House of Parlance Blog

It was cold outside, even for a Tuesday night in late February, but the atmosphere within the Vancouver East Cultural Centre was warm and welcome. And the room got warmer. The VECC had brought out the auxiliary chairs and expanded the general seating to a point where even the grizzled soundman had never seen ‘that many seats in this place before’. And the people came and filled them all up. The upper balcony was packed and the audience was in full throat from the get go.

Dan Mangan opened the show with a solo acoustic performance which included a powerful ballad about the glory of myspace.

Mark Berube performed next. Man, has he got a strong, sweet voice. He did a few numbers including one of his many road songs. During his last tune he inspired the audience to sing with him. That was a warm sound. I’m sure that if it wasn’t for a strict obedience to the fire code the audience would have waved their lighters in rapturous arcs as they sang.

Before everyone broke for an intermission Shane Koyczan and his band The Short Story Long hit the stage for an appetite whetting set. You could see that Shane was focused and ready to deliver, and there was a certain fresh confidence in him with the Short Story Long backing him up on guitar, piano and voice. There was even some slide guitar and funky wah-wah in this set which is never a bad thing.

After the intermission everyone - except the crowd - squeezed onto the stage for a full-on hour long jamboree of goodness. Mark was on the piano mostly with Dan taking the over duties on the acoustic axe. Shane stood stage centre and the band was behind him. Even the accordian was brought out for this one.

Then they just rocked. Shane was charming, powerful, poetic, sincere and hilarious. Everyone else was great. He dropped a number of classic poems including a jaw dropping performance of The Crickets Have Arthritis, which had the woman sitting beside me tugging at her kleenex one minute and laughing the next. The crowd loved it, eventually dancing in the aisles and demanding an encore.

It was a great show and I hope that we get to see it’s like again soon.

Note on the location:

The VECC is an old building in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive district. It was built in 1909 and was a local Methodist Church for most of the last century before a demographic shift saw a series of new tenants come and go. It was converted into a community theatre and performance space in the late 1970’s and has rocked the show ever since. It is a charming antiquated space with great acoustics and soul. You can feel the building’s history with every step that you take.