Or, A Rambling and Verbose Concert Review:
Lowest of the Low
This Ain’t Hollywood – Hamilton, On
Thursday April 7, 2011
This show was part of a tour (mostly southern Ontario, plus a stop in Buffalo and a trip out to Halifax) for the 20th anniversary of the Low’s first album, Shakespeare My Butt. The whole thing is winding up on May 7 with a big show at the magnificent, acoustically-renowned, historic Massey Hall in Toronto, and initially I had thought that the Massey Hall show (for which I have a front row ticket) was going to be the only one of the tour that I’d be able to make it to. About three weeks ago, I realized that (one silver lining to being somewhat under-employed right now) I had April 7 and 8 off work, which suddenly made the idea of a jaunt to Hamilton – which is really only an hour away if there’s no traffic – very plausible. And, besides the fact that I would generally be happy to see the Low (or its members, solo) play pretty much every damn week, I also really, really wanted to catch at least one of the “tiny bar” shows as a contrast to the big posh Victorian hall next month. So, one online transaction and some looking up of directions later, I was set.
The trip to Hamilton was an experience in itself, because it was WEIRD. Directions were easy, no issues there: it was the weather. Wild, epic, bizarre fog was generating off Lake Ontario in a way I’ve never seen before; I’ve been in the Alps and experienced the way a cloud can generate and blow in and out when you’re up a mountain, and this was something like that, but compounded in strangeness by seeing it happening around the downtown core of Toronto, and by the setting sun’s light which meant that there would be moments of hazy sunset, moments of near-darkness and often a liminal sort of golden fog that was the oddest thing ever. Initially, I thought that perhaps there had been a huge fire somewhere, because it was just that dramatic an onset: sunny at my house, but as I got within a couple of blocks of the lake, there was this horrible-looking bank of grey, blotting out the lake and the whole of downtown – and I only live about 2km from the lake, as the crow flies. Slightly unsettling. I really, really wished that I’d been the passenger, or that I’d had a passenger – someone to try and capture the conditions in photos. As the QEW (highway) veered further away from the lake, the conditions cleared right up and I made very good time, only to encounter even thicker fog on the way into Hamilton.
Now, I’ve passed through Hamilton on the highway many times, but have only rarely had occasion to go into the city and find my way around, but thankfully the venue was very easy to find. It’s in Hamilton’s ‘North End’ neighbourhood, which looks like a formerly down-at-heel, working-class sort of area that’s in the process of becoming a funky, small-art-gallery type of ‘hood. I spotted the venue with no trouble, but I must admit I drove around the block four times before parking – not because of lack of spots, but because I’m so used to the difficulty of parking in downtown Toronto that I kept expecting to see ‘no parking’ or ‘permit only after midnight’ signs.
Finally, though, I secured a spot just down the block from the bar and went to get the lay of the land. Since the traffic had been lighter and the parking situation easier than expected, I found myself a little over an hour early, considering that the venue had advertised ‘doors open at 9’. I expected that I’d have to kill an hour walking around, maybe go get a cup of tea or something and come back to possibly queue up a little before nine. First, though, I walked around the building to try and figure out where the entrance actually was (which wasn’t as immediately obvious as one would expect), and to indulge a little in the fact that I could hear them wrapping up their soundcheck. As I was standing there, a friendly woman (one of the bartenders, as it turned out) wandered out, asked if she could help me with anything, and whether I was there for Lowest of the Low. When I said apologetically that I knew I was really early, she scoffed and basically said no worries, come on in; the ticket girl wasn’t there yet, but to just show her my ticket once she got set up.
Obviously, this was a much better prospect than wandering around a strange neighbourhood in the cold, damp fog for an hour (also, an odd sidenote - the area was crawling with police, including mounted officers, because of a political event across the street), so I wasted no time taking her up on it, and took the opportunity to check out the room a bit. I hadn’t known what to expect, but I give This Ain’t Hollywood 10/10 for atmosphere and super-friendly staff. It’s small, a typical ‘black-box’ kind of concert area at one end, a bar down the middle of one long wall, and a kind of basic loungey area at the far end, with a fun assortment of art (punk band posters, some original paintings, and a big Frankenstein/zombie type of portrait over the mantel of a non-functional fireplace). I’m rubbish at estimating the capacity of venues, but I’d be really surprised if its capacity (the club, that is, not the fireplace) is over 200.
