Sunday, December 23, 2007

For Christmas 1980 Les Wiseman inaugurated a new feature idea for the then adventurous Vancouver Magazine. The In One Ear rock music column would feature a local band photographed and interviewed around a Christmas scene. This first In One Ear Christmas involved the hard core punk band the Subhumans. Others followed, DOA, the Modernettes and an even a more mainstream Kenny Coleman seen in that previous Modernettes blog. One of the strangest involved a band called Corsage. This was for Christmas 1983 when the alternative music scene's most interesting player was amateur golfer, professional grunge dresser and rock promoter Bud Luxford. Of Corsage, Les Wiseman wrote as an introduction to that Christmas In One Ear: Imagine, if you will, another sort of white Christmas, the kind that surrounds more of our metaphysically distressed than you care to imagine. Padded, white, quilted canvas walls, floor and ceiling; the glare from a 200-watt insect-repellent bulb that seems to do nothing for the white spiders that pop up between our subject's arm hairs. Imagine the purgatory of a young rock musician with a sense of the absurd, for we have just stepped through the doorway which leads to the Corsage Zone. In the picture with Phil "The K" Smith in the centre, and clockwise from the upper left, Rodney Graham (the doctor), Chris Grove, Scout Farelaine,Bill Napier-Hemy he's far right in this link, Jade Blade, Dale Powers and Robert Walker. Of Robert Walker even my Rebecca would know that's Tony Baloney. Tony Baloney is the man with the crosses on his glasses, far right in the third picture in this link.