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The 7 - Music - SLCR #230: Corb Lund (February 9, 2016)
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KJames199
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#1 Posted on 16.2.16 0938.31
Reposted on: 16.2.23 0939.56
It is Monday night, and I have to give a speech at Toastmasters on Wednesday, and I made the last-minute call to see Yukon Blonde tomorrow so I know I'll be out late with no time to prep a speech, so that's what I should be doing right now. So I made nachos and made breakfast and lunch for tomorrow and wrote some emails and did dishes and now I'm writing a concert review while Raw drags on for hours in the background. And playing games on my phone. Obviously.

I have sort of seen Corb Lund twice before; once with his old not-at-all country band the smalls (preferred - but irritating - capitalization invoked due to this being the only time I will mention them) and once by himself at the Exchange, years ago, where things got started late and we tapped out early. Luckily, the casino runs on old-man time. Not that Corb Lund attracts the greyhairs in the way that, say, Chubby Checker or Bobby Curtola did. I DID note that I had never seen that many pickup trucks in the casino parking lot before, but I suppose that was to be expected.

The theme of this winter's concert series seems to be Folk/Country - only The Headstones are outliers so far (and looking only at my first concerts of the year, you'd get a really skewed sense of my tastes). Alternately, it could be Shows I Went to Without Mika Because She Was in School. That only includes two of the first five shows, but there are at least two more coming, and others that I am seeing out of town. I offered to buy her a ticket to come see local indie wrestling with me next week, but she declined my generous offer. Some people just don't appreciate the comedic stylings of Colt "Boom Boom" Cabana, I guess.

On this night, I would luckily not have to go stag - Jeff picked up tickets for me and two of his friends. I did not catch their names because I am bad at hearing and worse at remembering, but they seemed like lovely people. He mentioned that this was his first time at a casino show (he was as delighted as I to learn that the casino keeps a strict schedule for us senior citizens) and now we'd be going three times in short order. I bought tickets to The Watchmen, he bought the Corb tix, and we each bought our own for I Mother Earth. I suggest we schedule a WebEx to discuss these methods in order to determine optimal efficiency and also whether we will ever see an American musician again. First order of business is selecting lunch.

Our hosts were local country radio DJs - I assume - whose wacky banter can only be described as having died a death. Oh well, they can't all be the ad writer from the rock station who introduces all the rock bands, a concept that still seems weird to me, but whatever. Maybe I'm just jealous because my work never taps me to introduce bands. All I ever got to do was write a letter to Leonard Nimoy once.

The opener was Daniel Romano, about whom I knew nothing except Mika seemed jealous that I got to see him and she did not. That is the only way I know whether or I not I am listening to something good. That is why I bought a ticket for Yukon Blonde. She is not jealous that she missed out on Koo Koo Kanga Roo's Cat Party. Though she should be.

Anyway, Romano is a singer-songwriter country type, as you might expect. He was accompanied by a pair of guitarists. His music was a little more sedate than Corb's stuff tends to be, and I'm not sure how to say that his lyrics are a bit more serious and emotional and less "fun" without it sounding like a negative, which it isn't. I enjoyed his set and he was quite well received at our table, judging by the mass exodus to buy CDs as soon as he was done. I'm looking forward to spending some time with his albums, of which there appear to be quite a few, judging from the big ol' list in the iTunes store.

On a somewhat related topic, our group discussed the fine art of deciding which album to get when you're interested in an artist but don't know where to begin. We settled on "just get the second album," thinking that first albums don't have all the kinks worked out yet, and nobody cares about your new songs if you have old ones. This makes me want to go through all the artists I like enough to know about their albums to see if that holds up. Word tells me that sentence is confusing, but you know what I mean. Or you don't. I'm okay with that.

At one point, Jeff asked how to pronounce Romano's last name - Ro-MA-no, or Ro-MAH-no. I said, as though I actually knew, that it was Ro-MAH-no, "like Ray or cheese." "And not," said Jeff, "like when you find out who's headlining Wrestlemania." About 10 seconds later, I inadvertently inhaled Diet Pepsi into my sinuses. I can be a bit slow, sometimes.

Corb opened with four songs off his newest album, Things That Can't be Undone, including Goodbye Colorado, Run This Town, and Weight of a Gun. He then moved into older stuff and the crowd started to wake up. It's weird that there were more rowdy drunks at Blue Rodeo at the Centre of the Arts than at Corb Lund at a casino, though there were certainly a few. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The older songs at the start included Shine Up My Boots and Five-Dollar Bill. As for the rest of the night, I didn't keep a detailed tracklist, but I know he played (in no particular order) Roughest Neck Around, Little Foothills Heaven, Sunbeam, Washed-Up Rock Star Factory Blues, Cows Around, Dig Gravedigger Dig, and Gettin' Down on the Mountain. He followed Hurtin' Albertan with Long Gone to Saskatchewan, which he noted the band always has to dust off and tune up around Medicine Hat.

