Blackie & The Rodeo Kings Rock The Trinity

Trinity/St Paul's Church seems an unlikely venue for roots rockers, Blackie & the Rodeo Kings, but that's where they chose to perform last Friday.

The occasion was the release of their new CD, Let's Frolic Again, not to be confused with their other recent CD, Let's Frolic. I guess they had extra frolicking material to share.

The core members of BARK (the standard abbreviation these days) are Colin Linden, Tom Wilson and Stephen Fearing. Each have enormous, award-winning careers on their own, but when they come together under the Blackie umbrella, they are awesome.

I'm not sure where they find the time, but somehow they collaborate on a new album together at least once a year... each contributing songs that are clearly their own, but also Blackie songs at the same time.


Although I missed most of it, opener Barney Bentall played his trademark acoustic folk rock.

The BARK bunch were great, mingling with the audience not only after the show, but during it; as they played a few songs traditional Nashville style, off-stage in the aisle, grouped around a single microphone. (If you like string-bands, Toronto's Backstabbers are masters at the one-mike technique.)

There are more pictures available and a video clip in the Showcase. We're experimenting with new ways of delivering content in the Showcase, so it'll be a while before we sort out some bugs. The audio in the video clips will always be bad, because still digital cameras have limited audio capability and a mike the size of a pin head. Download times are also much slower than we'd like, but we're working on that.

Meanwhile, you can also look at this BARK photo gallery using the slide show approach we've used in the past. You can enlarge individual pictures by clicking on them, or run the slideshow with or without the audio (that you need to activate first if you want it).

[The main downside there is that the slide show can't be synched with the audio, so there's a mismatched ending.]