The opener was Mick Thomas and ‘Squeezebox Wally’, of the Australian band Weddings Parties Anything, who have a long-standing friendship with the Low and actually covered the Low’s ‘Rosy and Grey’ and made it a very well-loved song among their own fans. I saw Mick play with Ron and Stephen at one of the ‘Blue Moon’ shows in Kensington Market a few years back, and knew I was in for a treat. I admit, I’ve been remiss in checking out more of his music in the interim (which I will definitely have to remedy now), but he’s a real troubadour, a bard – his have great stories to tell, for example one inspired by seeing a single, super-Goth teenager in a tiny Outback town. So I was quite pleased to be down front and give them my full attention. And let me tell you, I was even more pleased to be down front when, from his third song on, he brought out three-quarters of the Low to join him – with Ron playing bass, which I’ve never seen before. It was absolutely phenomenal, and it’s obvious that all these guys do have a great bond and they were all just having a hell of a lot of fun playing together. The highlight of the opener (actually, one of the highlights of the whole night) was their all-hands-on-deck rendition of Weddings Parties Anything’s ‘Knockbacks in Halifax’, which had so much energy I swear it could have powered the city of Hamilton for the rest of the night. I found the song (a WPA performance from about 1990, obviously sans the Low) on Youtube, for those who haven't heard it. – imagine this performed a little faster tempo and with ten times the electricity. What I would not give to see this again next Saturday night, when they will be IN HALIFAX. Seriously, you guys. That in itself was easily worth the drive to Hamilton in the fog.
So, at the close of Mick’s set, the crowd starts to close in on the stage, and those of us already at the front had to be a titch territorial about our spots, but the general tenor of the crowd was pretty good, and thankfully the sorts of people who didn’t want to give their attention to the opening act (although why on earth not, especially in this case? Who knows!) had mostly congregated in the lounge end of the bar until the break. One woman who I’d chatted to a bit way before the show (she’d asked if I knew who Mick was, I told her about seeing him at Blue Moon and that he was great) tapped me on the shoulder to tell me she agreed with my assessment and she’d loved the opening set, which was nice.
At last, around 11:30, the Low took the stage. They were welcomed loudly by the crowd, including some dude shouting “THIS IS HAMILTON! YOU’RE IN HAMILTON!” and making a few cracks about Ron’s mother, which was comedic to a point, but by about four songs in, Ron did have to say something to the effect that “This will get a lot less funny if I have to bring you up on stage and kick the shit out of you”, although it really was all in good spirits (I think…). As with the December show at Lee’s Palace, they played Shakespeare in its entirety, all 17 songs, as the main set, with an assortment of later Low and solo material as the encores.
It was a thing of beauty, with so much energy and motion and such a wall of sound packed into such a small stage and incredibly overwhelming being front and centre, to the point where it was almost like sitting slightly too close at an IMAX movie – you actually can’t take the whole view in in one glance, you have to look all around and decide where to focus in any given moment. And since a good deal of the stage lighting was actually from behind the band (which is part of the reason I didn’t even attempt many photos), I was well aware that they had a full view of the audience and that this was definitely a two-way interaction. Which is what I love, love, LOVE about small venues, but when you’re in front and it’s the band that’s narrated your life for close to 20 years and whose music has sparked laughter, tears, and just about everything else in between … it can mess with your head a little. You have to make a really solid decision to not let yourself get too self-conscious, or you can quickly lose the moment . (It’s also times like these that I am super-glad I don’t drink any more, or I could easily see making a compete ass of myself.) I do know that I had a ridiculous perma-grin through the whole thing, but damn, when you’re forty years old and most of life is forcing you to be entirely too grown up, any occasion for perma-grin is a fucking much-needed thing. And in my life, perma-grin and the Low are almost entirely synonymous.
Getting back to the concert report and not the grinning-idiot-in-the-audience report: after the main set, they did two encores (Devil Went Down/Gamble/Last Recidivist and Black Monday/City Full of Cowards/Out of the Black) which were the icing on the cake – except for the fact that the setlist had THREE encores but… apparently some of the crowd were turning into pumpkins? Granted, it was a Thursday night, but I kind of think, once you’ve committed to going out to a late-night show on a school night anyhow, is another three songs going to really break you the next day? Those of us down front yelled till we were hoarse (literally, in my case), but we knew there weren’t enough of us to make that third one happen. Sadface.
After the show, I stuck around for a little while, (sadly didn’t have enough spare cash left for one of the limited-edition posters that materialized), had a chance to tell Mick and Wally how much I’d enjoyed their set, and to have a quick chat with Stephen, who left me with the admonition to drive carefully, since Hamilton was still shrouded with fog at 2am.
The postscript is that yes, I obviously did make it home safely – although I have to say that on the way out of town, all alone on the road in the greyness, I was cognizant that I was also passing a huge cemetery and was really glad to get out of town before the zombies came. It was a perfectly surreal bookend to a perfectly glorious night. My only regret is that I couldn’t run away with the circus and follow along to the rest of the band’s shows over the weekend – but hey, Massey Hall is less than a month away!
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