The Perth Farmer’s Market folks have been preparing their food all day, the setup crew is getting ready for their shift and the tickets are flying off the shelf!

It’s gonna be good - see you there!

The Commuters prepare to share the stage with Tell Mama

We are so excited to be hosting the Night Before Christmas food bank fundraiser again this year and joining us on stage for the celebrations is my favorite local rock band, The Commuters.

This year we are adding another twist to the mix - the theme for the night is “Local Flavour - Local Sustainability”.  Local food and local music will surround you all night at this great annual event.  We are encouraging event-goers to consider committing to a monthly gift to the foodbank of $10 or more.  For a $10 commitment we are offering an event ticket for free (donation of food or $5 still required at the door).  For a donation of $15 monthly the party-goer receives free entry to this year’s event.

We are hoping to give away 200 free tickets and in the process, help to keep our local food bank sustainable with regular monthly payments.

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Kingston / Connecticut band Girlz Like That came out to O’Reilly’s Pub Perth (a la Tell Mama) and not only did they let us open for them but they let me play with them too!
 
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Tell Mama at McGarry fundraiser

Well, not only did we have a great time at The Crown last night but the event was a resounding success as well.  According to David Hauraney, the event organizer, $3400 was raised towards the initiative thanks to the tremendous generosity of this wonderful community.  I managed to get one remote photo of Corkery Road posted to my facebook page and then my cell phone died - right before Mitch Smolkin and his Klezmer band stopped in for an unexpected visit (sorry, no pix )

These guys were just tremendous! Klezmer en Buenos Aires joined Mitch from Argentina, Paul Brody from Berlin played a trumpet / flugelhorn, Boris Sichon from British Columbia did a stellar job on percussion (what a tremendous xylophone solo - well, it wasn’t a xylophone but I don’t really know what it was) and Aviva Chernick from Toronto joined in on vocals.  Anybody who caught their show tonight at the Studio Theatre would surely have been in for a treat.  You can find Mitch online at: www.mitchsmolkin.com

Then, later, as we did our best to follow a kick-ass klezmer group and a beautiful lab pup that was in the silent auction (not easy to do, I’ll tell you!) didn’t Freddie Dixon come in to relax after his sold-out Johnny Cash tribute show at the Studio Theatre.  We were honoured to have him join us on stage to sing “Summertime”.

Who knew all this would be happening in downtown Perth on a Saturday night!  I did get some video footage of the performance which I haven’t looked at yet but will post anything that’s worth viewing on youtube soon.

Tell Mama at Blue Mountain

Tell Mama just finished a short tour to Blue Mountain Resort in Collingwood, Ontario - what a beautiful place!  The folks that own and run this resort are the same people behind Tremblant and Whistler so you know that they’ve got some experience.  Georgian Bay is just a gorgeous blue and the mountain looks like it would make stupendous skiing.  All of the staff treated us with so much appreciation and respect and the guests were all so friendly - we almost felt like we were in an alternate universe!

Sunday was beautiful and sunny but also very windy and cold - Kelly, the excellent sound man, had a hard time keeping up with the mic stands that were literally blowing across the stage.  A couple times I thought for sure the wind was going to pick me right up off my own feet!  Yet there were still people lounging and listening to the music and many who were hanging out on their balconies taking it all in.  The whole rest of our stay was littered with people who recognized us on the elevator or in the hallways and who also took the time to thank us for the music - what a pleasant surprise.

We are looking forward to going back to Blue Mountain in August when there will hopefully be more sun and less wind!

The Bookstore Cafe has a lovely, intimate atmosphere, great food and wonderful staff - Mary Ann has done an excellent job of transitioning from a corporate position at Sunnybrook to a rural, entrepreneurial lifestyle in Camden East.  As usual, I brought our camera to record the performance, remembered to set it up in a perfect corner of the room - and then I totally forgot to turn it on!  I only noticed near the end of our last set as we were performing Moondance - I looked over, saw the camera and thought well, that was useful

O'Reilly's Pub, Perth

We had a great gig at O’Reilly’s Pub in Perth last night.  Cam and Dave did an amazing job on rhythm - everything gelled very nicely.  I did promise to try and get a live sync set up in time for this show and was almost able to get it ready in time but, truly, the place was so busy that to run all the wires I needed to would have been a problem for the diners.  So I decided to just focus on getting the band set up and doing a good show.  I think what I will do is get everything set up for O’Reilly’s to broadcast future shows and get the whole thing working with someone else on stage - then I ‘ll be ready for our next show in town.

