It could be an off colour April Fool’s joke, but you never know what that crazy bastard BA Johnston will do.

He’ll strip off his shirt, play the keyboard with his nose, disappear into the crowd, wander out into the street, jump on a van roof (he said it was his mom’s van) to play a couple songs,  run into the street and set off fireworks.

Either way it is an experience and all of that happened at the Slice and outside of the Slice  for a sold out show, March 31.

 The punk show of the week featured an exuberant audience and unfortunately an injury to local punk band Stressed Out’s lead singer, who apparently jumped into the crowd, but was not caught by them. The trooper continued the set anyway before going to the hospital.

 BA Johnston also leaped into the writhing audience to begin his show after cracking off colour jokes about Medicine Hat, but was caught by his screaming fans. He alternated between guitar, keyboard and drum machine and  sang a variety of his quirky originals centring around the themes of cheddar, McDonald‘s , deep fryers, assorted insanity and even a few bars of the Littlest Hobo theme song.

 One again common sense took a leave of absence as I had to stick around for  local band the Ketamines who are creating a big buzz in Calgary, just to see what the fuss is about.

It sounds like a lot of garage rock coming from Paul Lawton and Mammoth Cave records, but it is high energy and a lot of fun as the enthusiastic crowd  would agree.

 They played a capable set of rough hewn garage rock along the lines of Iggy and the Stooges mixed with a little Endangered Ape style strangeness (who most of this band were also members of), but with screeching organ and Paul Lawton howling the lyrics.