Gig: Nomeansno / Potty Umbrella / The Bon

Nomeansno / Potty Umbrella / The Bon

Lee's Palace. Saturday, April 18, 2009.

I must confess that I felt a bit of worry heading in to this one, wondering to myself if this was a concert that I should have gone to fifteen years ago to fully appreciate it. But it all turned out okay. Quiet as I slipped into Lee's, many of the early arrivals falling into the demographic that I was expecting at this show: the leather jacket-wearing, middle-aged balding punk type. I was genuinely curious to see who else was going to show up.

First up, a late addition to the bill, a local crew called The Bon.¹ So far as I can make out, this is a new-ish band, but it was immediately apparent that the members were all vets. Bringing a sort of meat-and-potatoes rock with a Nuggets-y edge, The Bon were solid entertainers, and a pleasure to listen to. Not paradigm-shifting music by any means, but their songs had a good beat and you could dance to them. Pedal-powered guitarists Peter Gleeson and Craig Daniels had a variety of crafty tricks up their sleeves and there were a handful of plus tracks on offer.² This may sound like faint praise, but I mean it as a genuine complement when I say this sounds like a band with few good 7" singles in them.

The crowd had been steadily building up during The Bon, and the place was fairly full by the time Potty Umbrella took the stage, though more in that full in the back, empty on the floor kind of way. The only biographical fact that I had going in was that they were from Poland, but that really isn't determinative of anything.³ The band came on with two keyb players at either end of the stage flanking guit/bass/drums and launched into a funky opener — jazzy in the way that Live-Evil is jazzy. That would be one touchstone for the bulk of the mainly-instrumental set. Another that came to mind was T.O.'s own Holy Fuck. The band was solid and, in a genre that is subject to musical wanking, generally did a good job of avoiding the treacherous shoals of proggy muso displays of virtuosity and jammy let-it-all-hang-out bloat, mostly through staying in the groove. Only a closing cover of "Higher Ground" felt like easy pandering, but the crowd ate it up — and generally seemed to dig the band's vibe.⁴

After Potty Mouth's departure, the floor quickly filled in. Looking around, it seemed to be a more diverse crowd than expected, though still skewing older and laddish. NMN shirts abounded, and the devotion of the crowd was established early on, when a roar greeted Rob and John each time they crossed the stage to prep some bit of gear. So the roar that greeted them as they strapped on their instruments was hardly a surprise, but still seemed to impress the band.

Eschewing the usual stick-the-drummer-in-the-back stage arrangement, John's kit was set up stage left, Rob centre and "new guy" guitarist Tom Holliston stage right. They launched into their set with a new one, cheekily entitled "Old", and then unleashed the crowd's excitement with a lashing take of "Oh No! Bruno!" that uncorked a moshing frenzy.⁵ The setlist was skewed a bit towards 06's All Roads Lead to Ausfahrt, but there was something from nearly every album reaching all the way back to Sex Mad. It would be hard to get everything you'd want to see in one setlist (I felt for the guy in front of me who was shouting for "Teresa, Give Me That Knife") but there was plenty gems brought out: "Self Pity", "The Day Everything Became Nothing", "Rags and Bones", "All Lies", "Everyday I Start To Ooze", "Madness and Death", "Humans". It was also a chance to see some live energy pumped into tracks from the last couple albums, and that generally gave them an animating edge: "Hello/Goodbye", from One, for example, is a track I had never been particularly convinced by that sounded a lot better on stage. There were also three new songs, all told, one (called "Jubilation"?) which sounded pretty fiercely good.

It was a treat to see how these guys do their stuff, and pretty amazing to see the energy that they still bring to it. So all my fears that I was no longer the version of me that would appreciate the show were pretty solidly wiped away. Highly satisfying, and a pretty great gig. I left wondering if the nomination papers for the Order of Canada are online — turns out they are.⁶

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¹ If you are going to google this band for more info, do remember to add "-jovi" to your search box if you want to save yourself a dose of The Fear. I don't normally pass along Myspace links but have done so here to save you the horror.

² Best of the lot was probably one called "Russian Roulette".

³ But may provide an excuse for their name.

⁴ Although the appreciation was not universal. A couple dudes standing by me were clearly not into it, and after a couple songs one of them (call him Megadeth Jacket) leaned over to his buddy (call him GG Allin T-Shirt) and said, with a pleading expression: "Can we go out and smoke? Anything's better than this!"

⁵ People still mosh, as it turns out. It was nice to see, watching from a safe distance, that this was a community-minded sort of mosh pit where people were taking care of each other. A few songs along, one dude was crowd surfing, and I later saw him coming back from the bar with a pitcher of water to pass around to the folks in the pit. Positive vibes, yo.

⁶ In case that doesn't work, I also voted for them for Zunior's Canadian Independent Music Hall of Fame.