Last week/weekend was cahrayzee! Get up at seven, go to summer school 'til two, come home, leave for London (…Ontario) at three, party it up until eleven, get home at one, and then sleep until seven.
Let's start at the beginnin', shall we?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at Hawk Rocks the Park V in London, Ontario
The first band of the day was Diamond Dust, a local band that won a contest to perform at the concert. They did all covers and — horror of horrors — halfway through the concert, I realized knew all of them! Would this mean that they would be the third show I'd ever been to where I knew every single song? The Who, Van Halen, and… Diamond Dust? But, as soon as they said that they would be "taking us into the 90s", I knew we were safely into the realm of songs I no longer knew.
All in all, I thought they put on a good show. The drummer really liked to show off. I mean, come on — "Rock 'N Roll", "Radar Love", "Hot for Teacher"? Quit hogging the spotlight, dude. Besides those songs, they did "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix, "Bottoms Up" and "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" (or maybe "Unchained"?) by Van Halen, and some Ramones ("Blitzkrieg Bop" and "I Wanna Be Sedated"?) and ZZ Top ("Tush" and/or "La Grange"?) songs, as well as the two 90's ones and maybe some more.
The next band was Great White, who I was sort of looking forward to seeing. I only recently started listening to them — in preparation for the concert, of course — and found that I actually liked a couple of their songs — "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" and "Rollin' Stoned" in particular — and they played both of them. They were okay, but I liked the songs on record much better.
The lead singer reminded me of Charlie from "Lost". I think he had like a slightly similar hairstyle. I should probably mention at this point that we were sitting waaaay back, so I couldn't really see him. We brought lawn chairs this time, which was okay because there weren't any bands playing that I really wanted to be up close for. But, with great lawn chairs comes great, umm, seating area. Well, not-so-great seating area, actually. We had to stay inside the orange lines, 100m from the stage. Oh well.
After Great White was done, they put up the big screens. While waiting for Ted to come on, they had a number on the screen that you could send a text message to and it would show up on the screen. This was our highlight of the night.
There was a guy a couple rows behind us who kept yelling "adrenaline RUUUUSH!" (or the ever-popular variants "adrenaline RUUUSH, baby!" and "you can't get enough of the adrenaline RUUUUSH!"). After. every. song. At first, it was okay. Then it just got annoying. Then, in a strange turn of events, it was simply hilarious. My dad decided to text the dude's catch phrase to the big screen. And it showed up! The guy didn't notice at first, but eventually he saw it and yelled out something like "that's what *I* say!". I think a couple of other people around us noticed it as well, but those poor people stuck up front by the stage had no clue about the hilariousness they were witnessing on the screen.
My brother had the bright idea of making his own t-shirt to wear to the concert. One that read "Tad Nugent". White on black in… oh yes!… Dom Casual! That's what it is fellas, get it right if you're going to make one. All caps, Dom Casual. White on black. Simple.
My dad also texted "Tad Nugent Rocks" to the screen and we heard someone behind us go "…Tad?". Silly people, get with the times! Later on though, someone else texted the simple "tad nugent" to the screen, and we knew all was well, for at least one other person in the crowd had seen the same episode of "That 70's Show".
There was another message on the screen that caught my eye: "Jane - will you marry me? - John". "AWWWW!" everyone said. But then I realized that with names like that, it was surely a hoax. Which would make it fair game to text back "No. - Jane" or "What do you mean 'no'? - John". Of course, the man with the phone didn't find this as funny as I, and so, John would not get his answer tonight.
The scrolling messages eventually stopped and focus was restored to the stage, now adorned with a giant grinning caricature of Tad. (Apologies in advance for my continual referencing to him as this and not Ted, Uncle Ted, or the Nuge. But you know what I mean. I realized that if I ever happen to meet him, I'm sure I would slip up and call him Tad, because I never refer to him any other way.)
But I've got to complain here. Big complaint. It's a little late to do any good, but dog dammit! Video guy, you suck monkey balls. That's right. At first I figured, hey, it's just the rain. The video's lagging. No. No. You, video guy, you decided it would be fun to go in slow-mo like a strobe light and then speed it up so he's playing double time.
Oh yeah, and you also decided that seeing the bass player is more important than seeing the man himself. What was up with that? And then… and then you decided to fucking invert the colours! Gawd! It's not the sixties, dude! Nobody thinks that's cool!
So, Ted comes on playing "Wango Tango", which is one of the three songs I know. Of course, he decides to leave out the "look for a garaaage" bit, which is the best damn part.
The most notable bit of his performance was the song "Fred Bear". Just before the song, he was going on about Canada and the Canadian wild and hunters and fishers and stuff. Which, by the way, have I ranted about this before? Do you say "hello America!" when you play in Madison Square Gardens? So why do you say "hello Canada!" every time you come up here? We have fucking cities too. This is not just Tad by the way, it was more Great White I think, but everyone does it. Though, I admit I can semi-forgive them on this occasion, because saying "hello London!" is weird when it's London… Ontario.
Anyway, since he was going on about Canada and then started showing this video of a dude in a canoe I'm like "Trudeau?" and then I'm like "wait, nah, man, Tad's not a liberal. Why would he be showing Trudeau?" and obviously, he wasn't. Then the video goes on and I (and probably a good chunk of the crowd) was like "…god, that's not cool".
The video, which I'm sure he shows at every concert and has for a long time, and I'm sure I'd heard about it before but just conveniently forgotten about, is a video of deer. Many deer. Getting shot. By Tad. And more deer. Getting shot. By Tad.
You know, I'm fine with him being a hunter and loving guns whatever else he stands for. It's okay that he shows that video because it's his concert and he can do what he wants. I personally don't think we really need to kill animals anymore, but if he wants to do it, he can, and that's okay.
I just don't see how anyone would think that would be "cool" or even a slightly good idea to show these videos at a concert. "Oh yeah, I shot Bambi. Check it out, in living (har har har) colour on the big screen!". I just don't get that.
Anyway, the rest of the concert was fairly uneventful. Oh yeah, except that song "ClaustraPHObic!". It was like he was trying too hard to be relevant but it was really just bullshit. After looking the song up, I find it's actually called "Klstrphnky", pronounced "Cluster Funky". What the fuck. It was released a couple of years ago, which is exactly what it sounded like. (Oh, burn!)
I also had a problem with a song that went "I Need You Baaad". Isn't "badly" the proper choice grammatically? Plus, they already stretched it into two syllables, so why not replace the second syllable with "ly"?
I can't find any setlists online, so some other songs I think he did were "Free For All", "Stormtroopin'", "Dog Eat Dog", "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang", "Love Grenade", obviously "Cat Scratch Fever", and "Great White Buffalo" for the encore.
And so concludes the first day of HRTP V.