As kids playing road hockey, we chose our favourite player and announced “I am Bobby Orr” or “I’m Andre Boudrias” (me) before the tennis ball was dropped. It was that way too with the other kids when it came to the Beatles. We picked our favourites. Mine was George. That seemed doable. I was too nervous to pick John or Paul. I played violin and couldn’t yet sing. George was close enough to that skill set. My recurring dream was not of being in my own famous band, but of being in George’s position on stage with the Beatles…or Keith Richard with the Stones or Pete Townsend in the Who. The first few dreamtimes were frustrating because I could only play the tennis racket. As I get older I know more of the material in real life and do a better job in the dreamworld. I used to be petrified when the dreams first started. I didn’t have the skills and felt like an imposter about to fail. Well…I still feel mostly that way. That’s excitement. Right?

I used to go to sleep with the radio on and, as it hit the perfect song, I’d try to conjur “the lucky pretender” dream. Well…flash ahead to today. I rub the genie’s lamp and somehow I bust a weird wormhole in the wall dividing the parallel worlds. I’m diving in.

It was a warm starry night in a campground beside a drive-in theatre in Parksville, B.C. and I was running wild with strange new kids – this is during the summer after the summer of love. We crowded to the top of the playground slide to see over the fence at the big screen. All the little metal speaker boxes in the car windows were cranked. The boxes from the far side of the drive-in created a weird delay in relation to those up close to the campground. Trippy. I didn’t now it at the time but we were watching D.A. Pennebaker’s “Monterey Pop” concert film. I would jostle for position at the top of the ladder only to be tossed down the slide by the bigger kids. On my few triumphant times at the top I saw Booker T and the MGs with Otis doing “Shake”, I saw the Who smash their gear and I saw Hendrix burn his guitar. My life’s path was set out before me. I can’t remember seeing anything that exciting for another decade.

In all those situations there was the stalwart bass player. I didn’t even know what a bass player was but I remember the three guys holding it down with the big guitars –John Entwistle, Noel Redding and Duck Dunn. They kept it together and held tight when the focus shifted to mayhem and flash. They calmly surveyed the landscape and held tight. You’d need these guys on your side if you ever got a wheel off the road. Bass players are best friend material. They consistently have your back and do so with a wry smile and slow shake of the head. After a life in music I can tell you this to be mainly true. A lot of people lose a best friend when a bass player dies. I guess that’s what is haunting me.

Here I am in the middle of rehearsals for the upcoming Art of Time Ensemble Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club celebration. Digging into the material I keep reflecting back on the weird twists of fate that the Beatles keep throwing at me. Some people don’t know about my band – Odds. Others who do know the band may not know we broke up from 1998 to 2007. Sorry friends. Maybe forgot to mention it. We were doing really well in 1998 but it felt like it was time to break up. Its just part of what you do if you’re a band. I know, for sure, I made a clear announcement to the band that I was leaving.
Everyone in the band knew but we certainly forgot to tell our agent who called about a week after my pulling the plug to say that Sir George Martin was about to embark on a big symphony tour and would we be the “electric band” part of the orchestra. We were to play the guitar, drum and bass parts and sing a lot of the vocals on a program featuring Sir George Martin conducting a symphony playing his classic Beatle orchestrations. The promoter had sent Sir George our albums. He had listened and declared us “great” and “the right choice”. I guess our influences were showing even more than we thought. No higher compliment could be paid. His official endorsement of our “Beatle spirit” was the sincerest form of flattery (I draw up just shy of the word imitation).
We talked it over and decided this was too good to miss. We agreed to put off our break-up until the Sir George tour was over. Our onstage vibe was going to be authentic “Let It Be” tension but what the hell.
About a month later Mr. Martin decided a long tour was going to be too much for him. He called and said he was just going to do a couple of shows in a few cities with musicians from those locales. He was sorry. So then we broke up.
That is the weird story of how the Beatles got our band back together…for a month. They were such a good band that their dysfunctional broken up band could get other broken up bands back together. Magic.
Odds have been back making music for years now. That had nothing to do with the Beatles I just wanted to make sure I told you about that this time.

