Bob Writes a little Dinner Music

There were at least ten of us sitting around the restaurant table. It was an impromptu dinner, decided upon on a whim. No vote, no forethought, just a bunch of like-minded people who found themselves together and decided they were hungry.

There was Steve Lalor, a guitarist from Seattle who was in a band we were all sure was going to make it, called the Daily Flash. There was Chris Ethridge, multi-talented bassist for the Flying Burrito Brothers and studio cat who had played with a lot of our favourite artists. Chris was a good old boy who lived in the canyon and whose door was always unlocked, always inviting.

Bob Presents Peter Kashur – The Segarini Band Legacy and Bar Tab

Peter Kashur is an annoyingly talented Renaissance Man from the unlikely womb of Thunder Bay Ontario, whose Culinary, Artistic, and Musical gifts cast a pall of inadequacy over his small circle of friends who tolerate his genius because his Oysters Rockefeller, Beef Ribs, and Vesper Martinis are to die for. He is my number one choice as my favourite companion for sitting on the porch drinking Bourbon, complaining about everything, bemoaning old age while being giddily thankful for it, and yelling at clouds. Mr. Kashur (known to his cadre of hooded followers as ‘Shew’) has been whining about the following for years …so I have decided to let him share his rage with you, thinking I would have the day off. Nope. Just repairing his lack of Capital Letters, random punctuation, and libelous rantings, kept me up most of the night. He has been a trusted and necessary musical compatriot and partner for 40 years. This is the least I can do. Seriously. I checked. It is the Least.

Please let me know if all the trouble was worth it. Anyway …here’s Shew.

The PIG and The PAT Part Deux – THE LITERARY BOONE

By way of celebrating the man’s 85th (!) Birthday this month, not to mention picking straight up where we left off last time after breakfast…

The following Christmas a strange package arrived in the mail from a hitherto unknown address in Burbank, California. “Boone Productions, Inc.,” read the label. “Printed Matter Only,” said the customs sticker.

Gary Pig Gold – My Jimi Hendrix Experience

If I can just get my mind together, the first “real” concert I ever attended as a wee young Canucklehead was The Jimi Hendrix Experience at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, May 3, 1969.

I’d already been a fervent fan for a couple of years, having spent most of my Grade 8 art class making swirly sketches of Jimi in charcoal. Plus the Are You Experienced album was right up there – almost – with Monkees Headquarters on my 1967 Most-Played List.

Gary Pig Gold on THE PHILOSOPHY Of FIFTY YEARS

On an even damper than usual Spring afternoon in 1969, three guitar-and-drum-beating sisters from tiny Fremont, New Hampshire entered an even tinier recording studio and emerged, just a few hours later, with a dozen original rock ‘n’ roll songs on some quarter-inch tape. These twelve songs were then pressed onto one thousand vinyl records, nine hundred copies of which immediately vanished forever off the face of the Earth. Within a year however, no less an authority than Frank Zappa declared that this album, prophetically entitled Philosophy Of The World, was “better than the Beatles,” and a decade after that the similarly inclined visionaries in NRBQ re-pressed Philosophy briefly on their own Red Rooster label.

Bob, Goddard, and Cosford Explain The Iceman – The Myth, The Legend, and The Bar Tab

I was going to write about the psychological impact of current pop music on housecats compared to the physical impact of dropping an armful of classic rock vinyl on them, when The Universe (in its mysterious and drug-addled randomness) conspired to intercede because (apparently) it was bored and felt like fucking with me.

Guest Columnist Barry Teller – The New Elmo

Got this in my email yesterday and thought I’d share it with you. Exciting news about the new Elmo and what we can expect and when.

Barry writes for the new online magazine, Canadian Life. He covers the Canadian Entertainment Industry and has sent this pre-release to a few of us bloggers in advance of the Magazine’s launch next Friday. I’ve added some pictures to this.

Enjoy. – Bob