The Seven Deadly Hotels

Hello everyone! As we travel around the continent, we are sometimes left to our own devices with regards to accommodations. Often on the night of a show there are hotel rooms provided for us, but when there aren't or when we're on a driving day with no show, it's up to us to figure out where we feel like resting our heads for the evening. Often the city/town/middle of nowhere is dictated to us by the necessities of travel that day, but we can pick and choose our hotel of choice. Being a money grubbing weasel who is always trying to save as many pennies as we can, my vote is usually for the cheapest most vile dive of a dump we can possibly find. Basically, if the organism at the check-in counter has any fewer than six legs, the hotel's too ritzy for me! This has lead to a number of interesting/amusing experiences over the years, and so I'd like to share with you now the seven most horrifying hotels in which we've ever stayed. I give you: The Seven Deadly Hotels!

7. Last year we stayed in a hotel in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I don't remember the name of it, but it smacked of crime. There were a couple of entrances to the highway right next to the hotel for a quick getaway, and the room looked like the kind of place you'd want to get away from in a big hurry. There wasn't too much particularly crazy about this hotel, but several pieces of furniture in each room looked like they'd been chopped to pieces with an axe, or maybe like someone had systematically dropped pianos on each piece, then tried to put them back in the room and hoped that no one would notice. All in all, the rooms had a very shady feel about them that's kind of hard to describe, and were in VERY poor shape with bathrooms about big enough for a spider to comment "well honey, it's a little cozy, but it's all we can afford right now". The beds were pretty uncomfortable as I recall, but as long as I wasn't going to die there that night I wasn't going to make a big issue of it.

6. On our way to pick up Mark at the Philadelphia airport one time we stopped for the night in Binghampton, New York. I don't really remember why we didn't have enough time to go all the way to Philly that day, but for some reason we didn't. This was one of those motels out on some side road outside of town where all the doors to the rooms face the road. The furniture was intact in this room, but the walls and ceiling of the room hadn't fared quite as well. One of the rooms was missing some ceiling tiles, and there were a variety of electrical wires hanging down from the ceiling into the room.

The bathroom lights didn't work, so at night you were completely in the dark. Also, the bathroom had one of those brutal shower stalls made of those tiny square tiles like they had in your high school change room. As a reasonably tall person, I've never been a big fan of shower stalls, and this one was tight and didn't seem particularly clean. At least the bathroom did have a window, so during the day time there was light, but the ground floor window was fully transparent (a little unusual for a bathroom window), and what little there was in the way of a curtain was translucent and wasn't capable of covering the whole window. Not that this was of particularly great concern, but it was just odd. I don't think I've ever seen that before or since. The water from the tap at this motel tasted particularly vile if I remember correctly; so much so that you'd be tempted to slowly die of thirst before chancing the gustatory ordeal of sampling another millilitre of that poisonous fluid.

5. Ah, now on to the Canmore Hotel in Canmore, Alberta. This was both our gig and our hotel that evening. There was a bar/club on the bottom floor that actually wasn't half bad, but the accommodations left a few things to be desired. It's always nice when your hotel for the evening is within walking distance from the gig, but I would have gladly gone some distance that night. Strangely, the hotel goes by the nickname "The Ho", and uses the slogan "Your Ho away from home". I'm not making this up. Apparently it's one of those places that more or less every young local has worked at for at least a few days to make a little extra money. Anyway, on to the hotel.

We were given five single rooms, which sounds exciting as we usually share rooms, but we soon found out why. All the rooms there are single rooms approximately the size of a large walk-in closet. The rooms don't have bathrooms; there's one communal bathroom in the middle of the single hallway. Now, the condition of the the rooms wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either. The bedspread had some cigarette burns through it, and so did the sheets, but they seemed clean enough otherwise. There was a tall window in the room with a white curtain about the thickness of a proton which blocked out absolutely no light (in fact, I'm not sure that the curtain wasn't emitting some of the light that was coming through). The heat was permanently on in the room, but it was on low enough in my room that the heat was bearable (one of the other guys opted to sleep in the van to escape the unbearable heat in his room). It also allowed me to use my bedspread as a curtain to block out the fiery ball of death rising over the mountains in the morning.

