Well, I had a bit of an unusual night out last night, thought I’d share it. (If this isn’t the right forum, feel free to move it).
Tuesdays are always bad for me - the glow from the weekend has worn off and the bulk of the work week is yet to go. Besides, on Tuesdays I do my exercises at 7:30 in the AM at the gym, so by the end of the day I look forward to vegitating at home.
However, my wife had other plans. Turns out that she made a good friend at my four year old son Carl’s Ukranian afternoon school, the mom of a girl Carl’s age, and this woman had some tickets to go see a band only playing that night. This person was a good friend of the guy leading this band, and so every time he’s in Toronto he gives her free tickets.
Well, I’d never heard of this band, named ‘Gogol Bordello’, so I naturally assumed they were a small band playing in a bar somewhere. But my wife wanted to go, so we dropped Carl off at his grandparents for a sleepover and went.
We picked up the friend, and drove to the location where they were playing, in the Port of Toronto area, meeting her sister and sister’s bf there. On the way, the friend described how they met, many years ago, at a traditional Ukranian music fest, before the singer had formed his band; they had been good friends for a long time.
Much to my surprise, the venue was huge - and crowded with hundreds of people, all of whom were considerably younger than us, and dressed in variations on punk - plenty of young things with piercings, tattoos, and wearing what amounted to underwear. Our group of 40-somethings in business casuals sorta stood out.
Well, we went to an upstairs balcony in this place, and we were sufficiently late that the opening acts had already played. The band came on, and I must say they were really very good - a sort of ecclectic mix of Klezmer and punk, with Gypsy and Brazillian influences thrown in; the band had a real energy to it, if they did play too loud (all of us thought we were going deaf). I’d certainly get their stuff. The lead singer had a great stage act, and looked almost maniacal as he lept about the stage.
Anyway, after the band finished, this friend of my wife decided she wanted to go backstage and meet her buddy, the singer. This proved easier said than done. As it turned out, there were literally scores of punkette groupies who had more or less the same mission in mind, and beefy security guards were busy chucking them out. I just wanted to go home, it being late and having no ambition to meet this fellow and not thinking it at all likely that the security guards would let us through. As it happened, they didn’t - but nor did they chuck us out.
I guess our party was a bit of a puzzler for them. We were too old and conservatively dressed to be the usual line of fans, which gave her claim to be a personal friend of the singer credibility, but they were obviously not in the business of letting members of the audience in. We waited in a sort of limbo, amidst the litter of crushed beer cans, while this friend thought of various ways to get through security; they ignored us and busily hunted down - and tossed out with various degrees of force - fans attempting to linger.
Finally, she snagged one of the tee shirt sellers who remembered her, and he went backstage and informed the singer we were here - and in we went.
Backstage the was a drunken, but friendly, party going on. Someone handed me a half-drunk bottle of vodka; the singer dude greeted the friend with a hug and glad exclamations, and they proceeded to chat for the next half hour or so. I was feeling a bit of a fish out of water, not knowing anyone. I joked to my wife that I was probably the only guy in the room who had not heard of the band before that day, which was overheard by the guy who played electric violin in the band - that broke the ice and we ended up chatting with him. A very nice guy. We got to talking about other bands who use electric violin (an instrument I happen to like - used by New Model Army on the album Impurity, among others).
Anyway, we had a good time, and after some of the band (not the electric violin player) decided to go to a late-night “after party”. I had to work, so I begged off; so did the friend. The sister and BF hopped in a van with the band, and we went home.
