Sad to say but Hulbert’s Sunday night open stage is closed. It was a great run and we’ll miss it and we’re all waiting in anticipation to see what’s next for Rhea, Cam and Chris. For the time being I’ll be lugging my ax down to the Second Cup up on 149 Street to attend Alex Boudreau’s Wednesday night open stage. Alex is a great guitar player with the generosity to give up a night every week to provide us with a soap-box on Hump-day. Hope to see you there.

I went to Del Mar California in June with Annelin to see Melanie of “Lay Down the Candles In the Rain” fame, Country Joe• without the Fish (still singing, “Well its one, two, three what are we fighting for”), Canned Heat (light a couple members), Jefferson Starship (minus Grace) and Big Brother and the Holding Company (with a stand in for Janis). They were all playing at the Del Mar Exhibition grounds on a racetrack just outside of San Diego. It was billed “Legends Of Woodstock” which I’m sure made the “Legends” cringe when the promoters pitched it to them. Surprisingly though it raised itself well above the kitsch that it threatened to devolve into. Not only nostalgic, it showed why some of these artists had such a good run. There were some great songs played by some great musicians and after four decades there was only a little rust showing on some of them.

Big Brother was outstanding. They were my least favorite band when I was a kid but they made me a fan that night. The musicianship was outstanding and they brought along a Janis stand in who in my opinion was every bit as good and maybe better than the original. Overall it was a magical night for the now blue haired Woodstock generation that showed up complete with the mandatory space cadets and dancing divas and that smell of cannabis in the air.

I saw Country Joe and the Fish almost forty years ago in an event at Clark Stadium they called “the Orange County Pop Festival.” Albeit it wasn’t in Orange County but it sounded good and it made us all feel like for a moment at least we were in California. Also playing that night were a host of others including Quicksilver Messenger Service and Alvin Lee and Ten Years After  who closed the night doing a half hour version of their “I’m Goin’ Home.”

Well, it's official. The Sunday Night Open Stage at Hulbert's is winding down.

Chris and Cam are moving on to new horizons and its looking like the new owner may not continue the Songwriter's stage there. Will it move to another venue? One would hope so, in some form or another. This is by far the best showcase in Edmonton of bright new talent and it would be a shame if it doesn't continue in some form or another. Rhea has done a great job of building a real strong core of people with U22 along side a sprinkling of some of us O22'ers. Her charisma mixed with the hospitality provided by Chris and Cam has been a magic combination under which many songwriters, young and old, have germinated and blossomed.

It is a lot of work and a great commitment to give up a Sunday night every week and show the generosity of spirit that Rhea has done, so she might just be happy to have a break from all of us. That won't stop me from telling her what a great job she's done and how much this has meant to all of us who've benefited from the stage she and the boys from Hulbert's have provided us for the past several years.

From all of us best wishes and thank you.

My dad has always been creative - he’s painted since his early teens. He supported our family as a commercial artist and supplemented that income selling his paintings for most of his life. At one time his work was so popular that his two-week shows of thirty plus sheets would sell out in the first fifteen minutes of the run, but it doesn’t stop there. He built almost every stick of furniture in our house and has done everything from soapstone carving to decorative eggs. On top of that he is a magnificent chef! He excels at everything he does, which is why when he told me he wanted to try his hand at building guitars I didn’t waste a minute to put him in touch with Andy Nichol.

Andy is a Luthier at Nichol Guitar and offers a guitar-building course. You build yourself the guitar of your choice, under his watchful eye, and if you can’t finish it he will. I thought my dad would build one guitar and move on to some other new challenge. It’s now more than a decade later and he’s built to date 11 guitars and a mandolin for my 2 sons and I, all beautiful guitars that sound better than anything I’ve ever played in a guitar store. Of course with his artistry he’s done inlay in these guitars that are works of art. On the head of one he inlayed a hummingbird with Abalone. Just like a hummingbird, Abalone is translucent and just like a hummingbird as you tilt the neck of the guitar and the angle the light hits it, the colors change. He used over sixty pieces of Abalone in the feathers and its breathtaking to look at.

When I was in LA about four years ago at an ASCAP event, I was sitting in the courtyard at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Hollywood playing one of my dad’s guitars by the pool. A guy sat down and listened for a while. Of course my ego kicked in thinking I was winning a new fan. What happened next is something that has happened several times over the years. It turns out he was a Luthier and was interested in my guitar. I showed it to him and let him play it. Before long, he said “how much will you sell it to me for?” I told him that it wasn’t for sale because it was built by my dad. He offered me ten thousand dollars US in cash, on the spot. Of course I declined. My dad only builds for his family. Too bad, he’d make a pile of money if he’d set up shop and built them as a business but he won’t.

P.S. As recently as a month ago George Canyon approached me in High River and yes we talked about songwriting and stuff but we talked more about the guitar I was holding than we did anything else. If my dad was interested, it was quite apparent, he would have put in an order right there on the spot.

From the moment Hulbert’s Open Stage (hosted by Rhea March) went “songwriter only”, I’ve had the weekly pleasure (every Sunday night) to witness the best Edmonton has to offer in young singer songwriters. My generation was quite self absorbed and well versed in its own music but had little use for the music that preceded us. I find young people today are much less generationally chauvinistic. On my kids iPods there are songs from Billy Holiday to Led Zeppelin to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Patti Griffin to Radiohead and forward. As a result they draw from a wider influence when they write. It makes their songs richer and more diverse.

I was at a concert at the College St Jean last night. There were two performers that blew me away. Andrew Perri and Lyra Brown, a couple of young Edmonton songwriters (I think around seventeen) performed their tunes with some friends for a crowd of about a hundred. I think Andrew had booked the venue and they were promoting the event themselves. Lyra has got kind of a Regina Spektor vibe and Andrew has a voice that reminds me of Billy Joel with the guitar stylings of a John Mayer. Both Andrew and Lyra were riveting performers, Lyra with her quirky originality and Andrew with his warm charisma and smile that lit up the room. Both are talented well beyond their years. I was asked by the father of one of the performers to come. I wasn’t expecting to see something this original and entertaining. It was a humbling experience.