A Canadian Adventure...

I have to say, Canada has always been on my list of places I wanted to visit, more so than America really (mind you, if anyone wants to whisk me away to Seattle, New York or Boston then just shout, I have a passport and ESTA clearance!). Pearl Jam playing a Canadian tour directly after PJ20 kind of sealed the deal for me in going over. 

Flying from Chicago to Montreal, I was sat next to a Texan going on a shooting tour. He was older guy, a mountain of a man, who was happily telling me about the guns he had in the hold. It was the strangest conversation but should I expect anything less!

Montreal airport turned out unexpectedly to be a meeting point for me and a few other PJ fans, always a good thing. I immediately liked this place.

My room here was the funniest thing; a bathroom with a bed in it is possibly the best way to describe it! But it was self contained and clean! There were already various tales of lost luggage but everything of mine was present and correct when I arrived.

Montreal was great, an amazing city which I got to share with pretty awesome company. A merry band of a couple of Scots, an Aussie, an Englishman and various others amongst the party! I loved the mix of old and new, Europe and North America blended into a vibrant centre and I also didn’t feel so bad when even the Frenchman with us struggled to be understood!

The first night involved dinner with a couple friends at a restaurant, and included an invitation to sit in on the Pearl Jam radio phone in show the next day. This was to be a day where I played hairdresser and bleached a friends jet black hair to an interesting shade of orange before we picked up our tickets and headed for the pre party, my first of this tour.

The pre-party concept is a strange one, my experience of them in Europe is that because we have GA, they are held the night before and are generally merry (drunken) gatherings. Across the pond they were more structured and on the day of the gig, the structure is partially because of the link to the fundraising of Wishlist foundation, but they are equally jolly affairs and a great place to meet new people. 

As per the invitation from the previous evening, a couple of us headed across to a hotel to sit in on the radio show broadcast. It was great to see the show in full swing, to listen to the callers and scarily, speak on air!

I loved the Montreal show, the seats we had were great (especially as other people in the row didn’t show up) and my ticket buddy was passionate and hilarious (interpretive dancing to PJ will never seem the same again!). The band seemed to be enjoying themselves. It was certainly a brilliant way to kick off the Canadian tour and the rest of the crowd were smiling as much as me upon leaving the venue.

The last day in Montreal was spent exploring, chatting, relaxing and seeing a friend eat the most massive smoked meat sandwich anyone can ever imagine!

Toronto beckoned; we took the train in order to try and see more of the country, there were a lot of fields...and a lake I swear could be an ocean as I saw no land on the other side! In Toronto we were being joined by another Brit, a PJ friend who I bizarrely met through my liking of Band of Horses; she was to be my roomie for the next few shows. It also became apparent that whilst others had had luggage lost getting to Montreal, I had just left some of my stuff there before getting to Toronto. I really am rubbish sometimes! 

During an initial meander through the city, (trying to find the biggest bookshop in the world - which we failed to find on that attempt) I gathered that Toronto had a buzz about it. The buzz was a bit of an odd one, I put this down to the Toronto Film Festival happening, there seemed to be a lot of media ‘in the know’ types about.

PJ20, the Cameron Crowe documentary was being shown twice during this fim festival. I really wanted to go, but had no ticket to either screening. For us instead of the première, we headed to Niagara Falls. Niagara was somewhere I really wanted to go, I love waterfalls and rainbows but I have to say initially I was not enamoured. The area built up around them is, umm, tacky and in some parts desolate! The Falls themselves are indeed marvellous, I loved the Maid of the Mist and it was great to add some more friends into the mix who joined us whilst we were there. It was a pretty long day, but a good one.

Back in Toronto, show day approached and we ventured to the top of CN tower to see the city from above, it was really good to spend such relaxing time with great friends. From there another ace pre-party was calling and then, the first of the two Toronto shows...

OK, I could wax lyrical about this show, filling an entire page. For me, this was THE show or the shows, it was pure elation. Toronto 1 was not the longest of sets, not full of rarities, I was not front row.  It was just great, a set including the ‘Man’ trilogy amongst others and progressed, for me,  to hit immense status when I got to see Pearl Jam perform Mother Love Bone’s Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns and then an awesome version of Rockin in the Free World with Neil Young! The band were absolute loving it, you could feel their sense of joy.

