Today I began my annual Blues Fest gig, where I help unload stuff off trucks for bands, and then point lights at them. I'm booked every single day between today and the 15th, happening between a couple days of set-up before and a couple days of tear-down afterwards. Meaning that the social life and free time aspects of day to day life will all but completely disappear, but at least I'll have a lot of money in the aftermath to spend on comic books and tattoos.

This is actually the first time in years that there isn't someone one the line-up that I'm highly anticipating and excited to see for free. The last few festivals have been a virtual check-list of my favourite bands: Metric, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Joan jett & the Blackhearts, and Weezer. Metric is back this year, and there are other bands like Dragonette that I have seen before, and Lauryn Hill who I will be glad to see 'cause I thought she was essentially retired.

On the main stage tonight was Tangerine Dream. To my untrained musical ear they sounded like a psychedelic record skipping and looping over the same three or four minutes of music over and over. On the B stage, which is where I will spend most of my time, we hosted Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea fame. Not to offend any of my East Coast Canadian friends, but I am not a fan of his musical styling's.

The head-liner on the main stage who closed out the night was some DJ, a genre the fest seems to be greatly embracing this year. My friend who I'll be working alongside for the next couple weeks and I were on our stage looking over at the full-blown DJ-ing chaos happening over in the distance. From out of nowhere a couple of groupies showed up, they were so cliché that they looked like characters from a bad SNL sketch (yes...I know that saying bad before SNL sketch is a redundant statement). That was our cue to get out of dodge.

If there's one performer on the list that I would say is the one to see, it must be Alice Cooper. If only because he was on The Muppet Show, which means that if I work on that stage that I'll only be a couple of degrees of professional separation away from none other than Kermit the Frog.