Video: Dead Ghosts opens a can of worms at the Biltmore

All morning, I've had this story from Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test running through my head.

I think it was sometime in the late '60s and the Beatles were playing a concert at a venue just outside of San Francisco. And so, of course, Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters made plans to greet the Fab Four.

But the night of the show, Kesey and a few other members of his troupe had perhaps a tab or two too many and things didn't exactly take a turn for the better.

Quoting Wolfe: "Cancer—Kesey has only too look at it and it is perfectly obvious—all of them, the teeny freaks and the Beatles, are one creature, caught in a state of sheer poison made cancer. The Beatles are the creature's head. The teeny freaks are the body. But the head lost control of the body and the body rebels and goes amok and that is what cancer is. The vibrations of hit hit the Pranksters, in a clump, stoned out of their gourds, in sickening waves."

Okay, so the Beatles, they ain't.

But when Vancouver lo-fi rawkers Dead Ghosts opened for Thee Oh Sees at the Biltmore Cabaret on Friday (November 19), it was kind of like that.

A mess of wiggly young people waving their heads around like stoned bobble heads.

You can follow Travis Lupick on Twitter at twitter.com/tlupick.