April 9th, 2002 - The Shamrock, Calgary:

This is the first show of a five night swing… we fly into Edmonton, pick up transportation and backline gear before driving to Calgary. Anyone who's read more than a couple of these tour diary entries will notice a recurrent theme… keyboard stands… how can the simplest piece of equipment onstage be such a problem all the time?… or is it just me?… anyway, after talking the store owner out of trying to fashion me a 2-tiered stand by fitting two single tiered stands inside each other and "then we'll just get a 2 by 4 and put that along here…" um, yeah… it takes a combination of two music stores to get me a stand that'll work (which is a combination of itself… part keyboard stand, part drum hardware) … it just can't be that hard… anyway, we end up with a few equipment problems on this tour…

The Shamrock is a small, dimly lit, hot, smoky blues bar… our favourite kind!… and it's packed so full that people are falling over our monitors on the edge of the dance floor, and landing onstage… I think most of them miss landing on Doug, but he's an easy target these days… He's confined to a stool onstage for most of the show - seems the night before we left, he set out for the liquor store on his bicycle (trying to spice up the rigors of exercise with a little JD no doubt), spotted someone he knew, turned when he shouldn't have… and… very painful, very swollen knees… nothing broken at least… not even the JD bottle, thank god… anyway, I think it's around the 3rd song of the night - JellyRoll - in the middle of it, I notice all of a sudden Jay is hunched over like a turtle with too much shell… only the shell is the bass cabinet falling off the table and landing on top of him… it's actually quite amazing to see him manipulate the cabinet back up on top of the table without having it fall… now, if he can do it next time without spilling my beer all over the place I'll be even more impressed! Unfortunately in the next song, Jay wasn't able to repeat the performance, and the bass cabinet vibrates itself (crash) to the floor… so you can picture this: as Jay is madly thrashing about trying to get the damn thing working again (leaving it on the floor this time), and I'm racking my brain trying to play his part as well as mine… Doug is just calmly going on with the show… BUT! the dance floor is so jam-packed that I don't think anyone even notices! It ends up being a great night anyway… Darcy, the club manager is very good to us and makes us feel welcome… as well as running the sound that night… (our soundman, Mike Dinger, was delayed in his flight back from New York where he was mixing a show for 'Gob'…) Thanks Darcy! One more funny anecdote from this part of the swing: we're in the bar, soundchecking… it's open and a few guys who look like they're probably regulars are in there drinking… Elio is trying out his rental rig… fairly loud (that's not like Elio at all…)… and this guy - probably around 70 years old - comes up and says… "I don't like your bangin'! Have some respect! Any asshole can do that! I don't like all that bangin'!" Of course, this isn't funny at all to any of us… none of us laughs… it's obviously a very serious matter… yeah… we're not done with this guy yet… he shows up later in the hallway of the hotel… only now he's sporting a very large wet spot, from just below his beltline clear down the length of both legs of his jeans… I guess that loud guitar must've scared it out of him… but wait, there's more… we're in the restaurant later, having dinner… and this same guy walks in… wearing the same jeans. The waitress either doesn't notice or doesn't care, and shows him to his seat… he orders eventually and then he comes up with our favourite catch phrase for the rest of the tour… it's about 3 minutes after he ordered and he yells out, "Where's my grub!" in this quick, low, gravely voice that the rest of us try with varying degrees of success to imitate for the next 5 days… Check out Lethbridge, Apr10th for the next date on this swing… Cya!