Killing songs

On the weekend I went to see the Sadies at Babylon.
There was the usual high good turnout. I met Matthew Johnson, an old childhood friend now married to a coworker of mine, for the first time in many years.
The show itself was a good long one, even by Sadies standards, with the requisite heap of songs about offing people like Pretty Polly, Little Sadie, Johnny Paycheck's Pardon Me,I've Got Someone to Kill and a slightly mangled version of Cocaine Blues (Travis Good was singing and forgot the words; "I can't even remember if he's killed her yet!" After a quick reorientation session around Mike "Snake" Belitsky's drum kit, he finished the song off successfully. Phew.
Other covers were The Ramones' Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, dedicated of course to the bruddahs no longer among the living, Lucky Eye by Flat Duo Jets, Algoma Reflections by The Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, and Dutch Boy by The Handsome Family (which Travis took pains to point out is not called Milk and Scissors, no matter what their record company thinks). Of course they did some Gram Parsons stuff as well. They wrapped things up with their favourite Grains of Sand tune - the one whose name I can never recall. Bunch of tunes from their excellent new album, a bunch of oldies (Rabid Monkey, Clam Chowder, Tell Her Lies and Feed Her Candy, of course). Stellar as always, though they didn't knock their mindblowing performance at Bluesfest 2003 from its lofty pedestal ... well, what could?

Dallas Good, appropriately blood red. As far as I can tell, he never changes.



Travis Good. His hair gets scarier at every show. Bassist Sean Dean at right. Note the marijuana leaf motif on Good's Nudie suit.



Sean Dean stuck with the standup bass for this gig, Mike Belitsky had his start in the Halifax music scene, in Jale (the band, that is, he wasn't incarcerated in a poorly spelled correctional institute).



The band seems to have adopted a mushroom motif on their merch and Belitsky's drumhead - psychedelic, man.