Payback Time

You beef in the music section’s general direction, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt and two tickets to a Live Nation club show of your choice taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here’s this week’s winning whinge.

Dear Payback Time: I’ll admit that I did enjoy reading in recent weeks about Roger Daltrey’s senior moments and about how a high-school student upstaged Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling. But I cannot fathom how the recent performance of John Prine was completely overlooked. I guess no one had time for the singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson once referred to as “like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene”. Prine has been a crowd-pleaser for over 40 years and this past show was no exception. Maybe when John Prine has moved on, people will jump on the bandwagon.

> Dan Beaton

Mike Usinger replies: Dearest Dan—With regards to the final line of your letter: probably not. Moving right along, why can’t you go to a show in Vancouver without being a victim of olfactory assault? It used to be that you’d find yourself wallowing in the stench of others once in a blue moon. Like the time a local record rep crop-dusted everyone within a 20-foot radius at Moby, at Richard’s on Richards. Or the time, at the same venue with the Pointed Sticks, some sicko took advantage of a logjam at the exit to unleash a Hiroshima-size fart bomb.

At least, in those instances, said air-shitters operated covertly. Lately, every time I go out someone decides to openly create a smell that suggests either a) something has crawled up inside them and died, or b) they not only oppose the use of deodorant on religious grounds, but also the washing of clothes. When Pink Mountaintops played the Rickshaw recently, a rockabilly-looking dandy decided to dance up a storm at stage right, the unfortunate thing being he had B.O. so heinously rank that everyone began breathing through their coat sleeves like there’d been a house fire.

At Monsters of Folk at the Commodore, some English guy with a cute blonde girlfriend kept disappearing to get draft beer, and then returning in an outright appalling brown fog of stink. Like, dude, she couldn’t put two and two together to figure out that you were the real-life Pig-Pen? Except that cloud around you wasn’t dirt, but your own fucking flatus.

Most recently, at Skinny Puppy, some Main Street hipster (i.e. bag man look-alike) who obviously hadn’t used a pit stick since George Bush Sr. was president decided to throw his own druggy dance party five feet from me. (His eye-watering stench was given additional flavour by someone who, as sweet baby Jesus is my witness, fucking smelled like shower mould.) Admittedly, I have a hypersensitive sense of smell. But at least, Dan, you can take solace in the fact that there are things out there that stink worse than the Straight not covering John Prine.

You can voice your impotent rage by snail mail or by sending an e-mail to payback@straight.com.