Now, none of this would have been too bad if it weren't for the fact that the walls were paper thin, and there was a non-stop all-night party going on in the short hallway connected to the few rooms available. Let me now explain what I mean by "party". There was the usual laughing and drinking and carrying on that usually accompanies the word, but additionally there were skateboarders riding up and down the hallway running into walls and doors, wall riding the doors themselves on occasion. Trying to sleep through what was going on was more or less analogous to trying to sleep in the middle of an active construction site, or trying to sleep in a county that also contains me laughing at something.

4. We once stayed in a university-run motel in Tallahassee, Florida. Now, at a cursory glace, and if someone had chopped off your nose and removed your lungs, these rooms appeared to be just fine and dandy! Unfortunately, I still had my nose and lungs (although upon setting foot in the room I began frantically searching for a pair of pinking shears with which to clip off my nose) and so my experience in this hotel was thus sabotaged. The air was more or less alive with mould and mildew. In fact I'm pretty sure I heard a few spores chuckling to themselves when they saw us enter. The room was pretty close to 1,000,000 degrees Centigrade (1,800,032 degrees Fahrenheit), and so I promptly turned on the air conditioning. This was I'm sure just what the spores were waiting for, because it turned out that the entire spore army was lurking inside the room's wall mounted air conditioning unit. The density of mildew stench in the air reached that of soup (and I mean a really thick, business-like soup with lots of chunks of things in it; more of a stew really. A mould and mildew stew in a stench broth), and so we were left to decide whether to cook slowly in our skins or permanently lose the use of our respective noses. I think my room opted to go with the loss-of-nose angle.

That was really the most serious thing, but the rooms were lacking smoke detectors. We knew because there was a big hole in the ceiling with wires hanging out of it where the smoke detector should have been in each room. At first we thought it was just the one room we'd been in so far, so a couple of the guys asked the front desk for another room, specifically mentioning the smoke-detector oriented reason for this request. They were happy to oblige, and sent them to another room. The lack of smoke detector was in a different spot in the room this time, but the story was basically the same. It turned out that ALL of the rooms had had their respective smoke detectors ripped out, and I'm not sure if we ever found out exactly why.

On top of all that, the bed was one of those beds that feels like it's just a lattice of criss-crossing wires instead of anything resembling what would conventionally be called a "mattress". You could actually see the lines of the wires through the sheet on the bed. Just a lovely stay. I slept like a walrus who just found out that he's being evicted in the morning, and his land lord's away for the week on vacation and can't be reached.

3. One time we stayed in a little motel in Holyoke, Massachusettes; I forget the name. This one was pretty interesting. I'm not quite sure how they stayed in business, because it seemed like no one had stayed there in years. You know how things look in a movie after there's been some sort of nuclear holocaust (or zombies, or killer virus or whatever) that killed off all the inhabitants of a small town, and then some unaffected person comes to town and wanders around wondering what happened to everyone? That's how this room looked. Everything was in its place, but there was a thick layer of dust on everything in the rooms. I mean dust that you could write in with your finger. There was also a wide variety of stains on the floor (poor Mark had to sleep on that disgusting floor that night if I remember correctly) and some cigarette burns in the sheets. The crowning glory of this hotel though was the shower. I can remember Craig coming over to the room I was in asking to use our shower because his was only able to manage a vigorous dripping possibly sufficient to get a paramecium damp only to find that our shower gave forth a brown sludge that I guess was supposed to pass for water. In short, it wasn't easy to stay clean in any capacity in this motel!

2. And now on to possibly the shadiest motel in which we've ever stayed. Just about 20 minutes or so into New Jersey from New York City (I forget the name of the town) we stayed in what could best be thought of as an anti-palace. The place had hourly rates posted, which really doesn't bode that well for the clientele, but that was just the beginning of it. Our room looked like it had had a recent coat of paint on it to cover up a wide variety of graffiti written on the walls, but that hadn't stopped the people staying there from writing more graffiti on top. I wish I could remember what the walls said in there, but I think there were some pretty wild things. There was a channel on the TV that between the hours of something like midnight and something like 11am showed some rather questionable programming not at all suitable for younger viewers as part of your basic room fee, and there were a number of other clues among the room's lengthy and verbose graffiti that strongly spoke to regular visitations by ladies (and perhaps gentlemen) of the evening. The bathroom door wouldn't really stay closed all that well, and was covered in graffiti on the inside, and the shower was in such a state that it was easy to believe that you might be dirtier after using it than you were before. After sleeping in the bed though, I was willing to take that chance.

