Newt's rock 'n' roll weekend planner, Vancouver edition, March 20 to 22

by Steve Newton on March 19th, 2015 at 3:13 PM

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It's been a while since I've seen Lynyrd Skynyrd live. The last (and first) time was back in '97 on a bill with Paul Rodgers and Kenny Wayne Shepherd at the Pacific Coliseum. Sadly, since then the band has lost bassist Leon Wilkeson, keyboardist Billy Powell, and guitarist Hughie Thomasson, who I'd been crazy about ever since I first heard his other band of note, the Outlaws (or "the Florida guitar army" as we used to call them.)

Never one to quit when peeps like me still need to hear three guitars wailing away for a long time on "Free Bird", Skynyrd has soldiered on, and the current lineup plays the Hard Rock Casino Vancouver on Friday. The group still features original guitarist Gary Rossington, as well as guitarist Rickey Medlocke, who used to play drums for the band in its earliest days before he went on to form another southern-rock group I used to like, Blackfoot.

So there will certainly be some shit-hot Les Paul/Explorer action going on--as well as whatever model of guitar Mark "Sparky" Matejka, Thomasson's replacement, chooses to bring to the party. As long as I get the chance to whistle like Ronnie Van Zant did before Rossington's solo on "That Smell" I'll be happy.

Unless you've already got a ticket, though, you won't be there to see the South rise again in Coquitlam because the Skynyrd show is totally SOLD OUT.

If you wanted to see Skynyrd real bad but snoozed and losed you can always go and drown your sorrows in popcorn and blood at the Northwest Horror Show, which runs Friday through Sunday at the Vancity Theatre. Movies include Lamberto Bava's Demons, Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, so spaghetti dinner may be in order first.

And hey, if you want to psych yourself up for the gore with some '80s metal by Accept or Saxon, that's fine too:

Check the witty and wise Adrian "Mad" Mack's overview of the festival right here.

Come Saturday, Vancouver guitar freaks are expected to converge on the Rickshaw Theatre, where local six-string wunderkind Don Alder will be doing the acoustic fingerstyle damage. This guy has won a whole bunch of international guitar competitions, but he's no snob about it.

"I don’t even consider myself a guitarist," he told me back in 2012, "because the true guitarist is all about precision, right? I’m sloppy, I’m messy, but I love to create. So I went down the artist track, and with artists there are no rules—you just have to make people try to like and appreciate you. It’s creating your own kinda mystique, I guess.

Prepare to be mystified:

Another option for Saturday night is Let It Be: A Celebration of the Beatles, which takes place at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

As far as I'm concerned, any time is a good time to celebrate the Beatles. Hell, I'm celebrating them right now, because for the last few days I haven't been able to get this song out of my head:

"The show musically charts the band's meteoric rise from their humble beginning in Liverpool's Cavern Club through the height of Beatlemania, and on to their later studio masterpieces," reads a sentence that was posted on the Internet.

Come Sunday, if you're the type of person who used to go to Sunday school and think about doing good deeds to help people, there's a benefit for the Stephen Lewis Foundation at the Trout Lake Community Centre featuring live a cappella music. More importantly, the event raised funds for African grandmothers caring for AIDS orphans, and my old Sunday school teacher would have surely admired that.

If you're feeling more along the lines of, "Screw that, I'm gonna help no one but myself and pig out on some loud music!", then Anvil is playing down at Venue. Keep in mind that I know zilch about Anvil except that it has a guy named Lips and is supposed to be a very influential Canadian metal band. The group had its heyday in the early '80s, but I guess I was listening to too much Maiden back then to take notice. If the guys in Metallica swear by them, though, there must be something there.

My last entry for this rock 'n' roll weekend has nothing to do with rock 'n' roll--or horror, believe it or not--but I've caught American comic Amy Schumer's TV show, Inside Amy Schumer, a few times and she got me chortling enough to think that her standup show at the Hard Rock Casino Vancouver would be pretty sweet.