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I

choices

Punk legend Joe Keithley and the rest of D.O.A. will wring in the new
at the Niagara Hotel on New Year's Eve. Chris Cameron photo.
Hey, that old geezer in the "1994" sash and diapers is beginning to smell. Whew! This year
needs a-changing. Before we go through the "Goodbye, Burundi. How are ya, Rwanda?"
bit again, a couple of rounds of the blues would be in order. Texas soulster Frankie Lee
brings his impressive pipes to the Yale on Thursday and Friday (December 22 and 23), but
for smoky, lounge-lizard blues you have to go to a smoky, tacky lounge full of lizards-such
as the Waldorf Hotel's Polynesian Room on Friday (December 23), where Coal and Lux
Indigo will wax torchy. The world got beat like an 18th-century cart horse this year, so that
night some world-beat music would also be in order, such as Opah .. .lhi.Ala at the Ashe
Gallery. For some reason things are pretty quiet over the weekend, but they get real loud
real quick on Tuesday (December 27), with the recently reunited Sons of Freedom
storming the Town Pump, and even louder on Wednesday (December 28), when the Four
Horsemen, the Modernettes, Stone Crazy, the Frank Frink 500, the Bottom Feeders, and
Jim Cummins assemble at the Commodore to honour the memory of famed local punk
drummer Ken Montgomery in An Evening With(out) Dimwit. After that, it's time to give
1994 a wedgie, a hotfoot, and an exploding cigar, then show it the door. How you
celebrate New Year's Eve depends on your musical proclivities. We start at the top end with
jazz, tapas, and valet parking at the Hastings Park Racecourse with the Coat Cooke
Quartet playing live. New Year's Eve Matata has Opah ...lhi.Ala and the Ogedengbe
Drummers doing the world-beat thing at the Glass Slipper, and the blues can be found at
the Yale, where Harpdog Brown and the Bloodhounds will howl. Country and
bluegrass fans have their New Year's Wingding at the W.I.5.E. Hall, with Peter Allan &
the Jellyroll Blues Band, Jimmie Roy's 5-Star Hillbillies, and Ray Condo & his Swinging
Dukes. We arrive at rock with local recording artists Pure playing the Starfish Room; turn
up the craziness a bit and you have the Real McKenzies bringing their kilt-clad loch-rock
to the Railway Club. But the ultimate, mean-streets, got-puked-on-in-Times-Square New
Year's party would be veteran punksters D.O.A. at the Falls Pub in the Niagara Hotel,
which makes the Waldorf look like the Astoria. Remember, driving like a homicidal maniac
is acceptable to Vancouver city police only if you are sober.