1. And now the number one filthiest place we've ever stayed. I still look back on this place and wonder if it really existed. Perhaps it emerges from a cloud of smog and toxic gas once every hundred years or so, or maybe it was built by a bunch of pranksters seeing just how much a band would be willing to endure without complaining. The place in question was the band house provided by a bar called "Amigos" or "Amigo's" (I forget which) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. What a piece of work this place was. Let me try to paint you a picture.

First, I went up the narrow staircase next to the door to Amigo's that led over the bar. At the top of the stairs, it looked like some kind of drug dealer's last resort hideout. There was a white (well, formerly white) plastic table and a few plastic chairs (the kind that you could probably buy a set of at a variety store for about $15.00) that were all covered in graffiti in black sharpie. EVERYTHING in this place was covered in band stickers and graffiti. Hanging from a long, vandalized, 1cm metal pipe running down from the ceiling over the table that probably should have ended in an overhead light was a soiled towel, or garment of some kind. I didn't want to know badly enough to explore its nature beyond a visual inspection as it hung. There was another "table" in the room which was an upside down broken television, its screen covered in vandalized band stickers to a degree that would have made turning it on pointless even if it hadn't been broken.

The bathroom was covered in band stickers and thoroughly offensive graffiti of every description from ceiling to floor. The mirror was so covered in stickers as to be completely useless. There were stickers and graffiti inside the toilet bowl! The shower was covered in mocking graffiti, although I think it was more or less free of stickers. Beside the shower was a pile of small, thin hand towels, which were to serve as bath towels for us. Apparently, there was one bath towel as well, but Craig (being the first one into the room) wisely saw and squirreled it away for his own use in the morning, and then came out of the bathroom complaining about how there were only hand towels for us. I salute his quick thinking!

On to the "beds". There were five filthy mattresses lying in various corners of the two adjoining doorless rooms. Most of them were falling apart: foam and such falling out of their sides and corners. I had to shake the dirt and gravel out of the sheets of my bed (I swear that I'm not exaggerating here) and dust off my pillow before I dared lay down to sleep. This is one of the only occasions in my life where I've ever chosen to sleep in my clothes from that day. I think I was the second last person to shower in the morning, and like a weasel of a fink, ended up using the last few hand towels to dry off. Even at that, I wasn't completely dry. I'm probably forgetting some of the details of this room, and I wish that we'd had a camera with us to show just how crazy the place was, but alas, it's lost to the ages now.

Well, there's the top seven. Honourable mention should also go to the Knight's Inn in Dayton, where Brian, Laura and I tried three different rooms before we found one that didn't reek of cat urine (after the door knob to the first room we tried fell apart in my hands while trying to lock it. In its defense though, it did look like the door had been broken down a few times in its life). Honorable mention also goes to a hotel in Victoria, B.C. that we didn't end up staying in. After all, we have some standards! This one was on top of a strip club, and the ear-plug-dispensing man at the counter advised us not to use the elevator, and further advised in a very friendly and helpful way that we not stay there. There was vomit in the hallway by the rooms, and the one room we did see had random pieces of carpet laid over damaged spots in the floor through which came the pounding music from the bar below.

If any of you thought that life on the road was a glamorous thing, I hope I've enlightened you to some degree! On the whole, I should say these kinds of places are the exception rather than the rule, but we've definitely seen some interesting things in our travels!

Vegas and the Canyons

Hello everyone! I just got back from a fantastic trip that some of you might enjoy hearing about, but I'll start with Las Vegas. The shows were a lot of fun, and we saw some old friends there, and fortunately for me we were staying in a hotel/casino. I'm a big fan of games of all shapes and sizes, and card games in particular, so a casino is a somewhat dangerous place for me. Everything went well in the end though, this time.

