After a Long Hiatus, Some Live Music

On Saturday, a friend and I went to the Starlite Room in Edmonton for an Oxfam benefit concert headlining Eamon McGrath and the Wild Dogs. I met Eamon several months ago through Matt, a good friend of mine in Toronto. Eamon was performing a live set at the York University radio station CHRY and as the musical director of the station, Matt invited me along to videotape the performance.

Unlike the CHRY set which consisted of Eamon alone with a mic and an acoustic guitar, the Starlite Room concert involved a full band playing a punk show. In this setting, Eamon and the Wild Dogs just throw themselves into the performance and pretty much completely let go on stage. These guys appear to absolutely love playing live, and the joy they exude is simply infectious. Between Eamon charging into the crowd to dance and sing, and the rest of the band going wild on stage, I was completely in awe of the amount of energy these guys played with.

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was particularly interesting to recognize some of the songs from the acoustic set. While the lyricism may be harder to appreciate in the punk show, I loved being able to hear such a completely different interpretation of the songs, particularly "Badlands", a personal favourite of mine.

One of the opening acts, Sam Hate and the Jackals also had a very impressive sound. I'm not sure how to describe it - let's go with hard rockabilly - but I was quite entertained. Of note, the bassist was adding an extra layer of percussion by somehow slamming the strings against the neck of his double bass while playing. At least this is the way he described it to us at the end of the show, but something might have been lost in translation due to the ringing in my ears.

Here is part of the video I filmed from the CHRY set, although I have to give credit to Matt for putting things together and editing the footage. Admittedly, the film is all washed out (that is my fault, not Matt's), but I think you will enjoy it.