Moments from Toronto Ska 2004-2010: Streetlight Manifesto at The Kathedral

When I discovered the bands Catch-22 and Streetlight Manifesto in grade 10, it was an illuminating experience. I was diving head-first into ska music and it seemed like every band I found was even better than the last one. These two bands, who I group together because they shared a substantial amount of members, maybe stood out the most at that time and both Keasbey Nights and Everything Goes Numb didn't leave my walkman too much.

I came across Catch-22 first. The first thing I liked was that they played really fast. Even today, the faster it is, the more I like it. If you play in a punk band, don't be a wiener. Up the tempo. I was also still learning bass guitar at this time and I was starting to get a lot better at the instrument, so I really took to anything that had a difficult or interesting bassline in it. Pretty much every Catch song had that and I learned almost every song on Keasbey, passing most of my alone time by playing the album front to back.

I also thought the lyrics were really good. In hindsight, they weren't anything that special, but at the time it certainly seemed like they were just phenomenal.

The first time I heard Streetlight Manifesto, it seemed like everything that I liked about Catch-22 had been amplified in this new band. The songs were longer, but not slower, the songwriting more complex, more intricate hornlines, and better lyrics. The basslines, in my expert opinion, having played both albums all the way through a significant amount of times, are "about the same" in terms of difficulty.

Re-listening now, the musicianship is still pretty astounding. I mean, the intro of "Failing, Flailing"? That's some big time horn work. The songs are also really long, with most hovering five minutes, but they really don't feel like it. Somehow, with 7 members who are all doing a lot on every song, nobody manages to play over each either. It doesn't sound busy. The record is kind of soured by the band's current place in music, but man is there so much good stuff on here. Damien and I used to talk about all the covers we wanted to play in our first band, Chinese Fingertraps, but we knew that we couldn't go near Streetlight. The songs were just light years beyond us. Something we could only dream about one day being able to play.

Streetlight also seemed a lot more interesting to me because they were still a band, whereas Catch-22 had gone through a huge member change, which greatly impacted the sound and dynamic of the band, then put out Alone in a Crowd, which, in my 15 year-old eyes, rendered them dead to me.

For Damien and I, seeing Streetlight Manifesto live immediately became a top priority, but they seemed to skip Canada on every tour. According to my research at the time, they had only been to Canada once before. That is, until they announced a show at The Kathedral (R.I. fuckin' P.) in June of 10th grade. In hindsight, I didn't really wait that long to see them at all, but it seemed like a fucking eternity back then.

There was only one hitch about the show: It was on a weeknight. Since I was 15, my parents still weren't keen on me going out on a school night. Convincing them to let me go to a show on a school night would take some effort on my part. But this was no ordinary schoolday, no. I happened to have an English final the next morning. When I saw the date, my heart sank because I knew the chances of me actually getting to go to this show would be slim.

The show sold out pretty quickly, before I even had an opportunity to get tickets. It took a little sting out of missing Streetlight Manifesto, but it still tore me apart. How was I missing this momentous event? How would I live with it? What if they did the live thing where they play "Keasbey Nights" in the middle of "Point/Counterpoint"? The regret was destroying me.

In a stroke of luck, a batch of new tickets got released for the show. I now knew that this was meant to be. Somehow, I was seeing Streetlight Manifesto. Missing the show was not an option.

I went on the offensive on my parents: I NEED to go to this show. I can't really study that much for this English exam because it's one essay question. I'll study all day when I get home from my previous exam. I already read To Kill a Mockingbird, the book we were covering, in grade 8. This is the most important thing in my life right now.

I managed to win them over and get permission to go the day before the show. I was ecstatic and couldn't believe it.

The next order business was getting some of this new batch of tickets. Damien skipped school for the first part of the day so that he could go to the Sunrise Music at Scarborough Town Centre and get them. This felt really scandalous at the time. Streetlight Manifesto meant so much to us that we would put it before our education! We pictured a huge line of kids and us getting the last pair, narrowly securing our place at the show and, by extension, Toronto ska history.

