![]() ![]() Also, “although it goes against my philosophy of the entertainer confronting the crowd-it just creates a kind of bad vibe-I saw Stevie Wonder playing solo piano for 10,000 people in the Edmonton Coliseum and although I thought people were pretty quiet, it wasn't quiet enough for him, and he started talking to one guy he said he heard chatting, saying, ‘That is no way to impress your girlfriend, man, talking during a love song!’”Īs for irredeemably noisy crowds, Doc Chad strives to “take comfort in the fact that I could make a ton of mistakes and nobody would hear, or I can practice something. “I had Mike Watt come on the PA system in a club where I was opening for fIREHOSE to tell the crowd to shut the fuck up,” he remembers. Someone in the audience is bound to tell people to shut up sooner or later if not, it’s a lost cause.”Ĭhadbourne thinks back to other musicians silencing crowds, and the different techniques he’s seen employed. ![]() That evening’s approach is in keeping with Doc Chad’s overall philosophy, when it comes to taming wild audiences, which is to “basically just play your music and not worry about it. The volume of the chatter turned down exponentially, getting quieter by the minute, as even people who had come to be seen and hang out were transfixed by Chadbourne’s intensity of focus and singularity of technique. Chadbourne in 2016.ĭoc Chad describes the experience of playing the banjo as “mystical”, and if you were there that night, you know what he means: it felt like Appalachian folk music by way of Ravi Shankar, coupled with some low-key Glenn Gould-like vocalizations. The rest of the band, including Williams and Kenton Loewen, weren’t even ready, as I recall, but Doc Chad just sat down and started to play, again on banjo. There were no signifiers that a concert was starting whatsoever. Everyone (even your author) was standing around Lick talking. At a 2010 Music Waste gig at a venue called Lick-about which the Straight interviewed Doc Chad collaborator, Darren Williams, here-the audience was privileged to witness Doc Chad silencing a chatty Vancouver crowd by that most unique means: quietly playing. Generally audiences at Eugene’s gigs are more respectful. At Delbert McClinton, they simply screamed and booed at me through the entire set, but the promoter was paying me 1,000 bucks to do it (not really normal for an opening act!), so I was thinking to myself I am being paid more to be booed at than any of the audience make as an hourly wage-so there!” My own audience tends to be fairly sophisticated at this point-they don't make a lot of memorable trouble. “I would say the weirdest things happen with audiences when I get into a job opening for a big rock band, such as Violent Femmes, They Might Be Giants or Corrosion of Conformity,” he replies. Reminded of the moment, Doc Chad, on the road to a show in Portland, remarks, “I wonder if Canadian audiences are always waiting for someone to play a Gordon LIghtfoot cover? The critic at my last Western Front show confused ‘From the Morning’ by Nick Drake with ‘Early Morning Rain’ by Gordie, which at least was something I had played, if not since high-school coffeehouse days.”ĭoes Doc Chad have any favourite stupid/weird audience stories? Chad was doing a loping, hypnotic banjo rendition of “Orange Claw Hammer”, by Captain Beefheart, and someone, mistaking the tune, called out “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”ĭoc Chad has pretty good skills at tuning out audience weirdness, but as he continued to play, you could see his brows furrow a little, and he remarked quizzically on mike, “You must be awfully drunk if you can’t tell Gordon Lightfoot from Captain Beefheart.” The funniest moment, however, occurred when Dr. That particular clip ended up on Clayton Holmes’ Eargoggles 6. He played relevant Doc Chad originals like “City of Corruption”, originally recorded by his band Shockabilly, and “I Hate the Man Who Runs this Bar”, which he gave a “special title” for the night, “I Hate the Man Who Owns This Building”. He’d also spent part of his dinner that August evening chatting about everything from the Dziekanski tasering to the RCMP's failures to stop Robert Pickton to the Sahota family, who were in the process of ousting wendythirteen from the Cobalt’s premises.Ĭhadbourne’s set that night seemed to reflect his dinner themes. ![]() His father lived in Calgary, for one thing, and he frequently stopped in B.C. It was a Fake Jazz Wednesday in August of 2009, and Doc Chad was up-to-date, as usual, on things going on Vancouver. Habitues of the wendythirteen-run Cobalt Hotel may remember Eugene Chadbourne playing there towards the very end of its run. ![]()
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