Rainin' nothin' but the blues

The amazing thing about the blues -- and all wistful, gut-wrenching music, for that matter -- is it ends up making you feel not sad, but just right. And Thursday night was a fine example of how some wailing licks and plaintive vocal tricks can help it all shake down.

Blue Rodeo reminded everyone why they're Canada's Poster Band. By turns playful, sentimental and darkly soulful, they held the crowd fully in sway during their varied set. A few new tunes, due out this fall, added spark and surprise to a welcome roster of familiar numbers.

Who else can tunefully compare a broken relationship to an iceberg adrift at sea? Hell, they ain't got no icebergs in Texas, so stop lookin' there.

Coyote, who captured several more ace images at all four stages, summed up Blue Rodeo nicely: "Reliably excellent."

Lucky Peterson and wife Tamara revved things up on the River Stage (hey, you can actually see the river before sunset), with a rollicking, borderline campy but greatly inspiring run through classics including Proud Mary. I haven't seen a crowd having more fun in a long time.


















Throw in some new sounds from Michael Nau and his band Page France, a dose of the Strong Persuader himself, Robert Cray, plus rain, rain that stayed away another day, and you've logged another worthy notch on that guitar indeed.

Cryin' the Blues about Chairs

Well, I do find it amusing how the Bluesfest just couldn't figure out how to manage the "chair" problem. So now it's back to the free-for-all mayhem that we've become accustomed to. We might have a new opportunity. Now that Mayor Lex and his posse have stopped funding the crack pipe program, maybe they can divert the saved funds for umpire chairs to distribute to those "standingly-challenged" Blues-festers.

A New Piece on Swabbin' th' Deck

I've a new Google Poem over on my other other blog.

Northern-fried blues

Take Yoko Ono on a bad crack jag, the possessed chick in The Exorcist and one of them sea lions from the San Francisco pier and you've got a rough sense of the sound Tanya "Tagaq" Gillis gave birth to on the Bete Noir stage Wednesday night.

Part Cambridge Bay ingenue, part grand mal seizure, Tagaq held onlookers spellbound with the help of her DJ partner's Apple notebook-created soundscapes. In the delightfully harrowing process, she dragged Inuit throat singing -- screaming, groaning and ululating -- into the 21st century.

When a couple of beatbox homeboys joined her on stage, she taunted one with: "You better be good, or I'm going to hurt you."

And when her voice jammed up, she quipped: "Throat singing doesn't work when you've got a ball of phlegm in your throat. You need water -- or whiskey."

The highlight was an extended duet with her cousin Celina Kalluk that showcased their northern hypno-trance to mesmerizing effect.

A night earlier, Alejandro Escovedo dedicated a song to Joe Strummer on the same stage. Joe would've approved of Tagaq.

Busy, bluesy...

Uh, yeah, really busy last night. Clockwise from top left: local hero John Allaire; 'just another' Tex-Mex band from East LA, aka Los Lobos; legendary Texas 'folk-blues-classicist-unclassifiable-incredible' Alejandro Escovedo, with half of his completely rocking string section; and the incomparably wry and funny observational folkie, Todd Snider.

The Independent Observer, Aggie and I also stumbled across a Motley Assortment Of Random Friends trekking through Randy Newman and George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars as we migrated from stage to stage. Reviews of Newman were polarized; the Motleys were uniformly high on him, but the IO (we don't call him "Independent" for nuthin') suggested that watching him was like entering the Eighth Circle of Hell. P-Funk fascinated us all: Diaper Guy, Feather Pants Guy and Neon Rasta Guy (George?), physiques showing a full range of buff-ness and seminudity, leaning toward large bellies, drew us to the Jumbotron like rubberneckers to a trainwreck. The musical funk was fun, though.

In further fashion news, Aggie was smashing in her new metallic Bermudas! Eat your heart out, Short Guy! You could have had all this and more, instead of getting dazed and confused in Rockliffe...