saturday in toledo

John Denver used to sing a song called “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio.” The lyrics go:
Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio, is like being nowhere at all
All through the day how the hours rush by
You sit in the park and you watch the grass die
Ah, but after the sunset, the dusk and the twilight
When shadows of night start to fall
They roll back the sidewalks precisely at ten
And people who live there are not seen again
You ask how I know of Toledo, Ohio
Well I spent a week there one day
They’ve got entertainment to dazzle your eyes
Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise
Is there any greater insult than to have John Denver — John Denver! — slag on your city as not being sophisticated or interesting enough? John damned Denver! Like most people who’ve lived in pretty lame places, I alternate between attacking it wholeheartedly and righteously defending it whenever anyone — particularly a dead folk singer — dares attack it.
I’ve actually wanted to write a story for sometime about Toledo’s place in music history — it’s always been the stand-in (alongside maybe Peoria) for the most boring, awful place imaginable. The Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach album a few years ago had a song called “Toledo” insulting the place. Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille” doesn’t insult the place per se, but it does make the city the place where people “pick a fine time to leave me, Lucille.” (Aside: for years, I thought the next line — “With four hungry children and a crop in the field” — was “With four hundred children and a crop in the field.”) And earlier this year, when I thought Toledo had finally dropped off the national radar enough to put an end to these references, the White Stripes’ new disc comes out with “Expecting,” which uses the lyric “You sent me to Toledo” as a metaphor for being dumped. It’s just not fair.
(I wanted to write that story until I realized no one but me would be interested in reading it.)
Anyway, last night I had dinner at the one decent Indian place in town, where I am proud to say the waiter/owner remembered my standard order, despite my not having been there in more than a year. (Mmmmm…chicken tikka massala.) Then it was up to Detroit to see Sloan.
For some reason, it was an early show — we got there around 8:30 and the opening band, Ultimate Fakebook, was already done. (The show was over by 10:30!) It was interesting seeing Sloan play a big venue like the State Theater; I’d only seen them at the cramped Main Event in Toledo (along with one outdoor show in Detroit), but here they had their full rock-star treatment going — big lighting, films projected behind them, a huge crowd, etc. About half the crowd was Canadian, although I detected no Quebecois separatist sentiments. Great show, as always, although Andrew, the drummer, was sick, so his songs were a bit off. (All four Sloaners write and sing about a quarter of their songs, and they rotate instruments a lot.)
One puzzling feature, though: a guy not far in front of us on the floor kept raising a sign that said “Eat Beef.” Was there some sort of mad-cow incident in Canada that I didn’t hear about? Is the Beef Council resorting to guerrilla marketing? The only possible explanation I could think of came during the set closer, the classic 1991 boy-wants-girl grammar-police anthem “Underwhelmed,” when Chris sings: “We were talkin’ about people that eat meat / I felt like an ass ’cause I was one / She said, “It’s okay,” but I felt like / I just ate my young.” Maybe.
The absolute highlight of the show was during “It’s In Your Eyes,” my favorite song from the new album, when they showed what looked like a late ’80s/early ’90s short film made on the cheap. The “protagonist,” if one could call him that, of the movie looked familiar. “Hey, I think that’s Matt Murphy, lead singer of the super-tuneful Flashing Lights, and ex- of Halifax stalwarts the Super Friendz,” I told Kelly. “Wow, you’re such a Canadian rock geek,” she didn’t reply, but should have. Then, after the song, Sloaner Chris mentions that it is indeed Matt Murphy in that 1991 film. Score! I think I deserve Canadian citizenship for that level of obscure Can-rock knowledge.
This morning, we had breakfast with friends Jennifer and Chris, then went off with friends Luke and Leslie to the Toledo Museum of Art, which is just about the only thing Toledo has going for it culturally (other than lots of Sloan shows). It’s really a top-notch museum, and worth a couple of hours if you’re ever passing through. (And since the country’s longest north-south interstate, I-75, and its two longest east-west interstates, I-80 and I-90, all intersect here, there’s a good shot you’ll be passing through sometime.)
The main exhibition now is Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which, while much less high-art than most of their stuff, was still quite entertaining. It’s a collection of all the drawings, paintings, storyboards, models, and costumes used to create the Star Wars movies. (We didn’t get the audio tour, mainly because we didn’t find out until later it was voiced by Darth Vader his own bad self, James Earl Jones.) It’s amusing to see what passed for futuristic in 1977: the Tie fighter pilots had these big clunky “computer” switches on their uniforms that look taken off an early Coleco machine. (And did you know one of the transport ships was called the Mos Calamari? Did George Lucas have some bad squid one night?)
I left the museum with good memories, and three Star Wars Pez dispensers (Chewbacca, Boba Fett, and a Stormtrooper.)
Toledo Blade party at Kelly’s tonight (see? Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio, isn’t so bad!), then back to Dallas tomorrow.