In reality, Damien was in the store by himself and described the process as "The least required thing ever". But hey, it seemed like a big deal at the time!

This was one of the first shows of the summer and that really excited me. The school year was almost over and that meant that I had a whole summer full of going to shows and having no responsibilities ahead of me. This show felt like the first part of a huge great thing that I was going to do this summer. The scene of looking at Queen Street, the setting sun shining across it, from the south side of the intersection, a line of ska kids in front of me, remains in mind. It also always felt so much better to be standing in the sun in a t-shirt and shorts instead of fighting off the cold outside of a venue.

It seemed like everyone in the line shared our excitement about what was coming. This increased exponentially when we all heard the band sound-checking "A Moment of Violence" from outside the venue.

The venue was really hot. I think the show was sold-out and if it wasn't, then it was certainly close. It was also about 30 degrees outside. A day of extreme heat like, coupled with a capacity crowd, made for a very hot and sweaty show. The only people we knew at the show were a group of girls we used to refer to as the "3-6 Gypsy Crew" because they would wear quasi-gypsy-ish clothes,basically meaning those baggy skirts that were popular for a few years when I was in high school (c. 2004-2007). We thought that this name was HILARIOUS. Like, we considered it one of our greatest inventions. One of them was my first girlfriend, named Klara. I asked her out on MSN messenger, we hung out one time, and then we broke up because I ditched her to play Sega with my friend Vito one time. I used to see her at shows all the time and I would act like it was awkward, but it really wasn't. She was nice. Damien dated one of them too. It was funny to Damien and I that the 36GC were the only people we hung out with at this show though.

In hindsight, that name is... still very funny to me. You just had to be there, I guess. My friends and I are hilarious.

The first band that played was The Knockouts. They were a local Toronto band used to play a lot of ska shows and had a really bad song called "Peanut Buddha". I remember absolutely nothing about their set.

The band Whole Wheat Bread were supposed to play the show, but didn't get over the border. I liked that band in high school, but realize now that they were one of the most embarrassing things I was ever genuinely into.

The second band who played was a pre-mainstream breakout Gym Class Heroes. They were still mainly a hip-hop group with live instruments and were mainly known for their song "Taxi Driver", in which most of the rhymes are emo band names. I will say that they put on a really good live show. There were next to no kids who knew them there and they completely won over the crowd. This is one of the funnier "saw them before they were big" stories that I have for sure.

The anticipation for Streetlight Manifesto killed me. Something that oddly sticks with me from this show is a kid behind me yelling "AW, IT'S THE T-BONE!" as the trombone player was getting his stuff ready.

The band ended up playing pretty much all of Everything Goes Numb, because that was the only release they had at the time, and man, that was all I wanted. They did indeed play "Keasbey Nights" in the middle of "Point/Counterpoint", as well as "9MM and a 3-Piece Suit" in the middle of "Failing, Flailing" (I think) and this seemed like the craziest thing in the world to me. The Kathedral (my favourite venue ever in a landslide victory) got so hot that the mirrors behind the bar fogged up and I had never seen that before. I took that to be a testament to my, and the crowd's, undying love for the band. Nothing, not even the extreme heat and dehydration, would stop us from skanking!

I was in awe of the show after it happened. All of my clothes were soaked through in sweat and it felt like I had just experienced something truly special.

I told my friends at school, my friends at Damien's school, my friends in the scene, anyone who would listen, that they had missed a momentous occasion that would never happen again. No Streetlight show would ever be like this one! It would be recorded and referenced forever and ever. Every ska fan in Toronto would forever be unbelievably jealous that Damien and I had been at this show.

Obviously my teenaged self was prone to hyperbole about ska bands (hey, still am), but I was also right in a lot of ways too. The next time I saw Streetlight, they played the biggest-capacity concert hall in Toronto, the Kool Haus, while opening for Reel Big Fish. They never played a venue as small as the Kathedral again and definitely never will. This was a singular occasion in being a fan of Streetlight Manifesto in Toronto. Though it is a little high-and-mighty of me to say it, it really wasn't the same seeing them again after this. I mean, of course it wasn't. Seeing a band in a small, intimate setting is better than seeing them in a giant cave of a venue every time.

