Within twenty minutes of being on the road to Sherbrooke, QC to see Arcade Fire perform that evening at Théâtre Granada, Shane Dalke, driver and AF-enthusiast and myself were waved to the shoulder of Highway 400 by an OPP officer 100 yards ahead. We were going 119 km/h in an 80 km/h zone. Shane got tagged with a $270 ticket, double the fine because he was speeding in a construction zone."It's costing me $310 to see Arcade Fire tonight. Plus food and drink," Shane laughed. "This better be the best f*cking show we've ever seen!"
This was the motto of the trip before we even left Ottawa. The drive was 4 hours one-way (5 there with traffic), and we didn't expect to get home until 3-4 am. I had to work in the morning, and Shane had a full day ahead of him too. He had decided the day before he would drive to Vancouver in two days to work for his uncle building a house. He would have to tie up all his loose ends in Ottawa in 24 hours and then drive four days to Vancouver, stopping home in Morden, Manitoba on the way. But we committed to this show and the 9 hours of driving it would take to see it. It just better f**cking be worth it.
When we finally pulled into a parking lot in downtown Sherbrooke, we had already been
lost three times, and still weren't entirely sure where the theater was. We climbed the sloped downtown street a little aimlessly. A woman dressed in a pink track suit sat on a curb outside of building. She cried "boo!" as we passed her, and then giggled when all Shane could say was "Oh."We got in line and got increasingly more excited for the performance. We already had an idea of the setlist, and discussed it. This performance was supposed to be their first show in Quebec in three years, a last minute practice run before they hit the big-boy festival stages in Europe. Here they had home-field advantage; the crowd would adore them no matter if their new material wobbled. The woman in the pink jumpsuit walked by and cried "boo!" at us again, continuing down the sidewalk and spooking others in line with more boos.
The 8-piece baroque pop orkest played a private show in Montréal on Friday, June 4th at the Notman Mansion House for 50 invited guests, press and friends. Said the Gramophone posted a really lovely review of the show. After reading that, we knew that we'd be hearing their new material (though I suppose we knew that regardless) and their old gems. We knew they'd close with Wake Up, but only if we called them back out for it.
Inside the theater, Shane and I decided to sit on the balcony instead of stand on the floor. I wanted to be able to see all the musicians, and that would mean we'd need to be high enough to see the whole stage. Before the show, the ceiling was lit with an aquamarine blue, and eight globe shaped lamps, amber and orange coloured like a harvest moon, surrounded the room just below the ceiling. There were five on our left and three on our right. It felt like we were on a different planet.
The band came on stage. They weren't wearing their classic 1940s wartime three-piece suits and skirts. Win Butler wore a blue button down shirt. He had an edgy asymmetrical haircut. His wife Régine Chassagne wore a silver-coloured sleeveless shirt and a full burgundy and blue skirt. Richard Reed Perry's hair had grown down nearly to his shoulders. They looked amazing. Their sound was so polished, their movements carved into their muscle activity after so many tours and festival circuits. Their older lyrics were sometime forgotten. They were like eight warhorses, on the road again under eight harvest moons.
They opened with their new single 'The Suburbs', a gloomy 60's psych-pop inspired tune, and then moved into 'Keep the Car Running' from their last release Neon Bible. The multi-instrumentalists kept the tables turning, vocalist to drummer, guitarist to pianist. Chassagne took her spot at stage front for 'Haiti', which the group transformed from a sparse little acoustic tribute on Funeral to a an incredible full-band anthem on the stage. It was the only song, unfortunately, that I didn't get a recording of. I did get a recording of the Théâtre Granada security telling me to "Turn off the device" 10-seconds into the song. It stayed off until their next song, 'Intervention', which was recorded from inside my purse. Those ten seconds of 'Haiti' however is enough to get me excited, nostalgic and a little regretful.
I still can picture the way Chassagne looked when she sang and danced to that song. Her motions were sometimes jaunty and sometimes fluid, all very beautiful and passionate. She shook her head of darks curls, and sang out to the audience in her unique soprano singing voice. Ah, Haiti. Mon pays. We were dazzled by her.
The music continued and so did the shifting musical roles for every musician on stage. There was not one role, not drum, guitar, bass, vocals, violin, piano or synthesizer that wasn't rotated at least once. It was pretty remarkable. These are eight incredibly adept and versatile musicians and songwriters. They're roles shift as readily as their sound and concept does from album to album. Everything was always on mark, with the exception of a few forgotten lyrics by Win Butler, but it hardly mattered to us.
After we called them out for an encore, they closed the evening with an acoustic version of their widely-adored song 'Wake Up'. Everyone who knew the words sang along. It was huge and so heartwarming. All of us contributed to that song, the entertainers and the entertained, in a one-night-only community of like-minded live music lovers. And that's what it's all about.
I love the recording I got of 'Wake Up'. At the beginning of the show, I told Shane to be quiet because I was taking recordings and it would pick up our voices before the music. But by the end, my recorder was jostled around in my purse while I clapped and stomped and exchanged excited words with my friend. On this recording you can hear us exclaiming, "He's got the drum!" because we knew what song they would play when Richard Reed Perry strapped on that marching drum. You can hear us both clapping our hands, not always on the beat. But you can't hear our voices singing, ours are lost in the sea of everyone else's in the audience.
Listen to the acoustic recording of 'Wake Up' HERE.
With the encore, the performance lasted one hour. We drove five to get there that evening, and we had another four ahead of us. But it was worth it. Now Arcade Fire are off to Europe, Shane is off to British Columbia. I miss them both.
Ecstatic words on ecstatic sounds,
V. Rocky Racoon
Surbub photo: delbz
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