He Gets It!

When I lived in Mississauga I'd duck into the local wing joint now and again.  Every weekend they'd have live entertainment.  Usually a solo act and every one of them played "Brown Eyed Girl".  Now, I don't mind the song, the original, but most of these guys were lightweights and after night after night of Brown Eyed Girl...I wanted to make her brown eyes blue. I was dating a brown eyed girl at the time so I had no choice but endure the torture.  I wondered if Van Morrison realized the Pandora's Box he'd unleashed on the world!  It was like Prometheus giving humans fire. What the hell are they going to do with it next?

One Saturday night I was in and the performer was pretty good.  Deep voice, he played a hard guitar. Something like Cat Stevens.  At the end of the first set he started to play "Brown Eyed Girl" and I thought..."oh crap...I gotta get out of here".  'Course the only other form of entertainment in the area was watching the fights in the bar down the street and watching kids spray paint the overpass on Lakeshore Road.  So I stayed.  Glad I did. Next to the original it was the best version of the song I had ever heard.  I said to myself..."he gets it!"

I talked with him between sets. His name was Augy G.  He and his brother Ernie came down from Sudbury with a band called BIg Blue Bus.  Augy had the deep ballsy voice.  Ernie could sing like an angel.  Augy would be in every couple of weeks and was playing some of the bands original material.  I got  hold of the cd and to this day it's one of my favourites. 

You ever hear a song that just automatically clicks.  Augy wrote one called "Slagtown". It's about growing up around the mines in Sudbury. The kids would hang out around the slag piles which they called Slagtown.  I grew up in St. Catharines around the paper mills where my dad worked.  On Friday and Saturday nights we'd hang around the sulfer piles.  Same deal as Sudbury.  No adults would come around there.  It was our haven where we could disappear. "Slagtown" is one of my top 3 songs ever.  I can see the lyrics in my mind.

I only saw Big Blue Bus play as a band a couple of times.  It's one of those things where you shake your head and say..."why the hell aren't these guys big stars?'.   I used one of their songs "Gonna Live Long" as the intro and extro music for the Sunday Funnies on Chum FM. 

Ernie doesn't play much any more but Augy is still at it.  I lost touch with him but managed to track him down this week.  Do you ever just want to hear a song?  Need to hear a song?  Turns out Augy is playing the Wolf and Firkin on Elm Street, down town Toronto this Saturday. I'm going go see him to see if he still "gets it" and to see if I can talk him into playing "Slagtown" for me one more time. I'll even sit through "Brown Eyed Girl".