Deadmau5

At LiveCity Yaletown on Friday, February 19

If you were among the thousands unable to get into Deadmau5’s maximum-capacity stand at Yaletown’s LiveCity site on Friday, take some solace in the fact that more than one person at the show left bitterly disappointed. Or, to be more specific, three people.

How could you tell, given that every one of the 8,000-plus people on site seemed nothing less than deliriously thrilled? That’s easy—you only had to head over to the guest-services tent. There, on the ground next to a small mountain of skateboards and backpacks, sat three giant mouse heads, each of which the proggy Ontario DJ known as Deadmau5 would have been proud to have worn on his cranium.

Imagine showing up primed to pay the ultimate tribute to the man known to his mom as Joel Zimmerman, only to be told to check your lovingly constructed rodent head by security. Sometimes life is crueller than a Victor glue trap.

As for the rest of the crowd, nobody left Deadmau5 disappointed; as love-ins go, this one was pretty much off the chart from the moment Zimmerman stormed out on-stage, sporting a Team Canada jersey and—predictably—a giant mouse head on his noggin. Over the course of an hour-and-a-half set with plenty of emotional peaks and valleys, Deadmau5 would make it clear that he’s anything but a one-trick pony.

Ambient washes of tangerine-dream electronica would suddenly explode into glitter-spackelled house anthems. One minute Zimmerman was resculpting Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” as a jagged tribal thumper, the next he was unleashing waves of keyboards, the effect suggesting Rick Wakeman with a trance fixation. Just when things would start to seem like a neverending bass-and-drums assault, he’d veer left with the synth-swept “Sometimes Things Get, Whatever”.

What might have been most surprising about it all was that Deadmau5 looked like he was having almost as much fun as his enraptured fans. When he talked to the Straight last year, the Niagara Falls, Ontario native made a point of painting himself as a pathological introvert, someone who hates interacting with people he’s never met.

He’s obviously come out of his shell, spending much of the night wildly pumping his fists, whether going for something grandly ostentatious with an epic “Ghosts ’n’ Stuff” or deftly riffing on Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”.

Forget hunching over a laptop and hiding behind a mask: Deadmau5 was determined to turn things into an event. First off there was the visual bombardment—1950s robots, ’60s space missions, The Shining snippets, bouncing rodent faces—taking place on the two screens that flanked the stage.

Putting a human face on the proceedings, the mouse head would come off periodically over the course of the night, revealing a tattied-and-pierced dude who looked more like a Boston street punk than one of the world’s top DJs. From that point, Zimmerman put on an old-fashioned show, dancing like a back-bacon version of Keith Flint, conducting the audience like a big-beat Leonard Bernstein, and doing the 20-yard-dash to the side of the stage for cold Coronas.

Evidently a multitasker, he would even prove his own highly effective hype man, donning the mouse head every now and then and then positioning himself at the front of the stage where he’d bust a move to music of his own making.

And he wasn’t alone as far as shaking his ass. Basically LiveCity Yaletown was a giant dance party from start to finish. Cool as this was if you were in the middle of the throng, things looked even more incredible from the back of the venue. This view ended up on the giant video screens flanking the stage more than once during the course of the evening, and it was nothing less than awe-inspiring: 8,000 people totally losing their shit at the feet of a giant rodent.

Vancouver still has a lot of partying left to do this Olympic run. This one might prove impossible to top.