I left that venue, feeling amazing, on a complete rush, still hyper hours later. To be honest thinking back about it has made me feel happy, as I type this, I’m grinning.

The fact music can produce such emotion it a pretty special thing, something that often gets forgotten about in our day to day lives and the current social obsession with instant gratification.

As I mentioned, the PJ20 film had two showings during the film festival. We chose Niagara over the premiere, and I had hoped to get tickets to the second showing but until the morning of the screening still had not managed it. Now, I had made it pretty clear how much I wanted to go, however I didn’t expect a friend to get up at stupid o clock in the morning, walk to the box office and manage to get three of us last minute tickets. That gesture meant a lot to me, it still does. So, I got to see the film, in Toronto, surrounded by PJ fans, oh and Eddie Vedder and Neil Young! That was kinda cool!

Toronto night 2 was another night of grinning, and a bit of crying (Light Years), it was a brilliant set, so many good songs and the atmosphere was great in that venue. It maintained the high of the previous night. I loved those Toronto shows so much. I got to see them with good people even if we were seated all over the place! Everyone seemed to have that same sense of happiness and joy after those shows.

I wish that I could have either of those nights again, in a GA crowd with all my PJ friends, you could pretty much give up on me there and then, I’d be done! I’d have had pretty much the highest high.

Our Scottish friends and others left us at this point, what an ace ending to their tours!

Another train took us to Ottawa, and to a sweet little B&B which was to be our home for the next couple of days. Ottawa, I have to say, underwhelmed me. I think being the capital I expected, well I’m not sure, but it seemed a very innate place. Everyone was lovely, but it was neither buzzing nor relaxing. Some of the architecture was very pretty, the parliamentary buildings felt like scaled versions of those in London and the tales of winter snow and ice were enamouring. It just felt like it needed an adrenalin shot.

The show was in a venue not designed for people travelling without a car, and getting there seemed like a triumph in itself! In order to give back to the Wishlist Foundation for all the pre-parties, I decided to buy a show poster and donate it to the raffle...which was then won by one of my friends, sods law! :D 

After the highs of the previous gigs, Ottawa had a lot to live up to, and whilst there is never a bad Pearl Jam gig, this one didn’t, for me at least, make the level set previously. The band tried hard to engage the crowd but it just didn’t seem to work at times. There were people in my row who hardly stood during the show and others who were quite blatantly checking emails and facebook. That’s a hell of an expensive night out to check your emails! Even Eddie seemed annoyed with elements of the crowd. However, there was a great dedication to the guys from Wishlist and the band as always put on a great set.

The bus back to town was awful, overcrowded and actually quite dangerous. I was relieved for us all to get off safely to be honest. It did put a dampener on the time I’d spent there.

After an early morning goodbye and thank you for being awesome to my roomie friend, I was on the way Hamilton. I wasn’t going to go to this gig, it was a late addition in the planning, but my ace film enabling mate was going and had a spare ticket! I am so pleased I went to the Hamilton gig, it perked me up after Ottawa, provided the perfect closure to my trip. The gig was great, the band seemed so ramped up and the people I met at the pre/post parties were truly awesome. I definitely made some good friends that night, whom I hope to meet again.

My somewhat weary self was ready to come home after seven gigs (including PJ20). I loved my first trip across the pond, it was great to see new surroundings, see shows in new places and experience new ways of doing things. If I was to name one of the places in Canada I visited that I’d like to return to, it would be Montreal.

The seated shows I did get used to but I still prefer GA, apart from the rest during the encores at the latter shows (I’m such an old woman!) and the anticipation and excitement of ticket collection. I never expected to win the lottery, and my 10C number is shockingly high, but to see fans crying when given tickets in first or second row was cool. That opportunity meant so much to them and that experience would stay with them. I have to be honest, I did miss the raucous nature of GA, I missed not being part of a collective during the gigs but I was very lucky to have great ticket buddies and to meet good people along the way.

I never expected a desire to see a band taking me on transatlantic flights, it hardly seems real that I went. Sometimes I look at the photos I took over there and have to remind myself it was me who took them. I want to go back to Canada, I would love to see the other coast, Vancouver etc, so it isn’t fully removed from my travel list but this trip did make me feel like I’d accomplished something. Life has a way of changing the path you think is laid out ahead, following that new path could take you to a place in your life you hadn’t thought you’d reach, in my case this trip was part of that.