Medicine Hat News, May 21, 2009
http://www.medicinehatnews.com/content/view/101854/74/
The no-go Fleetwood Mac show by Poncho Parker
Murphy's Law played the ace up the sleeve last week and ultimately nixed my chances with Nicks, of the Stevie kind. For anyone who had to charge their kids room and board in order to afford a Fleetwood Mac ticket, I feel your frustration, regardless if your name is Rhiannon or not.
Tickets for the Calgary show that didn't take place weren't exactly on the cheap side of a finback either. If you're charging your fans a minimum of $200 for a seat that isn't wide enough to house an anorexic standing sideways, you had better show up to play the gig because even Cold FX pills aren't even that pricy, I don't care how bad of a case of the sniffles you have. Put into another perspective, I would have needed to cash in 4,500 empties for a pair of tickets and that well exceeds my capacity over the course of spring season of sipping the wobbly pops.
I should state that my ticket company did let me know that the concert would not happen — 24 hours after the fact and long after I burned half a tank of fuel cruising the Trans Canada. This leads me to believe that makers of concert tickets are the same people that convert the fuel we put into our station wagons and half tons, but I'll save that conspiracy theory for a later date.
This isn't the first time Fleetwood Mac has given the golden handshake to a concert and if I didn't have such a thing for Stevie Nicks, I would have refunded those pricey little pieces of cardboard the moment I found out. A lot like a high-wire walker that's fallen without a net, I'm clinging onto a very cheesecloth like, onion skin transparent glimmer of hope that they won't pull a 1997 stunt and cancel the show altogether.
Much like the dude who lands the 60-pound trout and can't take a picture because of his faulty Polaroid camera and has to throw the monster back, the lawdy mama took time off work and I even scheduled my holidays around the show that didn't happen. And then I heard about the people who travelled as far away as Fort McMurray to check out Fleetwood Mac, rolling down the blacktop in their Gremlin, risking the Highway of Death and the hundreds of dollars it would have taken to drive to Calgary, only to be shunned away at the door. That's got to set some sort of road trip record, I'm sure, if nothing else. If 25,000 strangers can manage to drive, crawl and hitchhike their way to the Saddledome for a few hours of what should have been 'Mac magic, then it shouldn't be a problem for four musicians with mounds of disposable income to do the same.
And if you ever wanna chat about nothing or everything, you can find me hosting 'Poncho in the Morning', on Medicine Hat's Best Rock, Rock 105.3 every weekday from 5:30-11 a.m.