Princely blind date?

The phone lines were burning up yesterday with rumors that an Ottawa date would be included in a planned lightning Canadian club tour by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

TAFKAP has been showing up on short notice at various small venues around the continent, and confirmation of a Toronto date is expected imminently. A Montreal announcement is also anticipated, but various sources said Ottawa had also been in the discussions, and had even been included in an aborted schedule of shows for last weekend. Any Ottawa show seems to hinge on whether His Royal Badness opts to play a second show in Toronto. One source said plans for a royal visit have been on and off for months, and no one is betting the Purple One won't continue changing his plans.

MacKane gang: His solo albums haven't been selling, he's label-less, and he recently got over a lengthy illness. So how is Alejandro Escovedo reacting to all that hard luck?

He's going to strap on his guitar, set his amp for stun and hit the road with his raunchy side-project, Buick MacKane.

"It's real liberating. Collectively we are all guys who are underdogs," Escovedo says fresh from feeding the chickens at his Austin home and prior to starting a tour that arrives at Zaphod's Saturday.

"We kinda just spit in the face of the record industry and have a good time."

Anyone who knows Escovedo through his painfully honest singer-songwriter albums Gravity, Thirteen Years and With These Hands may be dumbfounded by the four-on-the-floor, grubby sound of Buick MacKane's new album, The Pawn Shop Years. Certainly, the music mafia in Austin didn't quite know what to make of the band.

"We are like the abused child or something. We didn't think anybody loved us," he says.

"We're loud and we are obnoxious. At one point, we were very drunk, too. We're not as drunk as we used to be," he laughs. "We're stuck in that limbo. It is weird."

Escovedo, who earned his stripes in the pioneering punk band The Nuns and alterna-country granddads Rank And File, has been living in his own kind of limbo, too -- somewhere in between critical acclaim and commercial fortune.

"I don't sell many records, you know," he says, as if admitting some humbling truth. "I have got to tell you it is not easy for me to survive with a family and everything and to play music. And especially the type of music I have chosen to do. Luckily, I have people around me who support me, like my wife and my family and my friends, who encourage me to keep going.

"And the fans that come to see us...People came out to see us who didn't know us, but came away with real strong emotional ties to the songs. That's a wonderful thing.

"It is not something everybody gets. There's a lot of people who sell millions of records that never attain that sort of connection with their audience."