woah, what a weekend.
friday, 11pm: Finish gig with the victoria operatic society. They put on a production of “white xmas” and they were gracious enough to invite me to play in the horn section. As much as the music can get tedious after 10 shows, it was super fun playing with a really good band and with the three people who got me into music (my first two trumpet teachers, and Dad).
11:23pm: Get home and start packing like a madman.
1:15am: After literally an hour and a half, I give up trying to fit my camping mattress and headphones in my bag.
1:17: Sleep
3:45am: Catch cab to airport for 530am flight. Get there wayyyyy too early.
315pm: Land in Montreal and sprint towards express downtown bus
430pm: Soundcheck for one of the biggest shows of my life.
So, you may or may not have heard (probably the latter), but the Aidan Knight Gang (plus a surprise Hannah Epperson) opened for Karkwa’s final show last saturday. If you’re not familiar with Karkwa, you better go check them out. One of the biggest band’s to have ever come out of La Belle Province.
Anyway, so I arrived in downtown Montréal with no real idea of the kind of the show I was about to play. I had an address for the venue and that was about it. So you can imagine how much my jaw dropped when I showed up to a two and a half thousand seater with all the trimmings. I mean, we’re talking a full audio recording crew, a full tv crew recording the show for dvd (I think I counted 2 fixed camera’s, 3 shoulder camera’s, and a giant camera crane), a mind blasting lightshow, and some of the best backline/tech crew I’ve ever worked with.
I won’t lie, I kinda felt cool.
After a very mediocre soundcheck, we all started getting some serious nerves. We all made the mistake of peeking at the audience before our set, and the sheer number of bodies was very frightening. All of a sudden, I could remember all those terrible mistakes I had made at our last show/soundcheck/rehearsal…..
Well, the God’s definitely smiled at us that night because we played one of our best shows ever! The whole band totally stepped up their game and after a terrifying first song, I was able to calm down enough to actually enjoy myself.
Afterwards, Karkwa dished out a hyper emotional, super charged set that I’ll I don’t think I’ll be forgetting anytime soon. During their first encore (yep, they did a couple), they invited us back on stage to play a few more tunes with them. Aw man, the vibes on and off stage were just soo good.
Well, I guess the good vibes could have been the drugs. Did I mentioned I was super sick? Two days before our show I came down with a serious flu/lung infection. Add no sleep the previous night and you’ve got a very, very haggard Olivier. So anyway, I told myself that there was no way I wasn’t going all out this night, so I kept downing handfuls of Advil, Sudafeds and beer. For anybody out there stupid enough to do this, I’ll say this: if you’re okay with having a multi day hangover and a broken body for a week, it’s totally worth it for one (1) evening! We ended up going to two crazy after party’s till 4am and I know I wouldn’t have lasted without the med’s.
Well that about sums up my insano weekend. We spend the next day walking around eating, and I was back in Victoria by monday afternoon.
Oh wait, there’s one more thing.
On the ferry ride back, me and Aidan decided to build a fort out of our sleeping bags and suitcases. It held the whole 2 hour ferry ride!
http://twitter.com/#!/aidanknight/status/149005476770746368/photo/1
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