I was on a separate flight from the rest of the guys, and consequently got to the hotel about five and a half hours before the rest of them. The idea was to catch some sleep before the show that night as I hadn't slept at all the night before due to the fact that I had to be at the airport at about 4:30am Friday morning and I'm a late night kind of guy. Unfortunately the hotel wouldn't let me check in to my room because the rooms were booked in Trevor's name, and obviously I am not Trevor. Sadly, this meant no rest for me. They did however hold my bags for me so that I was free to wander about unencumbered. I figured that I might as well see where I could get at the tables, so I sat down at the first black jack table I found, and in about five minutes I was up $37.50, so I walked away.

I then wandered down to Ceasar's Palace to see some artwork by my favourite artist, Stuart Yankell. He has some of his original pieces for sale in one of the galleries in the "shops" area of Ceasar's Palace. I have a number of his prints up on the walls in my house, but it was great to see the original pieces of some of the art I own! I would recommend checking him out if you like art. The link to him is available on my blog page in the side bar to the right. I particularly like the pieces he does of jazz musicians, but I have a number of his cityscape and marketplace paintings as well. Great work!

Anyway, I eventually made my way back to the hotel/casino to wait for the guys to arrive. Since I now had some profit to throw around, I decided to try my luck at craps. This is a much more complicated game than black jack, so I'll explain a very basic approach to how to play. This is only one simple way to play (there are about a million ways to make bets in this game), but it's the one that works for me.

You start by placing some money on the "Pass Line". Then you throw two dice. If you roll a 7 or an 11, you immidiately win your pass line bet, double your money, and roll again. If however you roll a 2, a 3, or a 12, you immediately lose your pass line bet, and can roll again if you put more money down.

Now, if you roll anything else (ie. anything BUT 2, 3, 7, 11, or 12), you set whatever number it is that you rolled (say, 4 for example) as a "point" that you are then trying to roll again in order to win your pass line bet. The "dealer" (for lack of a better term) will then place a large disc on the large "4" in yellow on the table above. Now the rules change (by "now" I mean the moment you make it past that initial roll without immediately winning or immediately losing your pass line bet). Now, only rolling a 7 will make you lose. Rolling anything else may or may not win you any money (as I'll explain in a moment), but only a 7 will make you lose. This disadvantage to you of course is that 7 is statistically the most commonly rolled number on dice.

Now, if you roll a 4, you win your point, and double up your pass line bet. No other number will do anything good for you unless you make any more bets. An easy way to do this is by betting (in addition to your pass line bet) on any or all of the numbers printed in yellow ink above. Let's say you bet on 8. Now you'll lose everything you put anywhere on the table if you roll a 7, win your pass line bet if you roll a 4, and win whatever you bet on 8 each and every time you roll an 8. No other number will do anything for you or against you.

What you can do however is bet on any or all of the numbers in yellow ink. So let's say you put money on each of the numbers up there. That means that now a 7 will lose you everything you put on the table, a 4 will win you your pass line bet, a 2, 3, 11, or 12 will do nothing for you or against you, and any other number will make you money. In short, as long as you don't roll a 7, you'll make money with almost every roll of the dice.

The catch to all of this is that when you put money on those numbers in yellow ink above, you can't remove your money from the table when you feel like leaving. In a manner of speaking, it's already lost. It will stay there until you roll a 7 and lose it to the house. The hope is that it will make more money for you while it's there than you'll eventually end up losing. If you think about it, if you only put money on 8 then all you have to do is roll an 8 before you roll a 7, and you'll break even. If you roll 8 twice before rolling a 7, you're up by whatever amount you bet. Each number bet you make pays for itself by hitting it once before rolling a 7, and makes profit by hitting it two or more times before rolling a 7.

That's just one approach to craps, but I've had a lot of fun playing! I tried to drag Brian and Trevor down in with me Saturday night, but they ended up just observing. Too bad because I had something of a hot streak that night! That's the nice thing about craps: it's everyone at the table against the house. A win for you is a win for everyone (who made similar bets), so it's generally a very supportive crowd of people if you're rolling well!

I then wandered over to the three card poker table, which I had never played before, and to which I didn't know the rules. This is a simpler game, but a really enjoyable one, so I'll explain how it works.

