I’ve been a fan of The B-52s for a long time. The first concert of theirs I went to was in San Diego on December 31st, 1989. I was visiting a penpal and she had tickets for the show. The show opened and I was hooked. (Thanks, Kara!) One of the things that stands out in my mind was Love Shack, which they played over midnight. It ran for 10 or 15 minutes and set the house on fire.  You can read an article about the show from Spin Magazine online.

The next time I saw them was later on the same tour when they played Massey Hall in Toronto. I was in the balcony looking down at the show and had a great time. The show almost ground to a halt, however, when some pinhead grabbed a stuffed lobster that was tied to one of the microphone stands. Fortunately, they retrieved the lobster, but before they basically singled out the offender and told him what he’d done was “not cool”.

I’ve also seen them in Ottawa once or twice – one time at the Ex.

(more…)

I took a few photos (ok, 292’ish… whatever) at the B-52s concert at the Ottawa Bluesfest. I’ve dropped some of them into a gallery, which you can view here.

Commentary sometime Friday.

Just a quick photo of the B-52s on stage at Bluesfest during Private Idaho.

More pictures to follow…

I’ve posted all the pictures I took of KISS on-stage at the Ottawa Bluesfest. You can view them here.

I headed down to the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest at Lebreton Flats Wednesday evening to see KISS in concert.

This was my first KISS concert, which apparently put me in the minority based on the fact that there were tons of people in KISS makeup. I enjoyed it enough and can put a tick next to “Seen KISS in concert”. Rock and Roll All Nite was pretty impressive, with lots of fireworks and confetti cannons. Very cool!

I took a lot of pictures, some of which you can see by clicking on the images below. Sooner or later I’ll get around to putting the rest of them online. They’re now available here.

View Full Album

By now you’ve probably heard about United Airlines throwing the Sons of Maxwell’s guitars around as they were loading them on the plane. Predictably, one of the guitars was damaged, so Dave Carroll asked United to fix it. United basically said “no”, to which Dave Carroll said “well then I’m going to write three songs about my experience and post them to YouTube”. I’m betting that Ms. Irlweg thought “yeah yeah… posting rant to YouTube… heard it before”. According to his website, he was hoping to get 1 million hits in the first year.

Well, over 1.3 million hits later  in 3 days and United has blinked. They’ve apparently seen the error of their ways. Of course, this probably isn’t going to stop the release of United: Songs 2 and 3.

I hadn’t been planning on going to Bluesfest, but a call from a friend changed that. I hopped on a bus and made my way to Lebreton Flats where I met up with my friend. We listened to some amazing improvisational electronic music from Holy F*ck for a while before heading off to see Ana Miura.

Watching and listening to Ana, it was clear that she was singing from the heart. Her music was warm and full of rich tones and she even played one song on a ukulele that she’d made herself. Very talented and a likely addition to my iPod in the near future!

Once Ana finished, I made my way to the main stages. Metric was about half-way through their set when I showed up, so I listened to the rest of their set while I munched on some mini-donuts I bought from one of the vendors.

The last act of the night was Ben Harper and Relentless7. He played a mix of guitar and slide guitar while singing a great selection of songs, including  a cover of Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. Wow!

All in all I had a great time at the Ottawa Bluesfest and I’m thinking of going to a few other nights because it sounds like there’s a bunch of great performers lined up.

I took some pictures of the various shows I watched and put them in my gallery. I haven’t gone through them with a fine toothed comb, so you’ve been warned.