What a Weekend!

I know it's pretty much the weekend again already, but I haven't had time to get on here since the last one, which is the one I'm referring to. In the title.

Ali and I took the bus from Acadia into Halifax last Friday evening after work. It ran late because too many people wanted to get on in Falmouth (aka Foulmouth) and we had to wait for cabs called by the bus driver to come and pick them up and drive them into Halifax. Lucky cab drivers! But that wasn't what made it what a weekend.

In Halifax, we went out for a dinner of Chinese food at the King Wah, my favourite Chinese restaurant in Halifax. Meg, KC, Krista, and Johanna all joined us and brought belated birthday presents for me! As if that wasn't sweet enough, we ordered a huge table full of food, all of which was fantastic. Then we went back to Johanna's (minus Krista, who had to work in the morning) and listened to OOOOLD mixtapes of her brother's, made from the radio on a really crappy tape recorder through a condenser mic. Pretty funny stuff: Air Supply, Rush, Chris DeBurgh, Blondie... a real grab bag of goodness. But there's more.

The next day, Alison and I went to Angie's yoga class for old time's sake, and because we've been missing a lot of the classes in Wolfville, and also just to see Angie and Cliff. It was of course a great class, and turned out to be good timing because Angie announced that she'd be giving up her Saturday afternoon class after Christmas. We had exactly two punches left on our punch card, with which we paid, and that was that. THEN, Cliff and Angie took us out for a late lunch (another birthday treat) at The Carleton. It's a pretty fancy place, but Cliff's been doing a bunch of web work for them in exchange for credit there, so we had another huge feast of hors d'oeuvres and entrées. But there's even more.

That night was the elsewhere mentioned Neil Young show. We went with Johanna and also Krista and her dad, the latter two of whom sat in a different section from us. I wish we'd gotten to sit with them, in part because Krista's dad was really hoping they'd play "Welfare Mothers," which I just found so funny that I found myself hoping it too. They didn't. But it was a sold out show and Neil did not disappoint.

But before he even came on, Wilco opened with a medium-length set and blew everyone's minds. They just sounded so great from the get-go — we were way up in the nosebleed seats, and you could hear every instrument perfectly. Plus, our sidestage vantage turned out to be a good one as you could see what everyone was doing. So they were rocking along and everyone was into it, and then I think it was during "Handshake Drugs" the lead guitarist (Nels Cline, I guess) pulled out this unbelievably long and continuously riveting solo that started out like Mark Knopfler at his most tasteful but then got more jagged and somehow evolved into Richard Lloyd of Television and by the end was just a complete freakout meltdown. People could barely contain themselves, but they did because they kept wanting to hear what he would do the next moment.

Then Neil Young took the stage with a full band that included his wife, Peggy, on backup vocals and various tonal percussion, and multi-instrumental genius Ben Keith, who's been collaborating with Young since Harvest and who features prominently on On the Beach, possibly my favourite Neil album. I'd been worried that we might get nothing but the folky side of Neil, but that was far from the case. Probably over 50 percent of the set was Crazy Horse material, played as hard and gritty and driving as those guys could ever have played it. Well, OK, maybe the drummer wasn't as "good" as Ralph Molina... (Why the scarequotes? Screw that: he just wasn't as good, that's all.) But It didn't matter because Neil really brought it and sat with it and let it wind around him like that hypnotizing snake in The Jungle Book, just as zoned in as if Crazy Horse at their best were backing him up. He was generous both in musicianship and stamina.

The only song from my unrealistic wishlist that they played was "Cortez the Killer." But it was enough because it was the highlight of the whole night. Neil got the band immediately into a very spooky groove, which they maintained throughout the song, and then bent over Old Black to solo over that groove as excitingly and spontaneously as he ever has over anything. His tone was from another planet and his fingers were receiving interstellar signals about what to do with it. You could seriously hear 10,000 people breathing through their mouths because their jaws had dropped to their chests.

Of course he did all the hits that everyone wanted to hear, including three songs off Harvest, and they were all great because they're all undeniably great songs. I thought the guy a few seats down from us trying to force everyone to stand up and clap during "Heart of Gold" was a little incongruous — it's just not that kind of a song — but he quickly got over our contrariness, and I quickly got over him. I mean, it's Neil! The set was very long and so the encore was just one song: a cover of "A Day in the Life". Maybe they'd meant to do more than one song, but during the climbing freakout coda Neil broke every string on his guitar. He left it shrieking beside his amp as the band walked off, and that was the end of the show. Halifax sighed with satisfaction.

But that's still not all.

Mind you, that is most of it. But we stayed over at Krista's and went out for a lovely brunch with her Sunday morning, after which she drove me to the bus station and went shopping with Alison, who was staying over again that night. I said goodbye to them and went to The Trident bookshop for a relaxing read and a contemplative coffee (decaf). Then I got on the bus.

I rode home through the city streets. There wasn't a street, there wasn't a building, that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school. And when I finally came in, Debbie was home from work, and I told her everything about my dinner with Andre.

- Andrew