November 20, 2009 | music, reviews

by guest columnist Mike Sauve

More than anything else I am a Bob Dylan fan.  Nothing gets my blood boiling like an ignorant staff reviewer sent to the local Bob Dylan show.  They Google him.  They make shallow, obvious observations about his voice and his hat.  The hat is always mentioned by the third paragraph.  Last night I found myself in a similar position, sent on assignment by The Shark Guys to a sold-out Jimmy Buffett show at the Air Canada Centre [Editor's note: the conversation went something like this. MS: "I have free tickets to a Jimmy Buffet show". Shark Guys: "Oh my god, that sounds absolutely awful. Please write about it."]

What I knew about Buffett going in:  most of the lyrics to Margaritaville, he was friends with Hunter S. Thompson, and in a recent interview Bob Dylan [reviewed by the Shark Guys here] listed him among his favourite songwriters.  This generated some enthusiasm but then I listened to Cheeseburger in Paradise on Youtube and the tropical wind went out of my sails pretty quick.

On the subway ride I saw a lot of drunk senior citizens with low IQs in Hawaiian garb.  I’ve never been to a Weird Al Yankovic concert but I imagine in 20 years this is what his audience will look like.  Minus the beachwear.

I find my seats a few songs late and notice the teal-shirted, shoeless Buffett had easily filled the Air Canada Centre.  The crowd was more boisterous than the Neil Young show I’d seen here, and this is Young’s home turf.  Buffett is considerably richer.  It just doesn’t add up.  There were palm trees and unironic crashing waves on a video screen that must have been purchased from a stock footage sale in 1993.  The tour was called Summerzcool.  Is a joke even necessary here?

Many drove a long way to be there, like the 40-year old functional illiterates behind me.  (I’m speculating on their literacy)  The most offensive gentleman had consumed an estimated 38 beers in his van prior to the show and had the loud drunkenness only excessive beer-drinking can provide.  When Buffett crooned the relatively pleasant Captain Tony the drunk aggressively screamed this raspy demand:  “Everyone should get up and dance to this shit.”

I feared he was addressing me, cynically taking notes and not standing or swaying to the grating tropical drums.  But it was his companions he made this demand of, including the poor wife who was holding him up. “This could be the last time we see Jimmy.”

There was a desperate love for Jimmy in his voice.  Like most people at big-name concerts they required some kind of transformative experience.  However, their dancing and drunk screaming didn’t seem appropriate for the 100-level seats.

I have to say a couple of folkier numbers almost won me over.  A new song There’s Plenty To Drink About had plenty of topical references (Levi Johnston, Bernie Madoff) in true Weird Al fashion. Still, I started thinking, “This guy isn’t such a bad songwriter after all.”  But then he unleashed Surfing In a Hurricane, which consists of precious little more than the title refrain. I began to think of Buffett as the world’s greatest con man.

He also had the nerve to reference Leonard Cohen then proceeded to inflict some clownish spasms while massacring Cohen’s The Gypsy’s Wife. He was either trying to pantomime the exaggerated stage motions of Cohen or having a stroke.  Either way it left a bad taste in my mouth that could only be cleansed by a $12 beer and a one-hitter in the bathroom.

He also name-checked Gordon Lightfoot, and in a rare humble moment said it was his goal to be 1/10th the songwriter Lightfoot was.  Something is wrong with a society that elevates Jimmy Buffett to arena rock while Lightfoot wanders the country playing casinos.  Lightfoot was at Massey Hall last night, and I tried to astrally project myself there but the volatile alcoholic vibes in the Jimmy audience prevented the necessary peace of mind.

I finally stood when Margaritaville was played for the sole reason that two very attractive girls were dancing quite boisterously beside me.  They glanced in my direction a couple times and I tried to play it suave.  A couple brooding looks in their direction, an heir of sophistication.  I could not manifest an enthusiasm to match theirs so I thought an alternative to the madness might work.  It did not.  Moments later they were seen in a drunken embrace with the loud, drunken 40 year old monster’s two male friends.  This seemed completely unjust on an obvious level, but not surprising.  Then a song came on that involved the audience making shark fins by placing their arms in a steeple shape above their heads and rotating them from left to right as the song demanded.  The pretty girls did this with great zeal and I was glad not to have made their acquaintance.

This morning I listened to Jimmy’s greatest hits on Youtube and was surprised to hear a number of very pleasing ballads, many actually on par with lesser Gordon Lightfoot tunes.  But this was sacrificed to hurricane surfing and shark-finning in his live show, so I must turn my nose up not at Jimmy, but at the aged inebriates that reward a talented folk singer for turning into some marijuana-referencing Raffi for dull adults.

Mike Sauve is a Toronto freelancer who’s written for the National Post, the Toronto International Film Festival and Exclaim Magazine

August 23, 2008 | reviews

****/5

Bob Dylan, Copps Coliseum, Hamilton Ontario August 20, 2008

“Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before”

Dylan might be haunted by his musical past, but as he nears closer to the Heaven in the song, (or its counterpart, reserved for musicians, even those who’ve given us Time out of Mind) he’s embraced it—though not warmly. Continuing to delight in undermining his audience’s expectations, he forges ahead on this long and lonesome road, playing to packed houses of fans, the majority of whom, by all accounts, haven’t made the musical journey with him beyond Highway 61 Revisited.

Those who have though, were the sizable contingent of those (mostly younger) who warmly welcomed newer material with which their parents were less than familiar like Thunder on the Mountain, a rollicking stand-out, or the stunning When the Deal Goes Down (“More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours. That keep us so tightly bound”), maintaining a generation gap that went beyond the choice of intoxicants and demonstrating that the true measure of any performer is a multi-generational legacy that isn’t a chaperoned minivan accompaniment to a Jonas Brothers scream-fest.

Dylan and his entirely capable matching Zorro-chapeau (and confederate army doppelganger) backing band, was positively energized with this newer material, with Bob even doing a half-jig, or stretching out one leg, than the other, depending on how you look at it, as they blew a hole through Rollin’ and Tumblin’, transferring kinetic energy into stand-outs Highway 61 and Stuck Inside of Mobile.

Nashville Skyline’s Girl from the North Country, was virtually unrecognizable without Johnny Cash’s canyon baritone, as were other muddled classics reverberating in the home of the Hamilton Bulldogs hockey team, where some songs were only decipherable by snippets of chorus. Just Like a Woman, with her ‘fog, her amphetamine and her pearls’ became a peppy, creepy crowd sing-a-long, with a Copps Coliseum capacity breaking into song as she broke like a little girl. A set list heavily weighted toward the gorgeous Modern Times, Ain’t Talkin’ was less moody than the album version, (carryin’ a dead man’s shield), probably not a bad thing in a Blackberry-back lit stadium setting and clocking in at nearly 10 minutes.
A considerable increase in volume accompanied the twin crowd pleasing encores Like a Rolling Stone and a heavily staccato keyboard All Along the Watchtower, which closed the show, one could say in Dylanesque fashion—with the house lights coming up after a significant delay, and much second guessing about whether another song was forthcoming.