It was all Carlos Barth's idea.
He was one of the cool kids at Lakes District Secondary School.
He had a mop of long curly hair like Jon Bon Jovi, and he used it.
He was the guitar player in the only band in school that actually got hired to play anywhere.
He said "I really want to go see the Colin James concert in Prince George." I'm not even sure he intended me to hear it but I said something like "I love Colin James."
And by that, I meant I loved the song Mighty Mighty Man, the one and only song I had ever heard, once, on CBC Radio, by this upstart guitar star named Colin James, a Canadian kid who was somehow making it big in the international music scene.
According to CBC, this stuff was called "the blues" but I was musically colour blind at that stage of my life, living on a farm in the rural outskirts of an already rural town in far-from-any-city northern B.C.
"So let's go," Carlos said.
Now, I had me a mullet back then, which was fairly high on the cool scale of the day, but I was far from ever hanging out with the self-selecting style sect. I was about as cool as a fart in a car on a sunny day.
I did have a car, though, and it was a sunny day.
It was a 1978 Omega SX, blue and white with wide tires, a V6, and a spirit voice that needled me to shove the accelerator all the way to the floor the way 17-year-olds with mullets were wont to do in 1989. (The speeds I travelled at were obscene and an utter danger to the public and I am very, very sorry.)
I had a bridge friend back then. Kevin Derksen. He was in with the cool camp but also didn't mind hanging out with me, for some reason.
He and I would go driving on the lake ice and see how fast we could go, then slam on the brakes and see how many miles we could slide, or how many times we could spin until the forces of nature finally stilled our icy doughnuts.
Kevin was the bass player in Carlos's band, so he was a natural third for our little tribe of Colin James fans who didn't even know what he looked like. You couldn't Google that kind of thing, back then.
We could only bring one more with us, since Carlos's mom and dad were going to also go to Prince George that day.
They would drive ahead of us, rent a room in the Holiday Inn, and we could crash there after the concert in some configuration of floor and bed amounting to four.
That's when my world got spun. Carlos passed Kevin and I in the hallway the next day and said "Dana Smith's going to come with us."
Dana.
Girl.
Cool girl.
Figure skater!
Never spoke to me.
Inevitably knew my name (our whole grad class was 75 kids) but probably wished she didn't.
Dana Smith.
In.
My.
Car.
There's a lot more to the story, but some of it is sordid teenage delinquency involving bootlegged lemon gin, making the drive from Burns Lake to Prince George in two hours (it typically takes closer to three), and hoping we could find some place called The Coliseum where Colin James was going to play a rock concert - whatever that looked like.
Now, Carlos always was pretty open-minded for a cool kid, and we did play hockey on the same team when we were 12, so it wasn't all that surprising that he treated me just fine on that trip, and forever after.
What was really surprising was how willing Dana was to act friendly, and a year later, the night we all graduated, she gave me one of the biggest hugs. We weren't close like besties, but we had become friends.
Are friends.
Carlos went on to become a professional musician, moved to Sweden to start a family, and got involved in sound production for live concerts.
He's kind of a big deal in those circles. I still catch up on his news when I bump into his mom and dad.
Dana went on to become a teacher, moved to the Island, now works at a university, has a lovely family, and smiles a lot.
She knits, paints, has a terrific family and helps shape the next generation. We are in their good hands because they are in her good hands.
Kev toured the world as a musician, and got into internet technologies as a profession.
He moved back to Burns Lake to raise his family, work for the school district, and keep playing music as he sees fit.
That's close enough to bump into him from time to time from my base in Prince George, the place that seemed like the big, glittery city that night we set off on our adventure.
The last time Kev and I ran into each other, we said the old "we should get together one of these days" thing, and started talking about what event might bring Kev down to PG. We suddenly froze when we saw a certain name on the CN Centre events list.
Colin James.
So there we were on Saturday night, missing Carlos and Dana, but channeling them into this unbeknownst hero on stage.
We marveled at two guitars we recognized he was still using these 30 years later and the lightning bolt guitar strap.
We laughed about how half his band was likely not yet born the first time we saw him in a room just like this one.
We nodded in deep approval at the saxophone player.
There's just not enough brass in modern rock 'n' roll. There's hardly even rock 'n' roll in modern rock 'n' roll.
In that sense, Colin James is like a mechanic who knows how to fix a sputtering Formula 1 car.
At one point, he rattled off a medley of five old blues joints by the first-generation masters and Kevin named them all as James morphed one into another in one continuous tune. Kev had become such a fan of the blues, because of that first concert injection, that he had done his own Delta discipling.
We both took turns guessing which songs James was going to leave off the set-list, because there's just no way he can do them all, not even all his singles, in a lone concert.
I was surprised he left Voodoo Thang off the menu, but I knew it was in favour of stuff like Breakin' Up The House (Every Night) and a delicious reworking of Keep On Loving Me Baby that sounded a lot more like the original Otis Rush version, or even the Magic Sam version, than his own fantastic interpretation off the Sudden Stop album.
I'd never heard of any of these foundational blues players in 1989 when I was a scared, disconnected teenager, but when James launched into his huge hit Just Came Back, on Saturday, I could now recognize that was always prefaced by a riff of Stones In Your Passway by the legendary Robert Johnson.
I knew it so well by now that I leaned over to Kevin as the telltale slide clank got underway and I said "I really wish he would do this whole song, not just that first stanza" and what does James do? Like he read my mind? He does it. The whole song. Then, and only then, he did his own hit.
That's a master who respects and never forgets the giants on whose shoulders he now stands. Epic amounts of taking got done from those gritty, committed, talented, inevitably poor-as-dirt black Americans back when Elvis Presley and Pat Boone were just flat-out stealing songs by Big Mama Thornton and Little Richard.
James isn't alone (see also: The Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, Eric Clapton, Jeff Healey, Harp Dog Brown, etc.) in being a giver - spreading the gospel of the blues out of respect and primal love.
James can't possibly play all his good stuff - for Kevin he was hoping in vain for Lone Wolf and I was hoping in vain for Saviour or Sudden Stop - because he has about four different careers going on all at once, all of them rich and fertile and all of them spun from the cotton of the blues.
But Kevin was heavily hoping to hear James's version of Into The Mystic and I was craning to hear the brand new one called 40 Light Years and those wishes were granted by this human encyclopedia of human connection.
You see, that's what the blues is. It connects the metal fan with the country fan, the jazz cat with the bluegrasser.
It connects the rich with the poor and most of all it connects the poor with the other poor. It connected four otherwise disenfranchised teenagers from a small northern B.C. rural town and set them all on a path into their later lives, from a Prince George hockey rink set ablaze by a lightning bolt shot from a guitar strap attached to his six-string time machines.
