge arena shows or festivals, and being SO excited when you got to the front of the crowd, and being impressed by "rock stars". I'm so jaded! Ha ha. Now, it takes a band I LOVE more than life to get me into an arena or stadium. I think Def Leppard was the last band I saw in an arena, and that was almost three years ago! (For the record, I only went because we got free tickets heh.) And the only living "rock stars" that impress me are Lemmy Kilmister and Bob Dylan. But, spoiled or not, I still adore seeing bands I love at small clubs more than anything, for the reasons I listed above. Nothing beats that intimacy. Nothing. It makes me cream. And the shots I get! Oh dear god. It's fucking electric when my lens gets that perfect embodiment of the sound and the pulse and the beat and the vibrations and the blood sweat and tears that went into that music.



Man I feel like I need to go smoke a cigarette.