It's also special because I saw the band at a specific point in time too. They put out their second album in 2007 and while it was good, it didn't carry the same "holy fuck, this thing is a masterpiece" feeling that came with Everything Goes Numb being the band's only piece of music. Being a ska fan in the mid-2000's basically meant having your heart and imagination being captured by Streetlight Manifesto's Everything Goes Numb, so for me, this show is my experience in a giant phenomenon that was very special to a lot of people.

Don't get me started on how Streetlight Manifesto aren't a ska band though, that's an argument for another time.

Another way that hyperbole is relevant is that Streetlight Manifesto kind of sucks now. They're now one of those bands who play a "Last Tour Ever!" tour every fucking year, and that makes me really sad. They've put a lot of music since I saw them in 2005; a 2006 re-recording of Keasbey Nights, 2007's Somewhere in the Between, a 2010 collection of covers 99 Songs of the Revolution, Volume 1, 2013's The Hands that Thieve; and while those vary from "still pretty good!" to "meh", none of them meant as much as that debut album. They've gone through a ton of member changes and while all the new guys are just as excellent as the ones they replaced, it's not the same seeing someone play someone else's music. The version of the band I saw playing Everything Goes Numb had this special, ethereal "the best band at this, doing this at the top of their game" quality to it that only comes with discovering music that is truly special to you and getting the experience the way it was originally conceived and performed. It's a special feeling that's hard to describe, but you know when you're experiencing it.

Nothing gold can stay.

Moments From Toronto Ska, 2004-2010: The Last Makeshift Heroes Show

The more I listen to Damian Abraham's podcast Turned Out a Punk, the more it makes me think about the specific music scenes that I've been a part of. These communities are constantly changing, as one scene slowly morphs into another, but certain instances of a few of them are well-defined in my mind and really important to me because of the role they played in turning me into the person I am. While listening to the podcast, I always think about what I would talk about on it if I were a guest and what my favourite memories of going to shows are. Something that would figure into this in a big way is my involvement in the Toronto ska scene during high school, because that is basically the main thing I did.

Through this, I came up with the idea for a series in which I would describe specific shows or events or nights that were significant to me while I was a part of the scene.

So yeah, Moments From Toronto Ska, 2004-2010: Episode 1

There was an obvious first choice for this series, because few things stick out to me as significant to Toronto ska like the break-up of the Makeshift Heroes. "Makeshift" were a really big deal for my friends and I during the later part of high school and were accepted by pretty much every person I knew in the scene as the best local ska band. They were vindicating as a teen-aged ska fan because they were young and poppy ska band, but were clearly in-tune with ska's first wave, which lent them a ton of credibility with genre purists who deride the genre for what it became in the 1990's. They basically played first-wave or "trad" ska, but were great at fitting all the great parts of the genres, complex rhythms, extended horn solos, parts for everybody in a 7 or 8 person band, into a recognizable song structure. Being a bass player, I loved the way that bass parts would sometimes stay constant for the entire song, making them almost like a dub-influenced drone. The baritone saxophone is like a fucking bazooka in this band. They also had a very good lyricist, which isn't the most common in 60's or 70's ska music. Rather than drawing their influence from bands like Reel Big Fish or Operation Ivy like most of their contemporaries, they looked so much further back than that, which was extremely uncommon at the time and really set them apart from almost every band in the scene. It also made for much better music

What is odd about this though, is the band very rarely opened bigger shows, despite headlining loads of local shows. I remember them opening for the seminal first-wave ska band The Skatalites when I was in grade 9 and another time opening for the Planet Smashers, but most tours that came through favoured bands like The Flatliners (remember when The Flatliners were a ska band? To the point that they were in an Expos video?) opening, because they fit better with the sounds of the other bands on the bill.

