Holiday Surprise

 

I had a wonderful end to my March Break vacation by attending the Elephant Six reunion (Holiday Surprise tour) both Friday night in Toronto and Saturday night in Buffalo. It's very rare I attend concerts, let alone two of the same, two nights in a row. For me, the Elephant Six reunion was worth it.

I developed a love for Elephant Six bands in high school, starting with the Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control. It's because of this music, I became friends with Jordan. Jordan, a boy in my grade, hung out with a completely different circle of friends than mine, but it didn't matter because our love for Elephant Six bands made us friends. We would chat in the hallways about the new Dressy Bessy or Beulah albums and use our older sibling's fake ID's to get into every Elephant Six show that toured our way. This continued into early university years, when I hosted a radio show at the campus I attended and would drop by Soundscapes and Rotate This in Toronto on a weekly basis. It made it much easier to access more of the rare Elephant Six bands, like Pipes You See Pipes You Don't, the Gerbils, Frosted Ambassador, the Music Tapes, the Late B.P. Helium, and the list goes on. Jordan and I continued going to Elephant Six shows, where we stood in crowds of 30 people. Sadly, in 2002, the Elephant Six Collective called it quits. The Elephant Six side projects started to slowdown and Jordan and I lost touch, with us not attending E6 shows anymore.

So, imagine my surprise when Jordan contacted me, asking if I bought my tickets for the Elephant Six reunion. And I was further surprised to find out the show (moved from the Horseshoe to Lee's Palace) was almost completely sold out (here I was planning to buy tickets at the door)! 

After going to three different locations, I got my tickets in time. When Jordan and I met up for the first time in 8 years, we questioned what happened over the course those years to make an Elephant Six show sell out?!

I guess like many things, when something is great, it doesn't reach it's peak of success until after it's gone. And lucky for those who missed it the first time, or those (like Jordan and I) who wish to see it again, there are reunion tours.

But unlike some reunion tours, there was no sense they're trying to profit financially from it. To quote my roommate, who I brought along with me to the show, "It's obvious these guys aren't doing it for the money. They're just talented people who love what they do."

Since I'm not entirely sure how the Elephant Six became so popular within the past decade, I'm also unsure of how familiar the crowd was with the music. Especially since the bands pulled out some very rare songs from the Gerbils, Pipes You See Pipes You Don't, Elf Power, etc. For Jordan and I, we felt an overwhelming sense of awe and kept commenting on how incredibly surreal this experience was. We had seen the majority of these performers on separate stages, but never imaged a decade later we would see them all perform together....and they would sound so good!

I was lucky enough that my sister (also an E6 fan) wanted to go to the show in Buffalo the next night, so I got to experience this twice in one weekend. Both shows were very similar, but they did pull out some different material and each show had it's own uniqueness. At one point in the show, they let an audience member choose any song in the history of songs (with the exception of their own) for them to play as a cover. I would love to just follow the musicians around on tour for this segment alone.

The entire weekend was incredibly nostalgic and enjoyable, even if the shows weren't as intimate as the ones we once attended. The crowd really just made me proud their talents are being recognized.

Anyway, I'm going to leave you to watch a video clip of a Music Tapes song played at the Lee's Palace show I found on youtube. :)