Fiddler MacIsaac offers half of future revenues to winning eBay bidder
Fiddler Ashley MacIsaac, as known for his attention-seeking stunts as his musical talents, has launched an online auction to sell half of his future revenue.
In an eBay listing, the 33-year-old musician says he’ll share 50 per cent of his future receipts with a winning bidder until the day he dies.
The deal also includes a concert a year for the next decade, located wherever the winner chooses.
As of Wednesday afternoon, one anonymous eBay account holder has met MacIsaac’s starting bid of $1.5 million. The auction ends July 7.
The Cape Breton-born, Toronto-based fiddler is reportedly working on a new album.
Considered a musical prodigy since his childhood, MacIsaac rose to fame in the mid-1990s for mixing contemporary rock ‘n’ roll elements with traditional Celtic music.
His genre-smashing album Hi, How Are You Today? became a Canadian and international hit, with the single Sleepy Maggie climbing Top 10 charts around the world. However, his musical achievements were soon overshadowed by his eccentric behaviour as well as drug problems.
The bad-boy musician began courting controversy, including in an incident where he kicked up his kilt and exposed his genitals during an appearance on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, and after talking in an interview about his sex life with an underage boyfriend.
The outlandish behaviour eventually extended to concerts as well, including several New Year’s gigs in 2000 where he launched into profanity-laced tirades directed at the audience. At one point, he joked about declaring bankruptcy รณ something that came true in spring 2000.
In recent years, he has toyed with a bid to represent Dartmouth, N.S., as an Independent member of Parliament (he later withdrew his plans); briefly ran for leadership of the federal Liberal Party (he dropped out after a few months); and declared he was planning a same-sex wedding ceremony in Calgary to protest Alberta’s opposition to gay marriage (he and his partner eventually married onstage during an East Coast Music Awards concert in Halifax in 2007).
“A lot of things I still say today aren’t true about me. I say stuff to media that I’ll make up just to see if they’ll print it,” MacIsaac once told CBC-TV’s biography series Life and Times.
“I’ve had some public issues that people have read about, whether it was drugs or money, but that’s the persona.”
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