Slipstreamed

In early August Howard, Maristella and I piled into the car and took the ferry to Vancouver. Off to see Bonnie Raitt in concert and also to meet up with Number 1 Son who was flying in from the east for a 10-day West Coast vacation.

I hadn't been to a concert in I don't know how long but when, last spring, I first heard she was coming to Vancouver I knew I had to go. My track record on actually following up on events I'd like to go to is pretty pathetic but this time I thought, "Enough of the "should do" and just "do". The last time I was in the same city as one of Bonnie Raitt's concerts was in Ottawa a decade or so ago when she was performing with Eric Clapton. I did not go to my everlasting regret. I had been out in Victoria for the summer and didn't know, until too late, about the Ottawa concert. This time that wouldn't happen again and I was first on line for my tickets.

Getting to Vancouver is easy and way pleasant. The ferry terminal in Nanaimo is 30 minutes away from our house, the boat ride across the Strait is about an hour and a half, then it's a 30 minute drive to downtown Vancouver. We stay at the Sunset Inn in the West End on a quiet tree-lined residential street a block from Davie Street and within walking distance to everything - Granville Island, downtown, Stanley Park. I think the building used to be an apartment building, so lots of space and balconies. Perfect. This particular weekend was hot and sunny and totally gorgeous and everybody was outside.

We arrived early at the concert on Friday night, which gave lots of time for people watching. I was immediately struck by the age of the audience - almost all of a certain vintage. Lots of (male) grey ponytails, and not a few canes, something I can now relate to this past week. It is always a shock to me to look in the mirror, which in this case was the audience of the full Queen Elizabeth Theater on this night. After an opening act by a Delta blues guy, out came Bonnie with her amazing band. All but one band member has been touring with her for decades - plenty of time to get really hot!

Bonnie Raitt reminds us that she is 62 and is very funny about it. Knows her audience. She says she hopes she'll be at it for another 10 years but jokes that they might have to widen the aisles in the theater to accommodate all the scooters. She doesn't appear to have changed a bit in 30 years - same hair, same clothes, same guitar playing, same voice. It was a fine concert, just fine. Colin James came out to jam at the end, the home town blues player appears to be a Vancouver crowd favorite. I'm so glad I went, I'm still feeling the energy of that live performance all these weeks later.

I listen to Bonnie Raitt a lot and have for many years. The new album, the first since many years, Slipstream, is great. Her cover of Bob Dylan's Million Miles is outstanding, is getting lots of air play on the blues radio programs, and will, I predict win awards.

As it turned out, music was to play a very key role in our subsequent travels in the weeks following the Vancouver weekend.

I love music stores, especially used CD music stores. I like working my way through piles of CD's, looking for something I don't know I'm looking for. I like the cover art, and I especially like the liner notes. Every now and then quite by chance as happened recently, I'll find something that really gets me excited, like the Oscar Brown Jr. CD. Recorded in 1972, I first heard it in its entirety late one night on CBC and promptly went out to get it. On vinyl I guess, though no one ever called it that, back in the day. It was a record, plain and simple. I like the tactile nature of a CD store, or that of my own collection of hundreds of CD's and I like the sense of surprise to find something, or rediscover something, something that doesn't really happen for me online. Although I do buy from Amazon often (along with books which is another story), I still like the stores.

On this trip to Vancouver, I went off to find a music store I knew on Granville Street, Charlies Music City. This was a large used and new CD shop that also had a huge DVD selection. It was there last summer and had been for decades - it is now closed. The big, multi-level flagship HMV music store also closed this past year, which didn't surprise a lot of people, but I still managed to find stuff there. This got me thinking about how I access music, how everyone else seems to be accessing music, and what I should do next. I don't download music for free. I decided to have another look at the iTunes store and found it's still the same crap website I remembered it to be, so I'll not be going in that direction, along with some of the Apple proprietary shit that goes on with the iTunes store.

I had also been looking for something to play music on. My wish list included, in one unit, a radio, a CD player, a dock for my iPad, and great sound. All in one, but I had been having trouble finding what I wanted.  One day Maristella and I were in a big chain electronics store (that is also now selling vacuums and dishwashers) looking at something else and I went looking for music machines. I couldn't find them. All I could find were cheap looking iPod docks. I asked the sales clerk about it. "What do people listen to music on?" "Their computers mostly", he replied. Maristella and I looked at each other. "Great sound quality" we both said at the same time. "Not".

That was the low point.  But later we found Ditch Records on Fort at Blanchard in Victoria and all was right with the world again. I left with a pile of CD's from their very eclectic mix, as well as a recommendation from the clerk where to go for my magic music machine - a real old-fashioned audio store, Sound Hounds on Pandora, with people working there who really love music and sound.  Got into a long conversation about music quality through CD vs MP3 or whatever that was pretty enlightening. I ended up buying a TEAC receiver, with radio, internet radio, CD player and iPod connection, with small but wonderful Boston speakers and it sounds great in the space we have for it. However when I returned home with this new music machine in tow, I soon discovered that my ancient iPod did not work on it, its technology too old for all this new-fangled stuff, so I had to go out and invest in a new iPod Classic and transfer my collection. More money to Apple.

Here's what I'm listening to these days on my new magic music machine - on CD:

Slipstream - Bonnie Raitt
Shape Shifter - Santana
Spirit Rising - Angelique Kidjo
Sin & Soul - Oscar Brown Jr.
Locked Down - Dr. John

Here's a list of someone's recommendations for some of the best new music (so far) 2012. Lots to explore.