My Life in Concert.com

The legendary Heatwave Festival happened 40 years ago this weekend: August 23 1980. 100,000 people turned up for the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, The B-52s, Rockpile, Teenage Head & more (but not the no-show headliners, The Clash).  It was not only my first fest and one of the best single-day bills I would ever see, it was the centerpiece of an insane long weekend adventure t...

Here is Part Two of my look back at 22 Performances I Missed. Since the Covid Summer of 2020 is also The Summer Without Live Music, I am going to pause my story and instead present two sets of podcast episodes devoted to performances that I missed by artists such as U2, Arcade Fire, The Grateful Dead, Simon & Garfunkel, Lollapalooza 2004, Bonnie Raitt, & more. Hindsight is 20/20, or so the...

Since the Covid Summer of 2020 is also The Summer Without Live Music, I am going to pause my story and instead present two sets of podcast episodes devoted to performances that I missed by artists such as The Clash, Bob Marley, XTC, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, and more. Hindsight is 20/20, or so the saying goes.  So, for my Concert no.020 entry in the original blog series, I published a two-part tribu...

It’s six months on from the Bob Seger concert in Episode 7 , and my world had fully transformed.  The old wave was (mostly) banished from my turntable by this point as I completely surrendered to the electrifying bang of punk which was delivering an exciting and ear/eye/mind-opening flood of completely new sounds, triggering several unprecedented years of relentlessly morphing sonic innovations an...

Three years after Roxy Music , I finally make it to a second, proper live show.  While the Roxy show kicked off a new era in my life—concertgoing—this gig instead closed an era.  This episode is less about Bob Seger and more about discovering punk rock and new wave as the old wave left the building for me.  I no longer wanted still the same.  Tune in for imbibing masses, gesticulating specks, and...

After giving up hope that I would ever get to see him live, Leonard Cohen goes back out on the road for a final North American leg of a multi-year comeback tour that brings him back to Ottawa for one last time.  One of the best shows I have ever seen. Cublet also drops by once again with a few of his memories from a concert he rates as one of his Top 5 best shows ever. Tune in for knee-slidin’ dex...

David Bowie comes to Ottawa on his A Reality Tour along with the culty, psychedelic choir stylings of The Polyphonic Spree.  This last of the five times I got to see him may have been the best of them all musically, as Bowie delivered a long show with some obscure and particularly wonderful song treats. Tune in to the Podcast for lucky accidents, set list surprises, and being relatively up-close-n...

This podcast looks back on the first post-Nirvana-explosion Lollapalooza hitting the Toronto region with your host Various Artists attending in the middle of a thrilling cultural and personal upheaval. Aided by notes I wrote in real time as the day unfolded, I look back at the festival, the era, and the music and how it intersected with my life at the time. With the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry...

After kickstarting punk rock in NYC in the mid-70s, the Ramones finally made it to London, Ontario, along with London’s own local-punk-scene launchers: The Demics. The gig marked a moment when the Ramones were to ascend to North American commercial success with the Phil Spector-produced “End of the Century” while London’s Demics were on the verge of breaking nationally. And then? Join me and forme...

45 years ago from the day of this podcast, on Saturday February the 8th, 1975, Roxy Music glamorously touched down in London, Ontario, Canada (they were from that other London…) to deliver a killer show to their glammed-up fans at the decidedly non-glittering old London Arena, at Bathurst and Ridout.    And a 12-year-old Various Artists was among them, enjoying a life-changing first concert that’s...

In this introduction to the My Life in Concert.com series, I discuss why and how music and live shows became such an obsessive, integral, and ongoing part of my life; where I am coming from as a lifelong tunehead; how I came to start writing the original blog over on OpenSalon.com in 2010; the musical and non-musical aspects of gig-going that I will be delving into; and some previews of coming att...