Wizard World Chicago '08

At long last, the in-depth report of our trip to Chicago!



The personnel: me, Mars, Divvy, and Zen.

We started on the road at 4 AM on Thursday morning. We got to Chicago in the afternoon, checked into the hotel, and got the table set up in the Artist Alley of the convention in time for it to open for Preview Night.

Here is the view of our aisle from our table:


And here is our table once it was all set up:


We didn't do many sales on Preview Night, nor on the Friday for that matter. Our aisle was a dud. Low energy, our neighbors sneering at us for being silly, there's a million and one reasons why we weren't doing so hot at first.

Later in the day on Friday I was wandering the convention hall and bumped into my buddy Mike Holman from Jackass. He asked how we were doing, and I explained that we are not doing the numbers I would have liked, and that I was thinking about taking over one of the small press or Autograph Area tables that look unclaimed or abandoned. He pointed at one such booth and said "Well I don't have anything to sell! Take mine!"

I quickly ran back to the Artist Alley and explained our good fortune to the rest of our party. We packed up the table and made like a Beatles cartoon running from one end of the hall to the other to get set back up as quickly as possible.

Here is our 2nd table, before the back wall got covered in balloons:


We were using Mike Holman's table, and our neighbors included The Honky Tonk Man, The Iron Sheik, Johnny Fairplay, and Gail Kim.









We were had our booth decorated like a children's birthday party, and we were giving away loot bag toys as sales premiums. As the Honky Tonk Man explained above, these were a big hit and turned our aisle into a big party.



On the Friday night, we were invited to go with Mike Holman and Johnny Fairplay to see a Vanilla Ice concert at a bar called Cans. They had the street beside the bar shut down with a stage set up out there. The crowd overflowed the whole area.

Free Jagermeister shots for everyone in the front row:


Then we hung out backstage....



And after backstage we went up to the afterparty where, upon finding out we were from Canada, everyone wanted to ask us questions and test our trivia knowledge.



We even got serenaded with a rousing rendition of O Canada from the Americans!

Zen is not used to playing with the big kids, but he was keeping up with us. shotgunning beers, doing shots, the whole thing. But when we got back to the hotel and Mars, Divvy and I kept the party rockin' in the lobby of the hotel (the lobby of the hotel is overrun with a huge party every night of the convention), Zen went straight to the room to collapse into bed without even saying good night.



Saturday was the first good day for business. We were selling the "Party Pack", in which you would receive pretty much one of everything Zen and I were selling.

We even came up with a theme song for the Party Pack:


The Honky Tonk Man came to the convention with a suitcase full of beer on the Sunday, which he shared with us. Then we left to go home on Monday, with a stop for Breakfast at IHOP.



And then we got back to Toronto in time to party for Canada Day!

For more photos from the trip: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=30621&l=31bc8&id=514079365

And for more crazy videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/seanward

The Nothing Mixtape

1. Nothin' to Roll With - Devin the Dude
2. Ain't Sayin' Nothin' New - The Roots
3. All or Nothing - Milli Vanilli
4. Never Done Nothing Like That Before - Supergrass
5. Nothing to Do - The Donnas
6. Ain't Nothin' Ta Fuck Wit - Wu-Tang Clan
7. Nothing of Value - The Pattern
8. Nothing To Do With Me - Stereolab
9. Can't Tell Me Nothing - Kanye West

What is Paid to Party about?

This Paid to Party record is the culmination of a big research project I undertook for a comic book. You know that I have a cartoon band that I create stories around, and I've got this huge story for them that I have been working on for... oh, it's got to be four years or more. This is going to be a huge thing about love, art, friendship, loyalty, creative vision, and the nature of reality. Sound like a big undertaking, hey? But when I would sit down to write it, I would realize that I still had more living to do.

I like my comics to be silly, but I think that what people respond to about them is the fact that there's a stream of truth that runs through them. Even though the story is going to be over-the-top, the portrayal of the music business has to be believable, being that the mechanics of The Changing Color's business are so central to the story. I have been front-row-centre to the entertainment industry for a long time, thanks to my connections in the Beatle world. I'd read lots and talked to a lot of movers and shakers. I'd even been in the inner circle of a few people who were negotiating record contracts with major labels. But I had to have the direct experience from the band's point of view. I had to know how it all comes together. I had to know about recording, playing shows, going on tour. I had to bridge that knowledge gap between the artist and the label.

At this point, I feel pretty confident that I could manage a band quite successfully if I wasn't so busy being an Artist. And at the end of the day, that's why I don't go be a manager, even though I know I could do it well. I have a calling, I am compelled to do the work that I do, and that right there is the crux of this big story that I'm going to tell with The Changing Color. And Mr. Lollipop. And the Queen, and Arthur Puctenbowler, and maybe even Benny Bunny.

