Phatstick are coming back to Sault Ste. Marie... again! Just a month after they last rocked Foggy Notions, the St. Catharines hard rock band featuring Saultites Jason Taillefer and Joe LaVergne will be back there for two shows THIS WEEKEND! Both concerts have scheduled start times of 10:30 PM, with a likely $3 cover charge and a 19+ age limit. Sorry for the short notice, they were only just announced a couple of days ago. If you want to hear some very good covers of songs from all genres (and metal, of course), head on out to Foggy's this weekend! Phatstick deliver the goods musically, but I really wish they'd play their own originals in their recent concerts, cause they have some great stuff on their albums! Still, go see them this weekend if you can! Confirm your attendance for the Friday concert at this location, and the Saturday concert by clicking here!
Meanwhile, Caveman Morrison frontman Tym Morrison has scheduled another solo concert, this time back at The Bottoms Up Lounge! Come rock out and mellow out at the same time on the long weekend, as Tym plays acoustic renditions of your favourite metal songs, and more! According to the Facebook event page, Tym's voice is stronger than ever, which is great news for the show! A 10:00 PM start time is listed, there's NO cover charge, and you must be 19 to enter. Tym always delivers a great might of music when he plays his acoustic solo shows, so consider making it out, especially if you can't go see him THIS WEEKEND at The Roosevelt Hotel! Get more details at the above links!N
ext up, a new concert video has popped up online from a recent show! No, it's not from the Kewadin Festival (I'm really surprised at the lack of videos from there), but it is from one of the bands that played it! This video is of Detroit hard rockers Fifth Way from their June concert at The Dreammakers Theater at Kewadin Casino, when they backed up Tesla! Now you've definitely seen the first video from their set already on the SMS (their performance of "Rock N' Roll"), but we have another! This was uploaded onto Fifth Way's YouTube channel on Sunday, and it's a performance of a brand new song, "Burn Like You"! Good stuff, but the guitars really overpower the vocals. It's from the same footage shot that gave us the video of "Rock N' Roll", so it's got a nice view from above of the stage! Check it out below!Also, as a side note, I found out last month that Fifth Way have more of a local connection than I realized! Did you know that guitarist Zak Stelmaszek is a graduate of Lake Superior State University, and lived here while he was going there? Yeah, he told me that through e-mail correspondence, and through some back checking, I can confirm that he earned an electrical engineering degree there in 2000! I think we have another subject for our out of town bands profile series! And of course, check out the new video!
Fourthly today, one of the more notable young musicians in the area has entered a major online contest, and he needs YOUR help! Nixxon Dixxon drummer Jake LaLonde has entered the Full Ride Scholarship Contest that's being run through Hollywood California's Musicians Institute, a major American music college that has tons of famous alumni to have graduated from there, including (among many others), notable metal drummers like Judas Priest's Scott Travis and Primus' Bryan Mantia. The Full Ride Scholarship Contest will give one lucky young musician a full complete scholarship, no strings attached, at The Musicians Institute along with $10,000 cash. For Jake to make it to the live finals in Hollywood, he needs tons of votes to get the attention of the MI judges, so this is where YOU come in! You have until August 15th (ONE WEEK FROM SUNDAY) to vote for Jake at this location! The more votes he gets, the better the odds! Note that YOU MUST REGISTER TO VOTE, but it is completely free and has similar criteria to other sites you register for, so don't be scared off.On his page on the Musicians Institute site, you can hear a drum solo track named "Grooving", and if you click "Visit Backstage", you'll get a bio about Jake and a video of him playing Godsmack's "Bad Religion"! Best of luck to Jake, it'd be awesome to see him win, though I don't know what would happen to the drum position in Nixxon Dixxon if he did. He's a great drummer, and one can only imagine how much better he'd get with Musicians Institute support! VOTE FOR JAKE TODAY!!!
Finally, this is a story that I haven't followed in depth on the SMS because it doesn't have much relevance to the local metal scene nowadays, but really, I should have talked about it before for it's past connections. A lot of discussions have come up this summer over what should happen to The Eastgate Hotel on Queen Street East. Local music lovers will no doubt recognize The Eastgate as a very popular venue for concerts in the 1980s, especially metal ones! Concerts continued through the mid-2000s, but they noticeably slowed down into the new millennium. More recent notable metal/hard rock concerts there included headlining bands like Nazareth, Econoline Crush, and probably the last show of note there, Bret Michaels in October 2005. Now a vacant unused building, the city is hoping to gain control of the building and have it demolished. A decision on that could be made at a City Council meeting on August 23rd. According to SooToday articles, word is that the building is structurally sound (doesn't really look it though), and there is at least one buyer interested in saving it. If you were hoping for it to become a concert spot again, don't hold your breath, as the prospective owners want to turn it into a retirement home, but that proposal was already rejected once by City Council. Discussions about the fate of The Eastgate Hotel are expected at the August 23rd City Council meeting. Keep up to date with this situation at this link, this link, and this link, and if something of note comes up later on, I'll let you guys know!That's all for today, but I have much more news in the coming days, so keep an eye out!
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