CMW 2015: Pkew Pkew Pkew (gunshots) @ The Silver Dollar

SATURDAY — Okay, so, to be honest, things tend to get a little... uh... blurry by the time we reach the wee hours of a festival's final night. And this year's CMW Saturday was even blurrier than usual. It was a little after one in the morning by the time we stumbled into the Dollar. We'd started drinking on the roof of the Bovine about twelve hours earlier. Everything after about nine that night starts to get hazy. Hell, everything after Thursday does: drunk on top of hangover on top of drunk on top of hangover...

So here's what we remember:

Beer. Sweat. Mike Warne's raging electric guitar. The ever-changing lights. Red. Purple. Green. Blue. The relentless, earth-shaking pulse of Dave Laino's drum kit. The crowd, a swirling confusion of people. Stefan from PUP grinning in the front row, moshing with the manic energy of a punk frontman on his night off, half-drenched in sweat and booze. Vince from Stella somewhere nearby, bathed in blue. Someone from the band — was it Mike? was it Ryan? was it Emmett? — heading down off the stage into the writhing mass of the audience, microphone outstretched into the singing faces of strangers. And a whole room screaming along to the chorus of "Asshole Pandemic." And to "Stop Calling Us, Chief." And the air in that room come alive.

Then, the fuzzy-eyed hangover. An early Mother's Day Sunday morning. The too-bright sun. The headache, vicious and unfair. Finding these grainy photos on our phone. And nothing but vague, half-lost memories of the night before.

LOOK

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Read all our coverage of CMW 2015 here.

Words and photos by Adam Bunch, Editor-in-Chief of the Little Red Umbrella and the creator of the Toronto Dreams Project and Toronto Historical Jukebox. You can read his posts here, follow him on Twitter here, or email him at adam@littleredumbrella.com.