Musical Style Celtic
Influences Pogues, Ramones, Spirit of the West, Great Big Sea

Item Description
Plastic jewel case, color booklet, 20 tracks, total play time 60:00

Liner Notes, Credits, Other Details
Compilation of tracks from ”A Month of Sundays” and ”Hotel Motel” as well as live tracks and one new song. Available April 14th at the show at Barrymore's or online now!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter. I don’t feel like we deserved more success, that we were overlooked by a closed minded, conservative music industry or that my twenties were rendered an exercise in futility by a need for rock and roll stardom and excess. No, I look back on the 1990’s, the alcohol, the poverty, the blurry indiscretions and the painful mistakes with fondness. I mean I began the decade with a university degree, a job and a band that I was proud to be in. Then, along with a bunch of unemployed musicians, I went busking, got fired, broke up my band, started what would turn into a seven year drinking binge called Jimmy George and ended the decade broke, in therapy, and “married” with children. Who could ask for more?

It would have been nice to have become the Beatles and to have gone on to failed relationships with supermodels and serious drug addictions. Or even to have reached the level of success of the Guess Who and made enough money to grow fat, irrelevant and, the odd reunion tour excluded, never having to work again. But that was not to be our fate. Fortunately or unfortunately our legend never got much beyond a few university dorm rooms.

So what do we have now? What did our ten thousand Sunday night gigs, constant touring and fruitless record contracts get us? Well, we have some CD’s, videos, t-shirts and posters that most of us lost or gave away. We have stories. We have a few physical and emotional scars. We’ve got wives and children born out of alcoholic lust to people we met at our shows. And we have sarcasm. Bitter, hurtful, hateful sarcasm. And that makes us laugh every time we get together.

LONG LIVE CELTIC ROCK! LONG LIVE JIMMY GEORGE!!!

- Spike

• This CD, like many other things Jimmy George, was hastily assembled, could have been better if we had spent more time on it and been more organized, etc. Perhaps because of these very excuses, this compilation ends up being all the more representative of everything that Jimmy George is, and isn't. Listening to some of the tracks from A Month of Sundays and Hotel Motel does remind us that hopefully the music does stand the test of time and that despite our disorganization and occasional disintegration into complete chaos, there were some redeeming qualities to the music itself. Then again, the music often became secondary to the spectacle, a prime example being the time Spike played a song on stage at the Duke completely naked, after enough people threw money on the table in front of him to tempt him. Or the time we all (except Mickey?) played in dresses to celebrate our transsexuality. I mean Hallowe’en.

We had our share of lucky breaks including appearances on the Tom Green Show and Rita & Friends, getting signed to Cargo Records and getting distribution by MCA, getting picked up by The Agency as our booking agents, and getting 2 videos picked up for rotation on Much Music. Then there are the less glamourous, yet just as unforgettable episodes such as "The Van with the Engine That Kept Exploding", "Josh Drives Off the Highway During a Blizzard", "Standing Under a Bridge in the Rain at 4am in Cambridge, UK" and of course who can forget "Shouting Match in Fredericton (parts I and II)"? Then again there's always "Playing in an Empty Heavy Metal Bar in Winnipeg" and "White Knuckles on the Coquihalla Highway".

This CD was compiled partly for those in the band who lost their copies, partly for the existing fans who may have lost or otherwise abused their copies, and hopefully for the new fans that may have been dragged out to a show by someone already in the "cult of Jimmy". We've also included one new song, hastily thrown together like everything else, chronicling some of our adventures in the UK a few years back, as well as an old song called Where You Bleed which was never recorded except in this live version. Special thanks go out to Mike MacDonald of Jr. Gone Wild for allowing us to exploit his set list for years on end, and to George Jennings for picking up bass duties through some of the leaner times. Please enjoy this CD with your favourite pint of ale or lager.

- Steve

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