Switching to Glide
This coming weekend we'll be at the Oakville Waterfront Festival and organizer Jill MacInnis asked me to be available for a TV spot this morning at CHCH in Hamilton. So I rent a car and show up bright and early in the CHCH parking lot, where I'm met by Jill, Dave and Jon. All I know is that Dave and/or Jon or going to do the TV news hit with me and Jill.
We go up to the greenroom and I'm doing the tour of the guitar with the guys and Dave picks it up and starts to play a familiar tune. As he plays, the lyrics flood back into my frontal lobes from somewhere deeper: "Hey Donna/Do ya still wanna/You said to ring you up if I was in Tarana" (that's Toronto for you non-Torontonians). I said, wait a minute – did you guys write that song? Sure enough, it was Dave Diamond and Jon Picard (aka Mister Zero) who wrote the tune for their band The Kings back in the early 80's and had turned into a monster hit with the help of genius producer Bob Ezrin.
They were great guys and have just released a DVD called "Anatomy of a One Hit Wonder" about the extraordinary (though perhaps all to tragically common) flirtation with major stardom brought about by that one unforgettable song. It was certainly an unforgettable moment to hear it played by the originators on Voyageur.
Posted at 6:17 PM
Return of the Dragons
Or is it return TO the Dragons?
Either way, I know, it sounds like I should be posting somewhere else but this was our third year in a row at the Ottawa Dragon Boat Race Festival - the largest of its kind in North America.
When Peter Macdonald first brought us to the Festival two years ago, it was an attempt to draw attention to the fact that this event is more than just a race – it's a cultural phenomenon. Once again, we noticed that many of the people we did portraits of were people who were attending on exactly that basis – coming to see the boats and the people and the music and things like the Six String Nation guitar.
But the fact remains that hundreds of teams show up starting at around 6:00am and will have raced a couple of heats by mid-morning. By the time they're ready to leave their boats on the shore, they're pretty bagged. As a result, we shot fewer team portraits this year than previous years and – because so many of the teams are sponsored by corporations dealing with the battered economy – there were fewer teams in competition, fewer families showing up to support the teams and fewer curious onlookers.
Having said that, we did manage to assemble one team photo we've been trying to get for years. For the first time in ages, ALL of the members of the African Guitar Summit were in one place for their performance on Sunday afternoon and we got the definitive individual and group shots with the whole gang. I don't have even an iPhone version of that to show you yet but they'll be posted to the Flickr site as soon as I've got them.
Thanks again to Peter Macdonald, to Mark Morrison and to Mark Petrica and Vistek Ottawa.
Posted at 6:06 PM