Before finishing off his main set, Corb sent his band to the back so he could do a few songs by himself. The first, S Lazy H, is a newer - and completely depressing! - song about the life of a rancher. The next song was... decidedly not that. Jeff mentioned seeing Corb play Five-Dollar Bill before it was ever recorded, and now it is a favourite "older song" and oh God we're all getting so old so fast make it stop. I may have added that last bit. Anyway, my point is that after S Lazy H, Corb played a new unreleased song for us and I can see myself having that feeling far off in the future when it is an old favourite. This was a highlight of the night. I found a video of the song online, recorded a few days earlier in Edmonton, and it's a shame that the title of the song is shown because it was fun to hear the lyrics and try to work out where he was going with it.



(but I can turn off the title when embedding it here!)

Anyway, after that delightful number, the band came back to close out the show with I Wanna Be in the Cavalry (which he said was called "Please God Buy a T-shirt so we Don't Have to Ship Them Back to Toronto at the End of the Tour"), followed by the allegedly religious number Time to Switch to Whiskey. This seems like a great point to introduce our new best friend. I mentioned that there were surprisingly few drunks in the crowd. Luckily, we were close to one. He started early on with some timid pointing in the air, which grew into increasingly enthusiastic fist pumps as the night went on. He moved on to shouting out song titles and raising his drink in the air every time alcohol was mentioned, which was often. All four of us at our table became aware of this man individually, only gradually realizing that we were all watching him. When Corb said he was going to play some songs off Cabin Fever, our friend yelled "GRAVEDIGGER," which Corb acknowledged with a wink and a nod before launching into the song. This may have been the best moment of this fella's life. At another point, he hollered something incomprehensible, to which Corb deadpanned "...wow" and I don't remember what happened for about five minutes after that because I think I died.

Also, at one point, he may have been riding an imaginary horse.

Anyhoo. Our guy also liked to gesture to the people around him to try to get them to stand up and appreciate Corb to an appropriate degree. Somewhere on the other side of the casino, another fella had the same idea, only he got up and walked around the front of the stage, trying to get people to stand up. This made Corb crack up and dedicate one of the last songs to him, which made our guy jealously gesture in a "what about ME" sort of way. Our guy then stood up, sat down, got back up, held himself awkwardly between standing and sitting for a bit, before finally taking his lady's hand and pulling her towards the front of the stage. There was some brief discussion about whether this was a terrible idea or (obviously) the BEST idea. Anyway, they danced, by which I mean he smashed himself against her and did sort of an Elvis swivel. I was so full of joy.

After that and a quick encore break (and change of shirt, I think), they played a handful more: Good Copenhagen, The Truck Got Stuck (with a notable lyric switch from "nothing better to do... except ranch" to "...except bitch about the new government" which is probably quite true to the 2016 Alberta experience), Seven Spanish Angels, and Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer. Which will now be in my head for several days just because I wrote out the title. He said that's where they normally end the show, but by special request, we got one last song - Counterfeiter's Blues. This show started off a little slowly but by the end it was the best and I was loving life and music and drunks who are close enough to be entertaining but far enough away to not be my problem.

We didn't stick around long enough to see if Corb fulfilled his promise of spending the rest of the evening at the tables, but I've heard Geoff Berner's song "Don't Play Cards for Money with Corby Lund" so I think it's a safe bet. But what do I know about bets? I lost my $5 free slot play voucher in two spins and called it a night.
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tarnish
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#2 Posted on 19.2.16 1725.29
Reposted on: 19.2.23 1725.37

I mostly know Corb Lund through Rich Terfry playing the hell out of him on Radio2 Drive, but I've liked what I've heard (and what I've gone looking for on Youtube). I wish I could say I remember The Smalls, but I'd be lying if I said I did.  I know remember the name, but not any of the music.

Corb Lund did a fun track called Bible on the Dash with a guy named Hayes Carll who I happened upon. He does a sort of neo-traditional country/western singer-songwriter thing. Unfortunately his recorded output sounds terribly overproduced to me, but his live stuff is bonkers like this track, Beaumont, from Jools Holland. He's played Western Canada several times, but hasn't come East to my knowledge. Probably worth a check out if he comes your way again.

KJames199
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#3 Posted on 20.2.16 0012.20
Reposted on: 20.2.23 0012.39
I have seen the smalls but didn't really know them back when they were a thing. hansen9j would be the guy to ask.

Will keep my eyes peeled for Hayes Carll. Thanks!
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Related threads: SLCR #229: Blue Rodeo (January 14, 2016) - SLCR #228: Whitehorse (January 22, 2016) - SLCR #227: The Headstones (January 26, 2016) - More...
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