And speaking of Benny Bunny, I am up to page 22 on Benny Bunny On Wheels. I think that the main story is going to be about 36 pages, and the book will be about 48. Man, if this was one of my series books, I would be finished already because those were only twenty pages!

PAID TO PARTY might sound like something boastful, but really it's a statement about how we're naturally supposed to live. We're supposed to experience joy every day and we're supposed to get money from doing what we would have been happy to do for free. I'm just doing my part for this movement that's afoot right now. I have hidden a success manual in the songs on PAID TO PARTY. Some of it was me recollecting struggles that I've been through, and some of it was me setting an intention, much of which has come to pass since I laid it down. The lay-person will enjoy rocking their party with this record. And those who watch The Secret or What the Bleep Do We Know over and over again, who know who Esther Hicks is, or who still believe in Santa Claus will find something special for them woven into it.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE RECORD!!!!!!

Can anyone cover The Beatles?

With all of this talk about Across The Universe, a subject comes up again and again: Can the Beatles be covered successfully? A lot of people say no, I say yes. So I am curious:

Can you think of any Beatles covers that top or compete with the original?

I can give you two:
Fiona Apple's 'Across the Universe'
Stevie Wonder's 'We Can Work It Out'

Actually, I can give you a third!
Nancy Sinatra's 'Day Tripper'

Now you. Can you think of any?

My review of Across The Universe

I'm pretty well-known as a Beatle-maniac, so a question has been popping up with great frequency: "What did you think of Across The Universe?"

As you must know by now, Across The Universe is a movie about a guy named Jude who goes from Liverpool to New York and ends up, with his American pals (Max, Lucy, Sadie, Jo-Jo, and other names all taken from Beatles song lyrics), taking part in the cultural milestones that would define the popular conception of what the 1960s were.

There's a lot to like about this movie, but for the most part it seems kind of clunky and awkward. I don't think that the music of The Beatles lends itself to this treatment, and the movie is just trying way too hard to force it. I agree that there is a drama implicit across the oeuvre, but this is a poor fit. The primary problem is that The Beatles music was not representative of the political goings-on of the times. They were always more about being timeless than being of their time, so I don't think that setting their music to this story is in keeping with the spirit of the music. Their stance was made clear in Revolution where the message, in the middle of the Vietnam War and massive cultural upheaval, is "whatever it is, don't worry about it. This too shall pass." The Beatles are timeless. They're not synonymous with that era the way Hendrix, The Doors, or scores of other artists are. And doing this same movie using any of their music might have made for a better production.

Because they're trying so hard to make the music fit the concept, certain songs need to be recontextualized to fit the plot. For an example, see I Want You (She's So Heavy). It's Uncle Sam singing "I Want You" to a Vietnam draftee, and "She's So Heavy" is sung by a bunch of soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty through a miniature jungle. And for goodness' sake, All You Need Is Love is not about romance!

The psychedelic and abstract scenes are the most successful of the film, I just wish they would have gone a lot further with it. The Strawberry Fields Forever sequence, or the Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite sequence, either of those exist completely beyond the scope of the 60s overview the movie's trying to be. I wish they would have taken it there.

The Beatles are not a rock band. They are artists such that they could successfully 'do' any style of music they attempted. When Paul decided he wanted to do a song like the ones he grew up listening to, they didn't make a song that sounded like The Beatles doing a vaudeville number. They did a song that sounded absolutely authentic. And they did this in every style they could get near. Victorian-era English culture, surrealist art, avant-garde philosophy, all of these were much bigger influences on the group than the shifting cultural tides of the times, so maybe a psychedelic love story set in the 1890s would have been more successful. And it could be one of those movies like Marie Antoinette or A Knight's Tale, where the movie takes place way back when but is set to the sounds of now (well, forty years ago). I'm being a little silly here, getting upset over what the movie's not instead of assessing it on the merits of what it is, but still... I think that would have been more in keeping with the spirit of the source material.

But I will say this: the movie is grand, epic, and it reaches for the stars. It even manages to just barely scrape the edges of the stars with its fingertips here and there. It's definitely worth a look, but it's not the classic it really ought to have been.

Apple/Beatles announcement tomorrow?

So tomorrow Apple is making a big announcement. I am looking forward to tomorrow because, as you know, I am a big Mac nerd. The rumor is that they are going to announce the Beatles catalog, remastered, available on iTunes. This is excellent news for me because, as you know, I am a huge Beatles maniac. That collection of music has not been updated (in terms of the quality of the sound) since 1987. Those albums were issued on CD in 1987 when CDs were brand new, and they haven't been touched since. Yeah, the hits sound great on 1, but I am looking forward to hearing all of my favorite album tracks with the bass booming and the treble sweetly swirling around the room. And apparently there's going to be new iPods, but that's not the exciting part for me.

