On the final day of Bluesfest, I ended up going there on my own as Mike was out of comission with his broken toe and Krista’s cellphone had lost battery power, hence I couldn’t get in touch with her. She didn’t bother going anyhow.
Of course, I was excited to see tonight’s act as it was the Sam Roberts Band…only one of the more rocking bands out there. They also had released their new album “Love at the End of the World” a few months’ beforehand so this would be the first time I could see how the songs translated into a live setting.
I arrived in the early evening in time to catch Canned Heat on the main stage. It was pretty cool to see a music icon like them. It was a sea of lawn chairs, but no matter. I had a good spot to check them out. I watched them for about an hour and decided to head back to the Rogers stage to get a decent spot. I did end up seeing Danny and Kathy along the way and they said they saw me from afar on the first night of the festival. They tend to go every year as do I and it’s nice to meet up with them once in awhile.
I grabbed a beer and found a decent spot which was on the cusp of the mayhem which looked like a sea of people ready to rock. I was right behind a family so I figured there wouldn’t be too much mayhem going on there. This made me think of how cool it would be to bring Mom and Dad to a concert someday and after the concert, I even found out the Eagles and John Fogerty were playing in Moncton the weekend we were going to Gaspe and I gave them a call trying to convince them to go to the show.
Let it also be noted that there were a few empty lawn chairs directly in front of the family. This created a small gap in the crowd and is a major point in the story that unfolds.
The Sam Roberts Band came out in full force and blew me away once again. The new songs translate well in a live setting and it’s nice to see a shakeup of the set list once a new album arrives. Gone is ‘Don’t Walk Away Eileen’ but here comes ‘Fixed to Ruin’ and ‘Them Kids’. It was during a slower song (I believe it was ‘Bridge To Nowhere’) that I spotted the first crowd surfer. Now, if there’s any guarantee in life at a rock concert, this is one of them:
Guarantee #47 – If you see someone crowd surfing during an acoustic number at a concert, you know that it will result in quite the crazy crowd during the night.
Of course, this held true as the crowd became the transportation mechanism for bodies floating across the tops of hands everywhere. There were tons of crowd surfers for the rest of the night. At one point I think I counted seven merging into one nexus point and I cringed at the thought of them all hitting that point and trying to figure out what the heck to do. The crowd was intense. There were bodies everywhere. The band was amped up. There must have been a family contingent from Pembroke to see Dave Nugent as there was a sign being held up in his honour (in which he rocked out for a few times). Everything was going crazy.
During their final song, Mind Flood (only the greatest modern age psychedelic rocker there ever was), it was hard to focus on them because there were just too many crowd surfers! Where I was situated, not many came our way because it was near the back of the crowd but sure enough we had one guy come our way and he had nowhere to go so I kind of just pushed him backwards into an area with not enough people to catch him. He caught onto this fact and quickly landed on his feet.
But then there was this other girl who was slowly creeping towards the area where the lawnchairs were…the gap in the crowd. I cringed as I saw her inch closer and closer to this area. She would have taken a header to the ground if it wasn’t for the quick thinking of some woman who grabbed her downwards. This resulted in an argument and then the woman’s kids started crying and all hell broke loose and of course we enter the point of Mind Flood where everything erupts and it’s like a volcano of electric strings, light shows that would make epileptic kids have multiple seizures and just this force to be reckoned with! It was quite awe-inspiring and I couldn’t really believe that no one was there to witness this with me (well no one that I knew, anyhow…).
The band left the stage and the crowd were crying for an encore. Let’s point out that they are not the main act of the night. But the crowd wanted more. A few minutes passed and the band returned to the stage. Sam took the mic and said “Thank you very much! We didn’t expect an encore so half the band were in the washroom!”. The broke out into ‘Up Sister’ from the new album which is one of my favourite rockers and all was good in the world. They told us they weren’t expecting this great of a crowd and were pretty pumped up from it. I agree that it was an amazing crowd considering a) it was a Sunday night (and the final night of the festival) and b) can an Ottawa crowd really rock? They have proven to me that it is quite possible and I shouldn’t badmouth them any longer.
New songs that were played:
– Love at the End of the World: Rocked more than I thought it would! The crowd ate it up.
– Lions of the Kalahari: Always a great slow tune. Sam’s daughter was on the edge of the stage with giant pink ear protectors.
– Fixed to Ruin: Always a live favourite.
– Them Kids: This opened the set. Sam broke a string on this one and had a guitar rushed in. In fact, now that I remember a little more, the first few songs were fraught full of instrument mishaps.
– Detroit ’67: Another fun one that everyone gets into.
– Up Sister: Rockin’.
A great night with a great band. I can’t get over the amount of energy that was at this show. I was firing all cylinders hours after the concert. It was definitely the highlight of Bluesfest for me.