Your intrepid correspondent *just* sashayed in the door after jamming
himself into the packed Phoenix Concert Theatre to drink in the genre- and
era-shattering spectacle that is... Ashley MacIsaac. Fresh from a cover
appearance in _Now_ (Canada's most im*portant* music journal) in which he
deep-throats the head of a fiddle while eerily gazing sidelong into the
camera, fiddler-N-the-hoof Ashley played to a joint overrun with expatriate
Maritimers (the young, the old, the wizened, regular guys who looked like
they'd finally earned enough Air Miles points on the MasterCard to put
their memories of SFX frat hazings behind them),
hipsters/hipstrons/hipstrixen, grrrlz, and more than a few tapettes, y
compris moi.
I made my grand swooping doomed-film-dowager-style entrance near
the end of Ashley's opening number, an undifferentiated fiddle tune. (More
on those later.) Our hero proceeded to kibbitz with his adoring fans,
outing himself as a native of Craignish, Cape Breton (get yourself on the
island and turn left, he told us helpfully, obviating the need for Global
Positioning System satellite trackers on *that* trip to the Cabot Trail)
and carrying on an extended conversation with a lad in the audience about
the lad's command of Gaelic. (It was scarcely better than Ashley's, but the
catgut-wielding dynamo did teach us to say "I am wet" in that coelecanth of
a language. And he was, too.)
The star of the show was resplendent in a uniform that would have
cemented a reputation as clotheshorse at Howe Hall smokers circa 1981--
green combat pants, _M*A*S*H_-like plain-green T-shirt, ruby-red shades
("Oh, Toto!"-- mais j'anticipe), and a *very* fetching teal baseball cap
with a lavender brim rotated 180 degrees on his mop of a head. (Another
month or two of unchecked growth, plus regular applications of Jean-Luc
Brassard-endorsed Pert Plus, and Ashley's 'do will put him in _Mod Squad_
territory. I'd buy *that* for a dollar.) The Beelzebubbian goatee, no doubt
causing stubble burn on chins in area codes from 902 to 212 to 905, was of
course icing on the cake. His fiddle was wired, ironically, to a wireless
transmitter, but on his other hip was really *quite* a large bag, which
would come into play in due course.
Ashley ushered a Mary Jane Lyman onstage, who sang a Gaelic dirge
while everyone in the audience tried not to look puzzled. These kids
clearly came for the uptempo numbers, the fiddle renditions of "Boogie
Ooogie Woogie Oogie Dancin' Shoes" and "Hooked on a Feelin'" or whatever
the fuck they heard that this guys does, and had few cultural reference
points for traditional Oirish fiddle lamentations. (Whazzamatter? Didn't
watch _The Pig and Whistle_ when you were a kid?)
Switching bows now and then, Ashley segued into an anecdote about
how "Cape Breton has a very high concentration of fairies." The room was
momentarily silent as various homonyms tumbled into place in people's minds
in slotmachinelike order of plausibility. A woman from Glendale's dad, the
story goes, caught a fairie (faerie, si vous voulez) and kept his bow, a
nugget of which someone had given him the day before. Ashley wanted to show
it to us, but alas, after rooting through his "bag o' trix" for a moment,
our hero gave up and seesawed up a hoedown that got the kids pogoing, if
not step-dancing. (He promised us he'd take another look for his "pixie
dust," but-- the big meanie!-- he didn't.)
Ashley's four-piece band-- I'll wait till I see the album notes
before attempting to write their names-- was occasionally joined by a
*bagpiper* *in a snowboard-d00d shirt*, of all matter/antimatter cultural
interfacings, and by the 60something {G,J}erry Deveau-- "the spoonboy! the
original Spoonman!"-- whose cameo consisted of accompanying the pride of
Craignish on spoons. Pity the sound kids kept turning his microphone off
and on. {G,J}erry hadn't gone down the road to the province of Toronto for
nothin', so by Chroist, me son, he got right up and did the finest
stepdancing Sherbourne St. had seen since the days of Japanese internment
and ghosts playing rounds of crib at 24 Sussex.
But the money shot was still to come. Dedicating a number to "all
the guys I met at HMV" before the show, Laura Ashley "Wet Look" MacIsaac
launched into what will surely be his signature, or albatross, number,
"Staying Alive" ("my *favourite*!" he bellowed in a stunning vocal amalgam
of Caper, debutante, and fierce ruling diva). And I tell you, the crowd
went wild. They were perplexed by the slow numbers epenthesized into the
song, but they got to dancing no later than two or three bars after Ashley
zipped right back into that immortal masterpiece of guilty-pleasure pop
music, last encountered as soundtrack to Australian thespian/dreamboat Mr.
Russell Crowe's manful striding in _Virtuosity_.
After that, specters and shadows were conjured in the an evil but
engrossing number in which Ashley blathered incomprehensibly into the
microphone while his fiddle, and the rest of the band, were maintained at
the same sound level as ever. Phrases like "oh, buddy in bad times!" and an
endlessly-repeated exhortation of "Master!" were all this reporter could
make out, but there were some major
domination/torture/deathforce/satanism/titclamps being conjured, let me
tell you. Also discernible during this stream-of-delirium was "there's no
place like home," which, though delivered with the verve of an android
nearing the end of its NiCd charge, still set off alarm bells.
Ashley's fingerings are oddly delicate by times, and not just in
the slow numbers. The muse is most clearly in control when he whips his
head to the side quick as a kitten's sneeze. *Then* there was a
transcendence. *Then* there was some major zeitgeist shit zipping through a
conduit named Ashley. Think Stevie Ray Vaughan, but juiced up to triple
speed.
What knocked the show off its rails, I have to say, was Ashley's
reliance on identical-sounding refrains to close various songs. At least
twice those refrains were songs unto themselves. I wish I had a name for
that piece so I could tally up how many nickels its composer raked in
tonight, what with all the variations of a very narrow theme. Even the dead
last number Ashley played before exiting stage left to get hosed down by,
one presumes, the guys he met at HMV was this same passage. "Wow, was that
ever boring!" exclaimed a jaded grizzled lumbershirted know-it-all after
the lights came up. Not boring, exactly, just lacking in the moxie I saw at
Harbourfront two years ago, when the doughy hick from Cape Breton won over
a conservative crowd in a sea-of-concrete setting, and lacking the
experimentation of the one song I've heard on the radio (reminiscent of the
Fall).
My fear is that this kid-- newly slimmed, only *20*, unique, with
the world his fucking oyster-- is getting bad advice and will live to
regret endlessly performing "Staying Alive," "*favourite*!" or not. Think
of Meryn Cadell and "The Sweater," Ice-T and "Cop Killer," Alanis and "Too
Hot." I don't need a Cape Breton fiddle version of a camp disco number,
because disco numbers aren't camp to me. They're part of gay culture,
something I listened to as a youth and rediscovered as an adult. (Him too.)
No need to bring "Staying Alive" downmarket so Truro systems analysts and
their Brantford girlfriends can get in an good ironic chuckle. We pays
Ashley the big bucks to veer off toward Alpha Centauri, dragging Craignish,
New Minas, Dildo, Cheticamp, and Port Hawkesbury along with him.
World domination will perhaps be delayed.
Joe Clark
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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