You start by placing a bet in the diamond with "Ante" written in it. This will be the money you're betting against the dealer hoping to double. You're dealt three cards (as the name suggests). The hands are as follows, in ascending order of value: high card (just having a single card in your hand that's higher than the dealer's hightest card) 1 pair (two of the same card, ie. a pair of 9's), a flush (three cards of the same suit ie. three spades), a straight (three cards of any suit in numerical sequence ie. 4 5 6, or 10 jack queen), three of a kind (ie. three 5's, or three kings), and finally a straight flush (three cards in numerical sequence of the same suit, ie. 7 8 9 all of diamonds). In order to beat the dealer, you just have to have a hand that's better than whatever hand the dealer gets dealt. The shuffling of the cards in this game is done by a machine, and it also portions out the various hands. There are no draws; you just play the three cards you're dealt.

So, now you've got your bet on "Ante" and you've got your cards. You now try to decide whether you're likely to have a better hand than whatever the dealer may have. If you decide you might, you place your cards in the "Play" rectangle, and exactly match your "Ante" bet on top of your cards over the "Play" diamond; no more no less. (If you decide that you probably don't have a better hand than the dealer, you can fold, and surrender your "Ante" bet). Then the cards get flipped over, and we see who wins. If you win, you double your "Ante" bet and your "Play" bet. If you lose, the dealer takes both bets.

There is an additional catch however, in the casino's favour of course. The dealer must have at least the high card of a queen or better in his/her hand in order to "qualify" to play. This means that if the dealer does not have at least a queen high or better, even though you've decided to play, and you put your "Play" bet down on the table, the dealer essentially says, "Now that I've looked at my cards, I've decided that we're not really going to play this hand. Here's your money back, and let's re-deal". You still win your "Ante" money, but if you don't have at the very least a queen high in your hand, you might be wasting your time playing.

Now, an additional potential bonus for you. You may notice in the picture above that there is another betting region on the table: a circle with the words "Pair Plus" written in it. This is an optional additional bet that you can make. It has nothing to do with beating or losing to the dealer, and is not affected be whether or not the dealer qualifies to play the poker hand. This bet only relates to what cards you get dealt. Essentially, all you're betting is that you will get dealt a pair or better. If you do, you win that part of the bet. If you don't, you lose that part of the bet. It's totally separate from the actual poker playing. The really nice thing about this bet though is that the house offers odds. That is to say that while your "Ante" and "Play" bets only pay out 1:1 (ie. a bet of $5 pays $5 if you win), some of the "Pair Plus" bets pay as much as 40:1 (ie. a bet of $5 pays $200 if you win). The odds offered for different hands vary from casino to casino, but they're always printed on the table so you'll be able to figure out what's going on.

So that's that game. I had a lot of fun playing this game over the weekend, and I think it ended up being a good money maker for a bunch of the guys. I think I came out on top in the band as far as everyone's respective winnings for the weekend, but it's not like any of us are playing for serious dollars. The old rule of "never bet what you can't afford to lose" definitely applies, and I certainly can't afford to lose much playing games at a casino!

The Canyons

After Vegas, the guys flew home, and I was joined by my family for a bit of a holiday. First we drove out to Springdale, Utah to Zion Canyon. It was absolutely spectacular. If you enjoy hiking, I couldn't possibly recommend it any more strongly. The scenery is beyond belief, and it seems to change almost with every step. On this first day, we hiked up a trail to a location called "Observation Point". It's a couple thousand feet above ground level, and has a spectacular view overlooking a long valley. Here are a few pictures from the hike:

From near the bottom:

From near the top:

Our next day brought us to Bryce Canyon, also in Utah. This place is like another world: Mars specifically comes to mind. Deep red rocks with white striations eroded into hoodoos (spires) that stretch on and on. You come upon this canyon already at the rim, and hike down into it. Here are some pictures:

It's hard to really convey perspective here, but try to keep your eyes on the trees in these photos for comparison to the mountains:

Day three brought us to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I'm told that the South Rim is more spectacular (although I've never been there myself), but this certainly blew me away. There's really no capturing just how amazing it looks in person, but here are some photos anyway:


Some Dufus:

The whole crew of us (from left to right: my sister's boyfriend Jeff, my sister Katie, my Dad Hector, my Mom Judy, my girlfriend Kira, and that same dufus from the last picture)

Can you imagine what it must have been like for the first settlers to come across that? It just about looks like the end of the world. The first thing you'd have to try and figure out is whether it would be easier to go through or around! Just mind-blowing.

