Ghost of Clinton's Tavern

When he arrived in Toronto in the early 1990s, Brian Blain introduced himself to the city’s blues scenes by playing at jam sessions and hard-to-get gigs. Playing at Clinton’s Tavern on Bloor St. in Toronto inspired him to write The Ghost of Clinton Tavern. The song is based on rumours that there’s a ghost at the tavern, but the rest he made up. When he performed it recently at Clinton’s, “the sound guy told me that a new intern had been spooked by something in the sound booth…and the barmaid nodded in agreement, too.”

"Occasionally I do a gig with my son Joel – we call it BlainBlain – two laptops running a program called Ableton Live. We captured a bit of that in this treatment of “Ghost”. All the notes were played on my guitar but sliced and diced by Joel. To keep the “living album” alive, the MIDI clips from the middle section will be available for download on my website as are the original live versions of all these tunes complete with my rambling introductions.