While together, the band put out two absolutely excellent EPs, Not So Fast! and Last Call, which I would really recommend checking out. You can find them here:

THE MAKESHIFT HEROES- NOT SO FAST! AND LAST CALL

During high school, there was a Toronto ska message board that all of my friends and I posted on called 4thWave.ca that was the nucleus of the southern Ontario ska scene during that time. Man, remember when posting on message boards was one of the most important parts of your day? I feel like in the grand scheme of things, they'll be forgotten because they were so quickly eclipsed by Myspace and then Facebook, but they were so important to my development as a music fan. 4thWave was my lifeblood in terms finding out about bands and show listings. Almost every show I went to in high school, I found out about through 4thWave. Just like every online community, there were a few bands that were almost universally endorsed on the board. It could just be hindsight, but I think that Makeshift was the definitive 4thWave band. Everyone loved them and eagerly anticipated the next thing they would do.

They were mostly known around Toronto for doing a cover of "Mad World" by Tears for Fears, which is well-known for being covered and included in the movie Donnie Darko. Now that movie is what is, and I feel like a lot of people might look down on it for being a self-important male teenager experiencing existential thoughts for the first time, and Gyllenhal can be a little too much in it, but when I saw it for the first time in high school, it certainly had a profound effect on me and after watching it, it gave me a feeling I hadn't gotten from a movie before. (Honestly, I could certainly do an entire post on Donnie Darko, because it oddly was a huge thing for me at one point in my life. My brother was obsessed with it in university and basically forced me to watch it.)

The Makeshift Heroes covered "Mad World" very shortly after I saw the movie for the first time and I was like "Yo."

The Makeshift Heroes broke up like all bands do. I'm not entirely sure why. University maybe? It didn't seem like there could have been any personal conflicts in the band, but there was no way I could have known. They certainly ended too soon though. On 4thWave, the break-up of the Makeshift Heroes was a pretty major event. It was bittersweet, as up to this point the band had only released one EP, Not So Fast!, and they announced they would release the EP they had been working at their final show. Everyone was pretty bummed about it and in the months leading up their final show, the anticipation got so huge that it essentially became impossible for the show to not be a pivotal event in the scene at the time. The only way to get the new EP, which was eagerly anticipated by fucking EVERYONE at the time was to go to the show. As a ska fan in the city at the time, you felt like it was imperative that you were there. My friend Erik, who drummed in both of my high school bands, asked me in advance to pick him up a copy of the EP because he knew he wouldn't be able to make.

The final show took place near the end of August of 2006 at The Funhaus, which was an amazing all-ages punk venue in Toronto that isn't active anymore. I know that Buda Funk Munk and the Cheap Suits opened, but I can't remember what other bands from the local Toronto scene played this show. Added bonus, before this show was the first time that I had Taco Bell, starting a lifelong romance.

The show had a weird energy, as all farewell shows do, because nobody really wanted it to happen. Everybody there is at the same time very excited because they know that they're at a show of some social importance, that in the future you'll be able to say "I was at the last ____ show", but at the same time, you know that it means the end of something you really like. Every band who played shared stories about how much the band meant to them and how much they would miss them.

I think that both Makeshift Heroes EPs do an excellent job of showcasing the amazing musicianship that went on in their music. Everyone there knew that they would play a long set and Makeshift absolutely delivered. I'm fairly sure that they played all of the songs off each release, as well as a myriad of old ska covers, including "Shame and Scandal" by and "Confucius" by the Skatalites and, of course, "Mad World". The set was everything that everyone had hoped it would be and by the end of the show the venue was a sweaty mess from everybody dancing.

When the band's set ended, all of the kids spilled out on to the street in a emotional mob. As Pat, Parks, Haleigh and I (I think that's who I was with? I can't be sure) were getting ready to leave a kid near us said

"The ska scene died tonight."

At the time, we all dismissed as hyperbole that was tied up in the emotion of the moment, but in hindsight he kind of bang-on. Not so much that the scene is dead, as I'm sure it still exists in some form, but it was certainly the death of the specific scene that I was involved in.

When that school year started, some friends and I started a band called The Pragmatics that heavily indebted to the Makeshift Heroes, to the point that we threw around the idea of including a Makeshift cover in our set, like four months after the band had broken up.