Up and down

There are times that make you feel like right proper rock star, and there are times that remind you that in the grand scheme of things, you ain't but a speck of dust in the breeze. You ever had one of those nights when everything that can go wrong does, and you can't really be upset about it because you're just in awe of the sheer magnitude of the fuckery? That was my night last Thursday at the U.S.S. CD release show. That just made me double my efforts and give an even more slamming performance, but it still took a couple of days to shake it off.

Sunday was a different story. I sat for a photo shoot with Ana Cop (sorry Ana, I don't know how to do the C with the accent-thing on top!), one of the greatest discoveries I've made in ages. She's really good. And I was lucky enough to have her photograph me in... well I don't wanna say what the concept was because the pictures are going to knock you out. But I will say that the abundance of leg and ass was a real treat.

ODB represent

This morning I was interviewing Aaron Brophy, 'the boss' at Chart Magazine. He's cool. I knew we were homeys when, apropos of nothing, he quoted Ol' Dirty Bastard in one of his answers. After the interview, I told him how my two biggest musical influences are The Beatles and O.D.B., and then we daydreamed together about how great it would be if Ol' Dirty would have lived longer, and if he and Paul McCartney teamed up on a remake of Say Say Say!

Off to Peterborough for the first out of town performance for Sean Ward & the Realness!!

Sadie Not So Sexy

Don't it figure? It's always when you're really carried away with your work and you're really getting into it that the program reminds you that you haven't saved in a while by crashing and taking away your work. In this case, I was working in a music sequencing program, working on the music for a cover song that's going to be on my album, when the program crashed and took three hours of work with it. That's the chorus, the whole second verse, and a whole bunch of tweaking that went into it. The rare times stuff like this happens, I take it as a sign that I was going down the wrong road but still, this is particularly annoying. In face, I'm just gonna leave it alone for now and go watch a movie.

Sessions - the movie

Yesterday was great fun. I woke up way too late (about one in the afternoon) and booted it across town to go sign a contract that renews my deal with JV Productions. Took the cheque I picked up from that contract signing, put it in the bank, and went downtown. Finally, at long last, replaced the camera that was stolen last summer with a gorgeous new Canon Powershot A550. Raced home with it, checked my email, and then motored over to the recording studio where we were finally getting Tye's parts laid down on the new songs.

Here is a little documentary of the visit to the recording studio!



That movie, and the many more like it that I am going to make, was one of the main reasons why I've been feeling more and more that I needed to hurry up and get a new camera. Next project: new computer!!

The story of rehearsal

Last weekend I was in the recording studio recording the vocals for three songs. We were going to rehearse for Saturday's Edge 102 gig in that same studio, but during the day the studio is a place where they make radio commercials and our rehearsal got bumped because the Ford Motor Company had a big emergency. So after a few phone calls to find a new place, we just decided to practice in Otis' music room. Otis is filling in on the turntables while Human Kebab is off in Alberta. He's a dude I've known from the internet for ages and ages for his music and sound projects, and only recently he gets in touch with me to tell me he got married to a Canadian babe and he's living in Toronto now.

So we're in his music room and I'm playing the beat for my intro (avid fans know that I use a different instrumental every time). This time around I'm using the instrumental for Jay-Z's SHOW ME WHAT YOU'VE GOT. Otis hears it and he goes "oh, I know what that is!" I say "Yeah, it's Jay-Z--", and Otis says "No, that's Shaft in Africa". He digs through this record collection, pulls out the Shaft In Africa soundtrack, and plays the original song that Jay-Z took the sample from. Right then I knew that Otis and I are going to work very well together.

rehearsal time

For the last two shows, we have not had any luck securing a rehearsal room to practice for it. We have been using a particular store after it's closed. We go in at night, move the cash register and calculator and fridge magnet display aside to make room for the turntable set-up, plug everything into the store's stereo system, and rock out. We make sure it's late so that the other businesses below, beside, and above the store will not be disturbed, but this week the violin maker upstairs stayed late. We kept hearing him banging around really loudly, and we had to wonder if it was his way of letting us know that he could hear us. So we turned the volume down and became very careful about how loud we were being. But the banging kept up. Human Kebab said that maybe he's just being loud, that it's nothing to do with us. So we turned the volume back up and got back to business.

This show is going to fucking rule. Two new songs in the set!!

High Praise from the Radio Man

So a friend just told me she heard Edge 102 FM plug the show on Thursday... and the guy called me the most talented artist in this city!! That's a nice feather in the cap!