Rock and Roll All Afternoon

Review by Darren Gawle
Photography by Rodney Gitzel

There was, however, no real reason to assume that the first guitar marathon was any kind of benchmark in Vancouver's musical history. Sure, 1322 guitarists (well, there were two or three bassists, too) jammed with Randy Bachman on "Taking Care of Business" for 68 minutes and 40 seconds. Sure, we got into the Guinness Book of World Records. But does that mean that the world now looks up to our city because of it? Are we any cooler? Would we stop being cool if we didn't try to break our own record? Apparently someone at Music West thinks so, or else we wouldn't be here (all 295 of us, or down about 1000 from last time).

So the tune this year is "I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night," which immediately poses three problems:

1) How many people know the song by heart? KISS may be a big act, but none of their songs have become part of popular culture the way "Taking Care of Business" has.

2) For us philistines who aren't KISS fans, they've supplied us with a tab sheet for the song. It takes up two pages. Enough said.

3) Oops, nope: Said tab sheet shows the wrong chords.

There's no need to go into the gory details of all 78 minutes and 57 seconds (they can't last another 0:03?) of the marathon -- I won't stay that long. Black Diamond do try to instill some enthusiasm in the crowd, but end up acting obnoxious. Meanwhile, a good half-hour goes by before Bruce Kulick wanders over from his hotel and plugs in. The local musicians invited onstage to jam make plausible attempts at looking interested, but it's just too damn silly. That's it, I'm out of here.