Of all the wonderful emails visitors have sent to the site, one question has loomed above most of them: "When is The Pursuit of Happiness going to play more shows?" They hadn't played live in public since 1997 and hadn't recorded anything since a demo in 1999. While the band had not officially broken up, Moe would respond to questions of playing with a mild shrug, and everyone got on with their lives.
When Moe's wife Laura, who'd never seen the band play, started suggesting that the gang get back together, the ball got rolling. In the fall of 2001, she approached your humble webmaster and asked (without Moe's knowledge, initially) that the site solicit emails from visitors as to whether they'd see a new Pursuit show. You responded en masse, the emails were shown to Moe and Dave, and the decision was finally made. A show at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, Ontario was planned for June 22, 2002, with warmup shows in nearby Barrie and Cambridge the preceding two days. The lineup was the same that had last played: Moe, Dave, Brad, Kris and Renée.
To read more about the history and motivation behind these shows, read this article from the Kitchener/Waterloo paper Echo. To hear the Horseshoe show one song at a time, go to the mp3 archive. To find out how to get video clips, head to the bottom of the Audio page. To read a preview/review of the three nights and see how it all came together, check the Updates. But to see what happened from as many angles as possible, we're proud to present our very first photo pages.
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Photos by Rob Winder (for full-size originals visit his
site) and Nick
Bastian (where noted)