Mike Ford @ Hugh's Room

Mike played for about 45 minutes. For once in my life, I wrote down a setlist. Opening sets are just so much easier for this. The order herein is as close as I can remember: SUGARCANE - nickname of a prison somewhere. He actually got everyone singing along on this. It was impressive.
WEB OF LIFE - we'd heard this one before during the extended version of FruCon VI. It's all about the Oak Ridges Moraine
CROSSROADS - apparently commissioned a few years ago for a political campaign. I forget for who.
GUINEA PIG - "A song about genetically engineered organisms. Everyone's got one of those, right?"
DARCY McGEE - "This is from the 8th grade curriculum. Tom Paxton's entire set is going to be from the 8th grade curriculum... wouldn't that be a world!" (Darcy McGee was one of the Fathers of Confederation, assassinated by the Fenians)
GORD'S GOLD - "There have been several tributes to Gordon Lightfoot. No one's ever asked me to participate in any of them"
HEATSEEKER BOY - I have no idea why he included this. It didn't flop per se but it needed drums, electric guitar and backing vocals. One guy with an acoustic guitar does not an NSYNC parody make.
I'VE BEEN EVERYWHERE - Mike's version of the Canadian version. Dave sings another Canadian version with Betty and the Bobs. Mike's is faster. He stops every so often and asks if he should name more places, and should he go faster. This gets just as enthusiastic a response from a crowd of aging Tom Paxton fans as it does from 6 and 7 year olds.
THE NIGHT THE STARS SHONE ON TORONTO -about the August 14 Blackout. He noticed it was the anniversary, and started "Happy Birthday dear Blackout" but trailed off pretty quickly.

There was a running joke that "This song will be on my upcoming album, entitled ..." I can't for the life of me remember any of them but they were funny.

Highly enjoyable evening. Go Fordy. Oh yes. One other minor thing.

MIKE FORD @ HUGH'S ROOM, JUNE 4, 2004!!!!!!!
He says it will be 2 sets and he will "sing until they kick me out".

Good review, Fiona... as Fru-deprived as I feel right now, I appreciated it!

Mike was awesome. :) Fiona figured out a setlist right afterwards, but I didn't have access to it when I wrote the first version of this review, so I'm going to be moving stuff around and adding things now. I'll try to make it sound like those old show reviews for you, because I always enjoyed reading those back before I ever saw any Fruvous concerts... in, like, 1997. Heh.

Off the bat, the only thing I can't remember, weirdly enough, is what he opened with. I have no clue at all, and even when she showed me a minute after the show I was like *huh?*. But now that I see her lovely setlist above, I can say that Sugarcane was a pretty good song. He did get the audience to sing along, on his first song, which was impressive, although this was a good audience to do that with. The song was really nice. If I recall it had this chorus that started in the last bar of the verse, so it was a very continuous, overlapping kind of thing. Nice.

The second song he did was Web of Life, which is his reggae environmental song about the Oak Ridges Moraine (he did that for the kids in February, so some of you will remember it.) My only comment for this is that it was stuck in my head all night Saturday while I was at work and also had a headache. But I think it helped more than hindered on the headache front. I really like this song :)

He then sang a song called Crossroads which he said he was commissioned for, but I didn't know who it was about. Some lady who had something to do with Toronto, from the sound of it. Good song, but probably not as strong as some of the others since I'm not going on at length about it.

Then he did Guinea Pig, which went over well. Remember when the lads used to do Gulf War and you'd hear the crowd laugh in places and go "Oh, yeah. That line is funny. I forgot."? It was like that a lot. Sounded good. He kept telling people what the first chord of his songs were, which was... very educational of him :)

That was followed by a beautiful song about Darcy McGee's life that he introed as being from the grade 8 curriculum, and everyone cheered, so he said, "And tonight, all of Tom Paxton's songs will be from the grade 8 curriculum," and everyone cheered some more. Beautiful song. I say that a lot. But it's true. This one really shows off his vocal range, and it's very soft and dreamy, even when it talks about Darcy McGee being assassinated, which was probably hard to do :)

After that, I think, was when he started talking about Gordon Lightfoot. He went on about how they keep putting out these Gordon Lightfoot tribute albums, and they're great, but he's never been asked to participate in any of them. He said now he was going to do a Lightfoot cover, but of a rare, unreleased track, and maybe you know it if you have this one certain bootleg from this one certain show... He stretched out the intro for so long that our entire table eventually caught on and were laughing like mad. Then he sang Gord's Gold :) The crowd lapped it up eagerly.

Then he did Heatseeker Boy, which was probably a bad idea. It really needed other people singing, if not necessarily more instruments (my opinion is that the guitar was fine... the chorus was just empty. You can't keep repeating "boy", that doesn't make a chorus unless there's something else going on.) The old fogies in the crowd were kinda confused :D I don't think they knew who Pikachu was.

He followed that up with *his* version of I've Been Everywhere, which is full of Canadian town names and goes fast enough, I'm pretty sure, to get into the World Record book. He did the same schtick he did last year with the kids, singing some town names really fast, stopping, then going "Oh, you want to hear more? Faster?". Eventually the older crowd was yelling "More! Faster!" It was cool :)

He closed with a song about the blackout called (I think) The Night the Stars Shone on Toronto. Very sweet and beautiful. He stopped before the second verse and told a story about turning on the radio during the blackout and hearing the mayor say, "It's strange, I can't hear the hum of the fridge or the air conditioner... this silence is terrifying!" or something along those lines, and made fun of Lastman for a minute before going into the second verse. Hee.

He *almost* got an encore. The sound and lighting dude was a moron about this. There was this huge roar of applause, which was sustained for a while while *nothing happened*, and nothing happened for so long that everyone assumed we were getting an encore, the applause got louder, and then the dude turned the house music back on and turned up the lights. Gah.

He kept making jokes about the songs being on an upcoming album, and giving different "working titles" for the albums. I thought he was just doing that off-the-cuff, but at the end he said, "Keep your eyes open for my future albums," and then named all three of the fake album names he'd given during the show, which was hilarious.

He had postcards (one of which I will scan soon) that he made a couple hours before the show at Kinko's doodling with a Sharpie (or so he said) for his OWN show, two sets, which will be at Hugh's Room on June 4th! That date got a bunch more jokes out of him onstage. "It's kind of last minute," he said. "And don't forget, that's a leap year. Don't show up on June 3rd going 'Hey, where's Fordy?'" He said afterwards he'd sing till they kicked him out. I'm almost sick with anticipation. :D

His voice sounded just fantastic, especially during the Darcy McGee song and the blackout song.

You've probably already read on the Frucon list that he has been informed of the EFO show and the Con likely coinciding. Also I think this is the earliest a frulad has known about the Con in a couple of years. Last year they didn't hear about it until *during*. Ahem.

Anyway, that's about all I got... So, to sum up, Tom Paxton was pretty good (wait, did I even mention him?), Mike is the awesomest, the end :D Woohoo! (scan coming shortly)

Scan now added to my profile.