Finally, we went back to Zion Canyon to hike a different trail than the one we'd hiked before. This one was called "Angel's Landing", and was my favourite hike of the lot. They were all great, but this one had a great finish to it. After you climb a long way up, there's an extra peak on the top of the mountain that you can kind of treat as optional. Basically, you hike up the spine of the mountain top, with about 1,500 feet of air on either side of you. The people who look after the park have installed posts and a heavy chain most of the way up to give you something to hold on to, but even still it looks pretty perilous. There are a number of places where there's no chain, and no fence to keep you from going over the edge if you lost your footing. Unfortunately, my Dad and I made this ascent alone, and neither of us held a camera, but here's a picture of what the ascent looked like from below:

Here are some photos from lower parts of this hike:

Nearing the top:

Looking back on the climb leading up to the last photo:

My parents and I on a path between the sections depicted in the photos above:

All in all, the trip was absolutely wonderful from beginning to end, and I would strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in hiking seek out both Zion and Bryce Canyons. You won't regret a second of the time you spend there!

How I Joined ETH

Well, Trevor has lead the way in this story, so as per the requests on the talkboard I figured I'd kick in my own tale.

Back in high school, I played in an original rock/alternative band called Drowning June. A few members came and went from the band, but in the band's later days we ended up with a guy named Owen Pallett playing alternately keyboard and violin. I had met Owen years earlier when he Trevor and I got together to perform the tune Correspondences by a Canadian band called The Tea Party at a talent show night at Trevor and Owen's high school. When Drowning June decided we needed a violinist for a couple of songs, I thought of Owen.

I had always planned to go to school for physics, but in my last year of high school, I decided to pursue music for a career instead. I had to quit Drowning June, and I went off to Humber College to study jazz, following in the footsteps of my friend Anthony Giles (percussionist appearing on both Casualties of Retail and Soapbox Heroes), whose example convinced me that perhaps a person could play music for a living. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do with music; all I knew was that I loved jazz, and hopefully if I got good enough I would meet someone who would be interested in working with me on some project somewhere.

I remember a conversation with my Mother when I told my parents that I wanted to go to school for music instead of physics. She had asked me what exactly I was planning to do with my music education, and I told her "I don't know exactly. I'm just going to go there, and something will find me." Naively bold words, but things ended up working out for the best anyway! I imagine that my parents must have been somewhat apprehensive about my dubious career choice, but they supported me all the way as they always have.

Half way through my first year at Humber, I got a call from Trevor saying that he'd just joined a Celtic Rock band called Enter The Haggis. He also said that the band was going to be looking for a drummer soon, and perhaps I should think about auditioning. Not only that, but my friend Owen Pallett was already a member of the band, and the two of them thought I might be right for the job. Trevor gave me the name and number of one Craig Downie and told me to call him to arrange an audition.

Craig encouraged me to come on down to one of the band's rehearsals to jam, although I didn't know any of the music. To be honest, I didn't really have any concept of what Celtic Rock as a genre was. I immediately went out and bought Ashley MacIsaac's High How Are You Today? CD, as well as Natalie MacMaster's No Boundaries and a Celtic compilation CD called Bravehearts (not to be confused with the movie). I listened to those CD's non-stop before I went to the rehearsal so I might have at least some idea what to expect.

On a Thursday night I found my way up the shady elevator to the illustrious loft in which Craig was living which was unlike any place I had ever seen before. It only added to the mystique of the place that Craig had warned me on the phone to steer clear of the building next door on my way into his building as he suspected that it was a sweat-shop of some kind. From there we walked to the band's rented jam space on Richmond street just east of Spadina in Toronto. The place more or less always stank of mold and mildew but there were a variety of other odours thrown in there from week to week. It was always interesting to see what the jam space was going to smell like each time we went there. We jammed for a while on a number of different ideas, and if I'm not mistaken ended up playing some Red Hot Chili Peppers tune. On the recommendation of the band's at-the-time current drummer Ken Horne who was present at the jam, it was decided that I was to be tried out for a while.

