For the first half of his sold-out show at an Ottawa nightclub on Thursday night, Ashley MacIsaac couldn't shut up. The Cape Breton fiddler who has supposedly turned a new leaf began offending people before he played a note, the Ottawa Citizen reported Saturday.
MacIsaac appeared on stage unshaven, hood up, baseball hat down, sunglasses on.
Spotting a young Asian woman on the dance floor, he launched into a rant on severe acute respiratory syndrome, the disease that has scared tourists away from Toronto.
For the rest of the night, it was his favourite topic. First he accused Chinese women of spreading the illness, then tried to gloss over the racist implications by declaring an attraction to Oriental girls in Catholic-school kilts.
"They got the SARS," he said, like a rave kid describing a show as "sick" and meaning it's awesome.
Then he introduced his band members as a bunch of Torontonians who all have SARS.
"Down east, we'd be called Ashley and the Pedophiles," he said. ``Tonight we're Ashley and the SARS."
Throughout the concert, MacIsaac seemed to get a huge kick out of intoning the word into the microphone.
There was debate about what was in MacIsaac's hand as he arrived onstage: the end of a marijuana joint or the rosin for his bow.
Publicists for the Atlantic music festival in Ottawa said there was no evidence of drug use during the show, which was taped by CBC-TV for eventual broadcast.
But another lengthy discourse between songs linked the subject of legalization of marijuana to Prime Minister Jean Chretien, with MacIsaac suggesting that a joint be called a "Jean" in tribute to the prime minister's increasingly relaxed stance on marijuana laws.
"Shut up and play," someone in the crowd finally shouted, and soon he did.
Most of the songs were drawn from his recently released CD. Some expect the self-titled record to jumpstart MacIsaac's lagging career and put to rest his bad-boy reputation as an unpredictable, profanity-spewing performer.