Review from the 5 city, Canada Rap Tour Tom Green's five-city Ontario rap tour in a yellow school bus ended in hometown Ottawa on Saturday with a performance that involved stuffed animals, Hooters girls, scrambled eggs, shots at ex-wife Drew Barrymore and the crowd-surfing debut of his dad, Richard Green. The action-packed spectacle at Barrymore's Music Hall was also a significant musical event that featured the heavy hip-hop beats and sleek scratching of Mike Simpson, one half of the hugely influential production team, the Dust Brothers. They're responsible for landmark albums by the Beastie Boys and Beck. Simpson stayed in the background on stage, but the heft of his mesmerizing beats gave weight to Green's material, which was divided between perceptive raps drawn from personal experiences and the goofy, toilet-joke humour he's known for. The pair have been working on music in Simpson's L.A. studio for more than a year, but had never played the material live before this week's tour. A CD, Prepare for Impact, is due for release this fall. Green, though known as an obnoxious jerk-of-a-comic, actually has a background in rap with Organized Rhyme, the trio he started at Colonel By High School. They were nominated for a 1993 Juno award. Green played the Juno track, Check The O.R., as his encore on Saturday, and mentioned performing at Barrymore's back in the O.R. days. There were also hometown shout-outs to Colonel By, U of O, Carleton, Algonquin College and Rogers community television station, where Green first pushed the boundaries of television comedy. For more proof of his hip-hop cred, there was his T-shirt. "I am a rapper," it declared across the back. It turned out he was a pretty good one, spitting out lyrics and projecting plenty of bug-eyed attitude for the audience and the cameras. The whole tour is being filmed for a DVD. The standout track in Saturday's set was Neighbours, a catchy, clever tirade about the celebs he runs into around Hollywood, name-dropping everyone from Paris Hilton to Fred Durst, including actress Drew Barrymore, his wife for five months in 2001. "There's my ex-bitch acting all drunk," he sneered in the lyrics, not the first of several signs of bitterness toward Barrymore. Another highlight of the set was Science, performed in tinfoil robot costumes to futuristic beats, about what things were like growing up before microwaves were invented. During a Beck-flavoured ode to Hooters restaurants (rhyming hooter with loser), two attractive young women in Hooters uniforms were up on stage serving trays of hors d'oeuvres to fans in front of the stage, a manoeuvre that, naturally, required them to lean over. The tall, bearded comic in baggy T-shirt and cargo pants performed with a group -- the Keepin' It Real crew -- made up of Louisiana rapper Shawn Anthony, Simpson (DJ EZ Mike) and skateboard champion Jeremy Klein, a cute slacker dude whose performing duties included cooking eggs and tossing stuffed animals in the crowd. Why eggs? Still not sure, but it's probably a good thing no one ate them. Dozens of plush toys had been purchased at a Salvation Army thrift store -- the price tag still attached in one case - to be distributed to the audience. There were more animals than fans who wanted them. "Don't go throwing the teddy bears back," moaned Green. "They're presents from me." The audience, though a few bodies short of sold out, was generally co-operative as Green bullied everyone into sitting cross-legged on the floor and remaining silent for five minutes, supposedly in order to set a Guiness world record for silence in a nightclub. There was also a special appearance by Green's parents, who had the guts to venture from their safe perch on the upper balcony down to the stage to join their unpredictable son. From there, Green pressured his dad to lay back and "surf" the crowd, a stunt that nearly brought a tear to Green's eye a bit later. "Thank you for not dropping my father," he said to the fans at the front of the stage. Also called to the stage was their school-bus driver, Shirley, a good-natured, grey-haired woman in a huge pink T-shirt, who declined Green's invitation to surf the crowd. All in all, Green delivered a show that was surprisingly good in musical content, but off the scale in entertainment value. It's probably the best creative idea Green has ever had, and it's going to make for a hilarious DVD. (Not Birdman) <-----------Last post on my friends account.