Half an hour out of Perth with Franc, his son Marcel and all of our related gear crammed into my little 1992 Honda Civic, our muffler falls apart.  Not tragic but not exactly a joy ride for poor Marcel in the back seat!  Franc’s car which is the same year and make did exactly the same thing to him last week.

So, we get into Toronto at 5:30pm (that’s rush hour for all you country folk :)) and take the Don Valley Parkway to Dupont and Bathurst so we can drop Marcel off at home on our way to Kensington Market.  When all of a sudden we’ve dropped six inches and we’re dragging the underside of my car along the pavement - cue grind to a halt.  Why I even tried to shift into first gear and pull over to the side is beyond me - geez, I wonder why we aren’t moving anywhere.

We get out of the car and take a look at the front left tire which is sitting independent of the rest and perpendicular to the vehicle.  Ok, here’s where I probably will screw up the lingo - the CV boot joint fell apart disengaging the drive shaft from the tire and dropping the whole front left of the vehilce onto the pavement.  What would have happened if we were on the highway!  I am so thankful that we weren’t and also that I had two competent, thoughtful guys with me.

All the cars behind us were pretty pissed off that we had the gall to break down during their drive home and they weren’t too impressed that they had to drive around us during rush hour to get going on their way.  One guy who was driving toward us from the other direction slowed down, rolled down his window to tell us “hey, your car is broken, I’m a mechanic, I know these things”.  Well, thanks for that Mr. Wonderful, I’m so glad that a mechanic stopped to tell me what I already knew.

The rest, in a nutshell, goes like this:  I call my in-laws in Lanark cause they’re my goto people for car trouble (I know, why would I do that…I wanted to know if they had a CAA card), Franc pulls out his CAA card (I guess I could have asked him first), they come and tow us to a garage at King and Strachan where they charge me $85 to tell me that it’s not worth fixing.  I’m pretty sure that’s what I told them when we dragged ourselves in there.  In the meantime, I call Brian to ask him to meet us at the scene of the wreck which he did but by the time he got there we were ten minutes away again.  Without one single complaint he drove his gas-guzzling Marquis down to King and Strachan to rescue us - gotta love that guy, and the gg Marquis which I always give him hell for driving (until now that is :)).

This gigs at The Supermarket and Statler’s were both excellent and Brian managed to shove all of our gear and us into his car and get us all back to Perth safely.

We met some cool people at our gigs and re-connected with Peter Kadar who joined us at Statler’s but maybe I’ll tell you more about that in another post.

Happy Easter!

Tell Mama has some gigs coming up in April that we’re really excited about and I finally took the time on the weekend to create a facebook event to promote the first one on April 7th at The Supermarket in Toronto.  I wasn’t looking forward to doing it because, at this point, it seemed that I have to create a new event for my group page and another for my band page just to get the word out to everybody.  I created the group event as per usual (sure would be nice to be able to “select all” for invitations or filter the names somehow by region) and then I got  quite frustrated when I tried to create a new event to post to my band page - the event function was nowhere to be found.  Of course, the moment I complained on a facebook forum I immediately found the feature as an addition to the tabs at the top of the page - how embarrassing is that?

I cannot tell you how happy I was to see that the event I created on the band page could both be sent to everybody on my personal profile and then sent as an attachment to all the members of my band page - the one stop shopping I have been looking for!  Now, I did this backwards cause I created my group event first so the next one I create for our gig at Ben’s Pub on the 11th I will start with the band page and see how that goes but I am certainly remaining quietly excited on this one.  Anything that helps me to save time mucking around is awesome in my book.