My first part-show with the band was in February 1999 I think, and for a while I traded off songs at shows with Ken, who incidentally is the one who gave me the nickname "Seumas/Seamus/Shamus/ Shame Us". On St. Patrick's Day, March 17th 1999 I was officially asked to join the band permanently, and I did so by taking over for Ken mid-tune during a performance of the song The Train from Let The Wind Blow High. The show was at a bar called "Original's" on Bay street in Toronto.

For a good long while, it was a real challenge for me to regain my "rock chops" as I had been playing nothing but jazz for months. (It might be argued by some that I still have a ways to go in that department!). If you could hear a performance from the band back then, I think you would find my playing VERY different from what it has become. It's been an ongoing struggle for me over the years to find ways to incorporate my musical preferences into the music of Enter The Haggis, and my efforts have met with a wide variety of success and failure. The experience has been very rewarding though, and I've learned a lot about my instrument, and a tremendous amount about how to play with a band.

UDrum

My first teacher Steve introduced me to Paul Dickinson at UDrum back in high school, and since then he's taken fantastic care of me. In addition to building my drum kit, he's seen to it that whenever I needed anything I got it immediately.

I can remember one time when I realized the day before going out on tour for about a month that I was on my last two pairs of sticks. I called Paul hoping to order another box, but he was out of stock at the time. This was a disaster as I couldn't be assured of finding the sticks I like on the road just anywhere, and I didn't know in any case how much time we'd have to be stopping in every music store on the way. Paul asked me where our first stop was. When I told him Thunder Bay, Ontario he asked for the hotel address, and when I got to the hotel, the sticks were waiting for me. He had managed to order them for me and rush them up there to be ready for me only 48 hours after I called him.

That's just one example, but in short, I've never had better or more personal service from any business in my life. Paul's has belived in me and helped me out every step of the way since I started my career. On the rare occasion that I've had some problem with my gear due to wear and tear, Paul has dropped whatever he was doing to fix it for me right away at no charge. He stands behind his work, and I couldn't be happier with his drums.

Since I often have people asking me what gear I use, I figured I might as well post the full details here.

The drum kit Paul built for me (and helped me to design) generally appears on stage with us in two different configurations. The most common one these days is the five-piece setup, consisting of a 22" bass drum, 10", 12", and 14" toms (all 6-ply maple with 4-ply re-enforcement rings) and a 14" x 7" brass snare drum with zinc die-cast hoops and nickel alloy finish. I sometimes swap out this snare for my 14" x 5.5" maple snare (6-ply with 6-ply re-enforcement rings) with maple hoops. The larger configuration includes an additional 13" and 16" tom (shell composition as above), and is a rack-mounted setup. The following is a list of the cymbals I use (* Denotes a cymbal that I use in my five-piece configuration as well as my larger setup): 20" Zildjian K Jazz Ride*, 20" Sabian HHX Evolution China, 18" Zildjian A Custom Crash*, 16" Sabian AAX Stage Crash, 16" Sabian HHX Evolution O-Zone Crash*, 14" Zildjian A Custom Crash*, 14" Sabian HH EQ Hats*, 12" Zildjian Avedis Splash, 10" Zildjian A Splash/10" Sabian HHX China Kang (Stacked), 10" ZilBel, 8" Zildjian K Splash.

I hope that answers some questions!

Influential Bands #1: I Mother Earth

Well, I figured I might as well start off these blogs by telling you a bit about the first band that I can recall having been a real, conscious influence on me; namely a Toronto based rock band called I Mother Earth. I had started playing drums in grade six at school, but I didn't really listen to a tremendous amount of music on any kind of regular basis. It might have actually been Trevor who first introduced me to the music of I Mother Earth.

Not only did I really enjoy the band's music, but the drummer (Christian Tana) particularly blew my mind. In many places in many songs, instead of just playing the expected type of thing that a drummer might ordinarily play, Christian had a habit of coming up with some really interesting and innovative grooves, many of which incorporated toms heavily into the groove pattern instead of just reserving them for fills.