The last Makeshift Heroes show is a huge deal for me because it closes a specific time in my life where I was a teenager in Toronto and really involved with ska music. It happened near the end of high school, so not long after I was moving away to Guelph. It's not as if I stopped listening to ska and going to shows after it happened, but I started to listen to a lot of different music, got into hardcore and metal.

I can still remember the way the street looked that night, how my sweaty shirt felt sticking to my skin and the weird ethereal "that just happened" feeling all of my friends and I felt taking the subway east that night.

I guess that the cool thing about being into ska or punk or metal or rap or house or whatever the fuck you're into is that something as small as a local band breaking up can bring up these huge ideas in your mind and that is where the importance being involved in and caring about things lies. I guess my final, overblown sentiment that I'll leave you with is:

Give yourself over to something. Make something. Do something.

I Found It Hard To Believe

I realized when I woke up this morning that thinking of something to write a big long write up about never even crossed my mind this past weekend (In order to understand this go back and read the post titled "Since It's About Old Entries, I Should Probably Post Bayside Lyrics Because I Loved Jamming That Shit Back Then", it's probably a page behind this one). So naturally I tried to come up with one on the spot. The first thing I thought of was my daphne blue Fender Mark Hoppus precision bass because I could still feel the blisters on my fingers from practicing the day before. Then I realized that there isn't much to that. I bought it and play it a lot. Then I thought of the first band I played that bass in, which was The Pragmatics, and figured that that might make for an interesting story.

So here we go.

We used to have "bush parties" in the ravine beside Warden Station all the time because we could never find houses to party in and it was somewhat convenient to get to for everyone. At one of these a few of my friends (for ease later, Erik and Parks) came later and told me that they had been jamming ska/reggae songs at Erik's house with some people and needed a bass player. I obviously jumped at the opportunity. They told me to learn "Having An Average Weekend" by Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet (which is well-known in Canada as the theme song to the absolutely amazing and famous sketch comedy show Kids In The Hall) as well as The Aggrolites cover of "Don't Bring Me Down" by The Beatles and "Have The Time" by The Slackers.

I bought my new bass that week and went about getting all of the songs down as well as I could. I showed up to Erik's and met Sherman (guitar), Alex (trumpet) and Lauren (keyboard) for the first time (Erik played drums and Parks played alto saxophone). We ran through the Slackers song once or twice, but started focusing on doing a ska/reggae cover of the SMOASP for the rest of the practice. It started to sound pretty good and we ended up recording it that practice. And you can even hear that recording (and a few others) right here.

Sidebar: Holy fuck, these fucking recordings. They are probably the worst fucking quality that you can imagine. To record songs at band practice we used the hands-free microphone from the cordless V-Tech phone in Erik's basement. We plugged that microphone into Erik's family's desktop computer and used the "Sound Recorder" application to record. In order to "balance" the levels we would put the mic in the middle of the basement. However, drums, guitars and basses are much louder than horns, so we would have the horns lean down to play near the microphone, with the soloists moving even closer when they needed to. This made for INCREDIBLY out of tune hornlines. We played a whole better live. I swear.

Man, we did actually record a ton of songs for how long we were together though. Most aren't up there.

Anyways, that recording ended up getting the best levels I think and we were all really fucking stoked considering we had been a full band for about three hours.

We met again to practice the next week and added another member, Graeme on tenor saxophone, who we all knew from local Toronto ska shows. We ran through the songs we knew and also wrote and recorded the song "Stormfront" that is on the myspace player I linked to up there. We started to meet every Friday to record and produced a new song at pretty much every practice. We got a lot tighter and started to put together a setlist.

We figured that we should play a show since we had been practicing so much and the logical choice for us was Cardinal Newman High School's Talent Night. Cardinal Newman was where Erik and Parks went to high school, along with essentially all of my friends. Every year they put on Talent Night and every year every one of our group of friends' bands would play (The year before being host to the only Chinese Fingertraps show ever. That's a way less interesting story though. Or maybe not. We'll see.). So yea we played our first show at Talent Night in 2006. We were playing in a highschool auditorium with absolutely no soundcheck or balancing of levels. We were so fucking bad. Like really, really bad. It bummed me out. Bad shows are never fun.

