It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong. It takes a much much smaller man to admit that he is tired as hell and had a blast getting into free concerts with red carpet treatment and filming awesome bands.
Yes folks it’s mid-June again and summer festival time is upon us; and what bigger festival in Canada for music then Toronto’s North By Northeast (NXNE) 2010. It’s been a blur, a blast and a handful of beers but I wouldn’t give back that weekend if my life depended on it. And yet, two days later I still can’t get over how much we – at our gloriously awesome music multimedia operation: The Indie Machine – managed to accomplish in between Thursday night and an ungodly early hour Monday morning.
After finishing the typical Thursday night show at the station – featuring our 10th episode of The Indie Machine Sessions with Toronto band Donlands & Mortimer – David “Mars” Marskell and I trekked back into the downtown core (after consuming an ample number of junior bacon cheeseburgers, of course). Once downtown we set out on our mission: get as many bands as possible. We were shooting to get 20 over the course of the entire festival, and while we hit 17 I’m still a little sore about our failure to catch 3 of our 5 planned shows on Saturday night due to EXTREME traffic congestion (more on that later).
Thursday night we hit The Horseshoe Tavern and caught Phili rockers Free Energy and LA experimenters War Paint before jumping over to Sneaky Dees and catching the opening bit of LA noisemakers HEALTH‘s act – though interestingly enough guitarist Jake seemed more interested in who won the NBA final between the Lakers and Celtics. We managed to jut down a few side streets in time to catch the tail end of Toronto’s Foxfire at Wrongbar before sticking around for Portland’s electro duo Glass Candy, and finally closing out the night with a few beers at The Drake and some weird Pizza concoction whose meat toppings didn’t include pepperoni…. who does that?
Friday we started off the night at Lee’s Palace with San Diego punks Wavves and Vancouver’s Japandroids – the latter of which apparently played an awful set according to people my roommate saw later that night at Wrongbar, though based on the songs we saw they were well on track to a fantastic show… :/ It was at this point in the night as we were leaving Lee’s Palace that Mars turned to me with pass in hand and said something to the effect of “God I love this thing”. I agreed.
We then raced our way into Kensington Market’s Bread & Circus for the finale of Regina’s Rah Rah and then ducked over to The Dakota Tavern to catch one of our fav locals Young Doctors In Love. They were to be followed up by a special guest, though when I asked a roadie that was setting up the stage who was playing next (ya know, so we could decide whether it was worth sticking around in place of going to see another band) he responded “THIS band” and pointed back at the stage with a smug look on his face.
Mars and I promptly called him a pompous dick and left to close out the night with Hamilton/Kitchener’s Spirits at Sneaky Dees. Note: a friend of our stayed at The Dakota and said the next band on stage was ok – though I was more than happy to catch Spirits, as I would call them one of my unknown standouts from the festival (by unknown I mean I had never heard of them, and now I consider myself a fan).
*Dude that was a pompous dick: if you ever end up reading this, please take note – you can stick to the fact that it’s a secret show and not tell anyone who’s going to be playing, it’s totally cool, but you don’t have to be an arrogant prick about it. Just saying…. for future consideration.
On Saturday night the plan was to catch West Palm Beach’s Surfer Blood at Wrongbar and duck over to The Drake to catch Toronto’s The D’Urbervilles. This was not to come to pass due to the aforementioned atrocity that was Toronto’s road system.
Words cannot truly describe how incredibly awful downtown Toronto was that night due to the compilation and overlapping of not one or two, but 7 city destroying events: NXNE, The Luminato Festival, MuchMusic Video Awards, World Cup, Taste Of Little Italy, Some sort of race thing, and city preparations to host the G20 summit; the later of which eliminated a good number of key travel routes due to the dividing wall being constructed and ultimately was the inciting cause behind the Saturday night traffic problems.
We ultimately gave up after spending 15 minutes driving three blocks and turned back up to Lee’s Palace in time to catch the tail end of Long Beach’s AVI Buffalo, and New York’s Cold Cave, before heading down to The Silver Dollar to catch the last bit of death metal band Comanechi‘s set, followed by Austin’s The Strange Boys and rounding out the night with drinks and nachos at Sneakys.
The GRAND FINALE on Sunday began at Rancho Relaxo for Toronto’s The Withouts, jutting over to The Garrison for equality as Torontonian Boys Who Say No, The El Mocambo for Manchester UK’s Ten Bears and then back to The Garrison for London UK’s The Gin Riots and Toronto’s Digits, before once again ending the night at Sneakys for cheap and delicious food at 4 in the morning.
Following these escapades I proceeded to A: collapse and B: shave the party armour. (See Fig. 1)
It’s here, I suppose that I should take a time-out here to comment on the necessity of party armour at events such as this:
You see kids, when you have a face like mine (what Mars dubbed a baby face while he and our friend Niki were critiquing my beard party armour the other night), it surprisingly (or at least surprising to me) becomes tricky getting to the front of a crowd at a concert with a big legitimate-looking camera; people don’t take you seriously enough. But when you’re sporting party armour and shout “EXCUSE ME” in a gruff and menacing tone, I’ve come to realize that people take notice …. and quickly proceed to get out of the way.
So now that it’s all said and done, I sit here at my desk ingesting footage, trying to get these episodes of The Indie Machine WIRED online as fast as humanly possible – though it has become difficult since some of the songs we recorded haven’t even come out yet so there are NO TRACKLISTINGS!!!! D:
It’s only now though that I’ve come to realize that I was at Sneaky Dees four nights in a row…. is that a good thing, or a bad thing…. I can’t decide. Regardless; I ended up getting the King’s Crown nachos… AND the Mexican chicken wrap out of it…
:)
<3 Stephenson
NXNE 2010 – SUMMARY:
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