A princess, a bricklayer, & a rock band
The drawing book is all over the place!
When I look through the drawing book (the old sketch journal I kept many years ago), I see that we’ve come to the story of the princess and the bricklayer. Be warned - it’s an unfinished story! And be further warned, there’s a rock band that makes an appearance right after that!
In case you can’t read that sideways writing, it says: “I don’t feel like ending this story right now - I don’t like the end. Maybe if I leave it right now I might think of a way to change it.”
I did think of a way to change it, many years later. It’s part of a bigger, unfinished story that I am still carrying around in the back of my head. Maybe someday I’ll finish it!
The middle panel above shows me pensively still thinking about the guy who broke my heart, and the last panel shows me sitting in an airplane on my way to see Bob Dylan in Hamburg. You can read about that adventure in this episode of “Bob Dylan Comics.” But after I got back from Hamburg, I went to see another musical performance in my hometown of Calgary: much-loved indie rock band The A-Team!
It’s hard to find anything about them online, but the A-Team was a popular Calgary band back in the 1990s, made up of lead singer Andy Sparacino and the collection of shirtless men in the drawing: Dan Vacon, Dan McKinnon, Keith Ritchie and Pat Downing. For this particular performance, my brother Matt (not a member of the A-Team) also cast off his shirt and joined them onstage for one song. (I’m not sure why shirtlessness was part of this show!)
Last year, in 2023, Andy and Dan McKinnon both passed away, which is pretty sad. Dan was known for being a dad, brother, son and all-around nice guy. Andy was also one of the all-around nicest guys you’d ever meet, but became better known to Canadian fans as the character “Tron” from the movie FUBAR. You can hear a tribute to, and some tunes performed by, Andy, on CBC Radio’s Key of A with Tarik Robinson, starting at 31 minutes into the show. (It starts with the song Wildcat, the same one the band was playing in the picture above).
A long time ago (a couple of years after I drew the picture of the A-Team in the drawing book), I painted some portraits of some Calgary indie rock musicians. I still have all those paintings in my basement - what should I do with them?
Here are the portraits of the guys in the drawing.
I’m having fun posting these stories and comics and I’m going to keep these newsletters free. But maybe, if I had enough paid subscribers, I could stay home and paint some more portraits. I haven’t painted a portrait in 20 years!! So please consider subscribing, and let me know: if I actually painted some portraits, who should I paint?