After that we kept on practicing and kept on writing songs. Alex also played in another band called Say Ah!, so we got our first real show as an opening band for their CD release. This show went so, so, so much better. I thought we played pretty well and there were even a few kids that started dancing during our set. I still have our set-list from this show and put it up on the wall of whatever room I'm living in at the time.

After that show we began to get offered shows very frequently thanks to lots of help from Yvonne, who played baritone sax in the absolute incredible Toronto ska band The Makeshift Heroes (I know I recommend music on here all the time and it probably falls on deaf ears, but this band was seriously the best thing that happened to ska in Toronto. There will probably never be a download that I will recommend as much as that link right there. DOWNLOAD IT. DOWNLOAD IT. DOWNLOAD IT. IT IS FREE. THERE'S AN INCREDIBLE COVER OF "MAD WORLD" IF THAT WORKS FOR YOU. DOWNLOAD IT. IT WILL IMPROVE YOUR QUALITY OF LIFE.), as well as another local band Frankie Foo And The Yo-Yo Smuglers. I realize that might be a little confusing. I meant that both Yvonne and Frankie Foo both helped us get shows.

So the next show we had was the opening band at Nut'n Butt Ska Fest at The Dungeon in Oshawa. This was a big deal for us (I guess me, I don't know about the rest of the band, but i'd assume they were stoked too) for a variety of reasons. One was that it was the first all-ages show we would play (with a whopping one show under our belt before that!). Now, if you are at all familiar with ska music, you know that it is usually something more associated with a younger teenaged crowd, rather than what you would get at a 19+ show. That being said, they were a decent group of older people who would come and see us somewhat regularly because we played something closer to "1st Wave" or "Trad" ska as opposed to being a Reel Big Fish clone, and that was radical. Still though, I was excited because we would be playing to kids closer to our age, rather than a bar of adults. And that way kids could "skank" and stuff and the thought of people doing that to music I was playing made me feel REALLY FUCKING GOOD.

It was also an out-of-town show for us, which was also a new experience. Even though Oshawa is the dirty shit-laden sphincter of Ontario, it meant that there would be kids from another town, or possibly towns, that would hear us and know us. And that also got me REALLY FUCKING STOKED. We got to load up our van, which I named the "Pragwagon", and then drive out to Oshawa in order to load in and soundcheck. And that made it seem like we were a for-real band doing for-real, serious band-type things and that made me REALLY FUCKING STOKED.

The final big-deal about this show was that it was allish-day festival-type of thing, which meant that we were going to be playing with bands that were way bigger than us and already established in the Southern Ontario ska scene, like Keepin' 6 (who were great and I still listen to on occasion) and The Cheap Suits (who had been around the longest of all the bands and were always really, really nice to me because they knew my brother) and The Johnstones (who are a really, really bad band). Which meant that they would bring out a lot more kids and that this was a pretty fucking sweet deal for us.

We met up pretty early and got all of our stuff loaded up and ready to go. We drove out really fast because we thought we were going to be late and thought we were the biggest badasses on earth when Erik and I flipped off a woman on the highway. We didn't bring a drum set or bass amp because the promoter told us that both of those things would be there for us. We arrived on time to find that pretty much nobody else was there yet. We set up and realized that Erik would be playing on the shittiest-in-house-beat to shit drum set that I had ever seen in my life. I felt really bad for him. We also found out that there was in fact no bass amp for me to use there. From that point on we brought our own drums and bass amp to every show, no matter what.

But the show went really well! a pretty decent amount of kids got there at doors, which meant in time to see us, and they seemed to like us a lot! There's even a full set of pictures from this show! I'm pretty sure that my hair is like that because I'm a dude who dances and jumps around and goes crazy when he plays! But I also used to just have the worst fucking hair ever! The rest of the show was also really fun because there were a ton of other bands that we were friends with on the bill. I felt a pretty strong sense of scene unity.

The town of Oshawa really fucking sucks though. Don't go there.