This resonated immediately with me, and I'll explain why. When I was taking drum lessons from Steve Wilson, he taught me a lot of different things about a lot of different genres of music. For the most part though, our work was focussed on various styles of rock and jazz. When he was trying to teach me the general difference between common approaches to the two vastly different genres, one of the things I remember him telling me was this: "You can play jazz [as a drummer] using nothing but cymbals, and you can play rock using nothing but drums".

Although I thought I knew what he meant, I didn't quite understand him correctly. What he meant was that in jazz, the main sound sources that carry the time feel (again, for a drummer) are the ride cymbal and the high hat. In rock conversely, the sound sources of primary importance are the bass drum and snare drum. At the time though, I didn't realize that this is what he was trying to teach me. I could readily understand how one could play jazz with nothing but cymbals, but I didn't understand how to play rock with only drums. My brain was still trying to fill in the "time pattern" (the riding pattern usually played on the high hat or ride cymbal in rock music) without using the cymbals that I had come to rely on. Back then I figured that what Steve was trying to tell me was that I could play standard rock grooves, time patterns and all, without using my cymbals!

So I set about trying to figure out how to do this. Quickly I realized that I needed to keep my bass drum and snare drum free of the time pattern so that there would be some kind of groove for the listener to grab on to. That meant that the time pattern would have to be carried by my toms. I came up with a number of simple ideas that I liked (although they were probably arguably ALL too busy for anything but so-called "progressive rock"), and started looking for places to use my ideas. In my old high school band, many of our tunes featured drum grooves heavily based around the toms. A good example of where you can hear this type of influence in the music of Enter The Haggis can be found in Life for Love from Casualties of Retail. This tom based thinking also led into grooves for songs like Lanigan's Ball, Haven, and Down With The Ship, which are based more exclusively on toms.

Anyway, back to I Mother Earth. As I said, I was already trying to figure out interesting ways to incorporate toms into my rock grooves, and here was Christian Tana doing exactly what I was trying to do, and doing it in a very interesting and musically appropriate way! Add to that the fact that the band appealed to my interest in jazz because, although they're a rock/progressive rock band, their music features a large number of extended intrumental sections, and killer solos by the various instruments. Finally, to top it all off, the band also features two percussionists playing latin percussion intruments such as congas, timbales, and cowbells, which fed into my growing interest in latin music and drumming.

The first album of theirs that really influenced me is called Dig. It was released in 1993, and distributed in Canada by EMI. Some of the sections that exemplify the grooves I'm talking about can be found on the tunes Not Quite Sonic, No One, Basketball, and small sections of Levitate and And The Experience. In my opinion, there's not a bad song on the album. It would definitely rank among my favorite 10 rock albums of all time.



The next album the band released came out in 1996, also on EMI, and is called Scenery & Fish. Another killer album; I have a hard time deciding which I like better between the two I've mentioned. I think I tend to prefer Dig, but it's close. On Scenery & Fish, examples of great tom grooves can be found on One More Astronaut, Pisser, and Songburst and Delirium. Again: great album. Another one of my favorites to be sure.


After these two albums, the band underwent some changes, and although I still enjoyed their later music, it didn't quite have the same effect on me that their earlier music did. Anyway, I don't know if their music is available on iTunes or not as the band has since broken up, but if you're interested in hearing the first music that played a major role in influencing my stylistic development as a drummer, as well as just a killer rock band, they're a band well worth checking out. To give you an idea, the one Enter The Haggis song that I've always felt had a real I Mother Earth influence on it is Twirling Towards Freedom from Casualties of Retail. Enjoy!

Introduction

Well, this is officially my first blog entry. Ever. Anywhere. It seems like the appropriate thing to do would be to list some of the things for which I plan to use this. So here we go.

Over the next long while, you should expect to find posts here from me about a wide variety of subjects. I may talk a little about interesting things on the road, and I certainly plan to talk quite a bit about some of the bands/music that have/has influenced me over the years, as well as music that I just really enjoy. In addition, I'll probably throw in some interesting (to me, at least) little bits of science information along the way, and perhaps some other nonsense from my daily life, if I should deem it interesting enough.

Enjoy!