It’s Thanksgiving in Canada and Columbus Day in the States and it’s fitting that Canadian markets are closed today, as due to the financial meltdown there’s been increasingly less to be thankful for anyway, unless you count your health.
Thanksgiving stateside is a big thank you to major networks for airing continuous football coverage to ease the tensions of family get togethers (Canadians enjoy the south of the border holiday in their own way by delaying their return to the office from the pub by an extra hour to make sure their team covered the spread) while Turkey Day up here isn’t nearly that big a deal but roughly coincides with the start of hockey season.
Growing up, hockey competed with WWF wrestling, sharks and dinosaurs for our attention and one of us was taught how to skate by a dad who’d grown up in Southern Italy and had never seen snow [Editor's note: to this day skating backwards remains elusive, however for a large number of skaters, it is as well and doesn't detract from one's ability to enjoy the game, just one's ability to properly play it. Editor's note, II: For those interested in dinosaurs, check out Sarah Palin's Yabba Dabba Science here]
During those formative years, a favorite of ours was Dale Hunter, who made up for various deficits in skill by being one of the dirtiest, filthiest players ever to have laced up the blades in the NHL and who delivered one of the cheapest shots the game has ever seen when he blasted a player face-first into the boards after the guy had scored a goal [To give you an idea of how dirty he was, when the Washington Capitals retired his number, Hunter was actually presented with a commemorative penalty box]. He gave hope to all of us who were untalented, under 5′10, who used their stick like a samurai sword and who took inspiration from the movie Slap Shot (R.I.P. Mr Paul Newman)
Needless to say, hockey is huge north of the border and to our US friends, The Hockey Night in Canada Theme [see below], like Takin’ Care of Business, could be considered a second national anthem. It was the tune we hummed when we headed outside to play road hockey and the tune we hummed when we headed inside after a car ran over the tennis ball.
When the national broacaster, CBC (who, like NPR, have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for all things quirky: weather vane collectors and the guy who can burp the alphabet in Aramaic) lost the rights to the song, there was a near national uproar and a contest was held to replace it. Entries came from far and wide and the end result was fairly craptacular [see below], but not nearly as bad as Hank Williams Jr’s Monday Night Football song (you can give your thanks to us, that we don’t include that link]
The bagpipe charged tune, was written by Colin Oberst and produced by Bob Rock [left], Bon Jovi and Metallica producer, who apropos of nothing really, bears a strong resemblance to Spinal Tap guitarist, David St Hubbins (seen right) and who strangely, has a speaking voice identical to that of Tap actor Michael McKean. [Even though Rock had nothing to do with these, for the hell of it, for our list of Worst Bon Jovi Cover Songs of All Time, click here ]
We’ll see if this new ditty captures the public’s attention like its predecessor but to us, there is only ONE hockey song, and it’s the incomparable Hockey Song by Stompin’ Tom Connors. Keep yer stick on the ice…
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.
When preparing The Shark Book, we took great care to ensure that every continent was represented except for Antarctica (although we now have our eyes on a few climate-change researchers who know how to party for the sequel). Yes, we traversed great distances via keyboard tapping and mouse clicks to bring together a collection of drunks with a truly international flavor (much like Ibiza, one would assume).
Our book featured soccer referees getting wildly drunk and directing traffic on a busy Jerusalem street, a shit-faced German who offered his friend’s identification to arresting DUI officers, forgetting one key detail—his friend had a glass eye—a tough sell to even the dimmest of cops, and a Maltese man so blotto on cheap whiskey that his flight had to be diverted because he would not be stilled in his quest to break into the cockpit so that he could tell the captain he “loved him”.
We may be accused of a lot of things (libel, extremely poor taste, bad judgment, and offering our accusers hush money) but ignoring Africa isn’t one of them and like Bono, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to put the oft-ignored continent under the glaring lights of our Shark Guys roadside spot check—but unlike Bono, we’ve done it solely out of blatant self-interest and in a bid to further gas up our airplane-hangar-sized egos (read with sarcasm heavier than a fat camp welcome wagon).
We chronicled a drinking contest in Tanzania, in which a man washed down a liter (two pints) of pure vodka with a couple of beers en route to “victory” (his nickname was “Shame”, which you can interpret as you may) and now, the continent is represented again by a couple of high school teachers in South Africa who made the news recently when they were arrested for being drunk on the job. (Note: This might not shock the odd reader who may, in retrospect, recall the odd whiff of something other than a Fisherman’s Friend lozenge emanating from the homework-checking teacher of his or her own school days)
A police official said the school had long had a problem with the students showing up looking as if they had completed their essays on Dylan Thomas by living out one of the end stages of the man’s life, but that “now it’s teachers themselves that get drunk at school”. The policeman then went on to ask “What is this world coming to?”
We would refer him to the “Halls of drunker learning” chapter of The Shark Book, chronicling boozing antics on both sides of the chalkboard divide, for the answer to this excellent question. [full story here]
The bagpipe charged tune, was written by Colin Oberst and produced by Bob Rock [left], 
Bon Jovi and Metallica producer, who apropos of nothing really, bears a strong resemblance to Spinal Tap guitarist, David St Hubbins (seen right) and who strangely, has a speaking voice identical to that of Tap actor Michael McKean. [Even though Rock had nothing to do with these, for the hell of it, for our list of Worst Bon Jovi Cover Songs of All Time, click here ]
