HEY ROSETTA! . . . LIVE AT THE MIDDLE EAST DOWNSTAIRS

For the past couple of weeks there’s been an annoying ad on tv. I think it’s for some model of compact car . . . though it could actually be for car insurance. It features a young woman with a bland nasally voice and uninflected delivery who purports to be in a hipster band on some sort of tour. She’s wearing cut-off shorts (denim, I think) and fishnet (I think) stockings. A couple of mornings ago, my wife asked: “Who dresses like that in real life?” Well, we found out the answer that night—that would be this past Wednesday night—when we paid our first visit ever to The Middle East Downstairs, a longstanding Cambridge music venue that seems to feature mostly alternative rock bands. And the answer was: “Just about every young woman at The Middle East dresses like that.” We were amused. I guess we didn’t read the small print on The Middle East website about the dress code!

But even if we had dressed the part, it would have been tough for us to blend in to the predominantly twenty-something crowd gathered in the cavern-like performance space to see and hear the triple-bill of bands performing there that night. We had our twenty-something daughter with us—maybe she gave us some “street cred” . . . or maybe not: maybe she just confirmed how old we really are. But we weren’t really there to blend in—we were there to see the opening act, a band from St. John’s, Newfoundland called Hey Rosetta! Or actually we were there to see the violin player, Kinley Dowling, the daughter of our good old friends Alan and Estelle. Kinley is on tour with the core quartet of Hey Rosetta!, joining with a cello player to add some Electric Light Orchestra-like texture to their basic folk-rock sound. Hey Rosetta! played a well-received 45-minute set: we have their CD Into Your Lungs, so we were pleased to see them live and in person. And we were very happy to have some visiting time with the lovely Kinley, whom we hadn’t seen for quite a few years: she fit right in with those hip twenty-somethings . . . even though she wasn’t wearing cut-offs with fishnets. Our daughter remarked afterwards: “All the guys thought she was cool . . . and all the girls were jealous of her.” I couldn’t get my camera to work in the low-low light of Downstairs, but I’ve tracked down a video on YouTube from just after Kinley joined the band in Los Angeles in mid-August on their current connect-the-dots North American tour. Check it out!

Kinley mentioned that when the tour ends in Montreal she’ll hop on a plane to Vancouver to perform with another rising star from the vibrant eastern Canadian music scene, Jenn Grant . . . who happens to be the sister of another of our old good friends. Maybe they’ll end up at The Middle East some evening. We’d know how to dress the next time . . .

TEN YEARS AFTER . . . THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

A couple of weeks ago, driving by the Simmons Sports Centre in Charlottetown, PEI, I had a flashback to a rock concert that I sneaked into sometime in the early 1970s at that unlikely venue (a small hockey arena in a mostly residential neighborhood). The band was April Wine. They were formed in Halifax in the late 1960s and eventually found not only a national but even a south-of-the-border following. Their signature sound of twin lead guitars is still catchy a full 40 years later, and I have three of their tunes—“You Could Have Been a Lady,” “Bad Side of the Moon,” and “Roller”—on my iPod. As this old video shows, they were a tight band with a distinctive presence.

One flashback prompting another, I have to observe that today marks the 35th anniversary of a “road trip” that my friend Marty and I made from Charlottetown to Moncton, New Brunswick—we took my family’s old VW Beetle on the car ferry from Borden to Cape Tormentine—to see the British blues-rockers Ten Years After perform there at the Coliseum. Listening now (literally now) to TYA’s Recorded Live album, I am transported back to that transporting night when Alvin Lee lived up to (if not beyond) his “guitar hero” reputation. This video from 1975 would be pretty much what we saw and heard . . . but I remember the live show being in color!