We played a show the next night (HOLY FUCK! TWO SHOWS IN TWO DAYS? WHY AREN'T WE SIGNED?!?!?) at the Tiger Bar in Toronto, continuing our tradition of playing every venue possible at the intersection of College and Bathurst. Not many people came to that show, probably because it was a Sunday night and it was full of shitty ska bands that nobody had heard of. I think I still have the flyer for this show packed away. The highlight of the night was finding a box of fluorescent tube lights and then smashing them, which would also become a tradition for the band.

We had another show the next weekend (WE WORK HARD FOR OUR MONEY) (But seriously, we played way more shows in a month and a half than all of the bands my friends were in. We really weren't a big band at all, but it made me feel like I was doing it right, because playing shows is what real bands do) at Sneaky Dee's. That was super rad because Sneak's is a very well-know bar and concert venue and saying "We have a show at Sneaky Dee's" is a fuckload cooler than saying "We have a show at The Tiger Bar". There's also pictures from this show, but I can't seem to find them anywhere. If you look at my facebook profile though, I'm pretty one of my really old dp's is from this show.

I was really, really stoked for the next show because it was going to be our first all-ages show in Toronto. We were playing with a lot of the same bands from Nut 'N Butt Fest and I was stoked to create a sort of network of local ska bands. Some of our friends came and all of them said "Man, you guys are pretty good live!" which made me feel REALLY FUCKING GOOD. The show also turned out to be pretty packed and there were tons of kids dancing and stuff for our set. And that is a PRETTY AWESOME EGO STOKE. We got a positive review on a pretty prominent ska zine and that made me PRETTY FUCKING STOKED. There's a full set of pictures for this show too! They make me look cooler than I am! If you didn't believe me that kids got mad stoked about dancing to us, there's a picture of them in there! Hot damn!

We had a ton more shows lined up after this and it seemed like everything was coming up Pragmatics, but unfortunately Sherman was being an asshole. I still don't know the entire situation, but he and another member had a bit of a checkered history (C wut I did tharr?), which lead to a bunch of conflict at practice. Eventually it got pretty heated and he decided he was going to quit. We still had one show booked for sure and decided that it would be the last one, which sucked.

What ruled was that this show was opening for Chris Murray! I realize that name probably means nothing to you if you aren't big into Canadian ska, but in that realm he is a pretty fucking big deal, which meant that it was a pretty fucking big deal for us. This is still my one claim to fame regarding this band: "One time, we opened for Chris Murray". Anyways, we were up to our usual business live when the two aforementioned members started to go at it. We had one song left and one of them kicked the other one and walked off stage. This was unfortunate because that member was really needed for the last song. We tried to drum up some sort of jam to kill time but ended up just unplugging. At the time, I was super pissed off because my band had just broken up onstage. Now, I find it to be one of my funnier anecdotes, especially if you know/are somewhat familiar with the people involved, because my high school ska band broke up onstage. The rest of the show was really awesome, because Chris Murray is pretty much the man (he does every show all request).

There's a full set of pictures from that show too! Brutal ill Scarlett shirt! Ugly board shorts comboed with high socks! Seriously though, if anyone could go back in time and bring me back that Lakeside softball, I'd be the happiest clam in the sea! (Like I'm not already, MIRITE?)

So that was pretty much the end of the band. We were pretty serious about keeping on, but that never materialized for, I'm pretty sure, no reason whatsoever. We actually got together once I had come back from my first year at Guelph and jammed out all of our old songs and seemed like we were somewhat serious about getting it going again, but that also never materialized.

It was a really fun time though. The Pragmatics were the closest thing to a real band that I was ever in. I realize that this isn't really anything other than a way to kill time reading for everyone else, but it was a super-duper-crazy nostalgia trip for me and I remembered a ton of shit I hadn't thought about in years (this actually took me the entire summer to finish, I started it June 29th, mostly because of laziness) and I'll probably add some more to this later.

There's probably nothing I miss more than being in a band and playing shows and having an awesome time playing music with my friends. Maybe having a girlfriend. But I think I would take being in a band still.

Because that shit rules.