Today was day one of rehearsals for the Art of Time’s re-imagining of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The musical structures have only been changed enough to illustrate how amazing the original album truly was. Unless you do something different there is no new light shed on anything. There’s the old adage that each time you listen to a Beatles record you find something you’ve never heard before. The arrangers on this project are true fans who went digging through this album to unearth all the hidden gems and polish them bright. They’ve preserved all the beautiful colours and then thrown those colours back at the canvas to startling effect.
Steven Page, John Mann, Andy Maize and I are “the singers”. We’re fans too. We’re using our own voices that have been somewhat shaped by years of Beatle appreciation but are definitely our own. We’ve “made our faces” as they say. Anyway, we’re not going to be successful as a tribute act because none of us plays drums and there is no call for “the Beatles as they may have looked in middle age”. We are, however, bursting with admiration for this music and really enjoying ourselves. The artistic director Andrew would never say it directly but I get to sing a lot of John Lennon’s parts because I sing through my nose a lot more than the others do. I made my own face but I guess the shnoz ran away on me. So…
I get to sing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. Jonathan Goldsmith’s new arrangement has me feeling even more stoned than the Beatles were when they made it. It’s amazing. I told him I feel like I’m underwater while I’m singing it and come up for air at the end. As a kid I thought all these songs were so weird and indecipherable. I gave up on lyrical analysis and just rocked. It’s strange to discover, upon singing “LSD”, that it is as linear and straightforward a story as any country song. The only thing different is the pursuit of the girl takes place in a world where taxis are made of newspaper, the odd person is made of plasticine, and you have to bushwhack through giant cellophane flowers. No big deal. Been there before. If you took a few of those weird things out, stuck to the story, and put a cowboy hat on the guy, it would make a great CMT video.

I have been writing a diary for the National Post this week. They asked me for 150 words a pop but gave me examples that were 350 to 400. I split the difference.

In the end the cut them back to 150 with a picture. I understand the drill but I think my original versions are closer to how I was feeling. I’m going to lay them out here in their original form for all of you who haven’t been privy to the edited versions.

Here’s #3 that ran on Wednesday. I don’t have 1 and 2 in this computer so I’ll add them last.

Craig

On the plane from Vancouver to Toronto to start rehearsals with the Art of Time Ensemble for their Sgt. Pepper 45th anniversary show. I’m fishing through the movie selections on the headrest in front of me. Choosing the “Canadian” option hoping to finish seeing “French Immersion”. I only saw the first half on my last short hop. Instead I find 1970’s “Goin’ Down the Road”—Donald Shebib’s film about two maritimers heading to Toronto to find a different life. The song “There’s a Rainbow in Toronto”, from the SCTV parody of this movie, instantly starts playing in my head. Paul Brennan of the Odds and I used to sing it every time we rolled into Toronto. I haven’t seen the original film in decades. It seems like it was on CBC every week back when I was ten.
The opening driving montage is rolling and Pete and Joey are laughing and tossing stubby beer bottles from a beaten blue Chev convertible painted with crude hot rod flames. There’s a suicide knob on the steering wheel. Oh yes…our “unsafe” history. “There’s gonna be so much there we won’t know where to begin”. They roll into town and the dark adventure begins. The 1970 footage is captivating and the dialog dated and cartoonish –“what a pair of knockers”. When I was a kid my dad said things like this. My mom dressed like this. Mini skirts and high hair. I am now realizing, as our protagonists struggle and party in “the Big Smoke”, that my childhood impressions of Toronto came from this film. I didn’t get to see the city for myself until I was twenty-nine. As my kinder gestalt is reanimated it mashes-up strangely with my current understanding and experience. Starting tomorrow this phenomenon will repeat itself on a musical level. As a kid I threw myself into my parents classical record collection and all the Beatles discs. Now I’m “Goin’ Down the Road” to dig that vibe up and play classical Beatles mash-ups with a group called the Art of Time. Art of time travel indeed. Psychedelic man. Something is going on here. There’s a rainbow in Toronto for sure.

Yes! Dog of Thunder’s adopted hockey squad won the championship last night in a tight checking 2-1 affair with the North Shore Lucky Legs. In this pic you can see me (Craig) 2nd from left in the front row. In the back row far left we have Dean “Chef” Delandreville the person who built this website. One in from Dean, to his right, is Brent “Bünt” Belke. He’s a Dog of Thunder composer. One to the right of Brent is Cam “Espo” Andrews who created the Dog of Thunder logo. Blair “X Factor” Calibaba is the one in street clothes. You may also know him as an engineer on four Odds albums and seen (or heard) him mix the band live for several years. Not pictured would be Paul “Crazy Legs” Forgues who mixed Odds “Cheerleader” and is our current tour manager and front of  house sound engineer.

Congrats to all my team mates for a great season with a spectacular finish.

http://samthomphotography.com/2012/03/14/steven-page-barenaked-ladies/

The tour has been a blast. Victoria on Wednesday. Here’s a good picture Shawn Morgan took at the North Vancouver show. This was the first time I could walk home from a gig in many years and have it take less than 2 hours. Much fun. See you in Victoria.