Festival Man Read online

  Festival Man

  Geoff Berner

  These are the Memoirs of Campbell Ouiniette, former head of Bombsmuggler Incorporated Music, manager at one time or another of many illustrious folk, country, punk, and world music artists.

  The stack of copiously stained, longhand-scrawled legal notepads were found in October 2003, outside Pincher Creek, Alberta, by accordionist and archivist Geoff Berner, who also managed to decipher Ouiniette’s idiosyncratic handwriting.

  FESTIVAL MAN

  “Without cruelty, there is no festival.”

  — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

  I BOUGHT THIS FARMHOUSE FOR A DOLLAR. Which I actually haven’t paid yet. I shouldn’t be here. I should be headed home. But I can’t go home empty-handed, so I have decided to sit down in this empty, run-down-but-still-standing discarded house, and write a proper account of how the whole thing went down last weekend, in Calgary. I feel the need to make an accounting of myself.

  Why? Because I know that a lot of people think of me as worthless. Less than worthless; a parasite, dragging other people down, a rip-off artist.

  I know their nicknames for me, “Scam-Bull.” “Mr. ‘No Problem.’” I was given an Indian name once, a good one, which spoke of my bravery and rare insight. That name was later redacted by the name-giver to “Skid Mark.” They say I’m incompetent, a liar, an Alcoholic. One musician who I still think of as a friend will tell anybody who asks about me that I’m the kind of guy who’d sell his own grandmother and still not manage to make a profit. How do you like that? And in a certain light, maybe they’re right. But for the sake of Posterity, for the sake of my Love, at home in Vancouver, my Love whose regard for me I know has been ebbing away like a slow leak in an old truck tire, and for my daughter, too, maybe when she’s old enough, after she’s heard all the innuendo and bullshit talked about me, there needs to be a document that shows my light on things.

  I’ve always sworn I’d never write my memoirs. I’ve always thought of the written word, unaccompanied by music, as a guaranteed lie, deliberate or otherwise. So this will not be that. It’s just an account sheet summary of this past weekend, skipping over irrelevant details, focusing on the key points, and, most importantly, explaining from my point of view what was really going on, under the surface of the events themselves, especially my intentions, my goals, the reasoning behind my actions, actions which I know, on the face of things, might look a bit questionable to some people.

  The key is to keep that focus, to stick to the story, and not get distracted into digression. Above all, I have to make sure to stay solidly on track, telling the events of this past weekend. It should run no more than four or five pages, which is good because my arm is pretty badly chewed up and I’m afraid it may be starting to worsen a bit. Right arm, though, so I can still write through the pain, as I’m left-handed.

  So I’m holed up here in this house that I bought for a dollar. I just own the house, not the land around the house. You can do that around here, just by finding a number on a truckstop bulletin board and meeting a guy at a diner in town. That’s ‘‘’cause this is where the big agribusinesses have bought out all the family farms to create food factories the size of Belgium. It’s not cost-efficient to bulldoze all the little grey houses that dot the Canadian prairies. You might as well just leave them standing there, an accidental warning, like the statues on Easter Island. They’re not hooked up to the electricity grid or water anymore, but it’s summer, and there’s some buckets around, and a river not too far away that I can get to in the rental minivan that I should have returned four days ago.

  I stopped at the store on the way here, so I’ve got a bunch of good Alberta Beef jerky, a bag of tomatoes, a roll of bandage tape, and a bottle of whiskey, not for the purpose of getting drunk, mostly just for sterilizing the wounds in the arm, but also to use to wean myself off the booze a bit, which may be overdue, I guess. Don’t want to get the d.t.’s — you can die of that. I’ve seen it. And of course, I’ve got a bunch of speed, in powdered, snortable form, to keep the words coming efficiently. I have candles, too, so I can work through the night.

  THE COLLECTOR

  LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I AM.

  I’m quite a big man, if I do say so myself, about six foot two, and broad-shouldered, with a measure of heft. Not fat, but some heft. I’ve got a mighty puff of unruly, dirty-blond curly hair that kind of emanates from my head and face and makes me look even bigger. I think it’s fair to say that, for better or for worse, I take up a lot of space. Not just physically; I project. I don’t care much about clothes. I tend to wear the same green sweatpants and black hoodie everywhere I go, whether I’m in the alley behind some dank rock club, or at some idiotic music industry awards gala. I smell like drum tobacco and dope and thick cowboy coffee and eastern European delicatessen meat. And sweat, probably.

  I look big, but I rarely get into actual fistfights, and although I can’t say I’ve ever won a brawl in a bar, I’m usually able to stick to the Golden Rule of Canadian Bar Fighting and inflict roughly as much damage on my assailant as he has done unto me.

  I’m not a musician. I make music happen. Yes, I’ve played music, but only when it was the last option, in order to make the music happen. I played the bass a few times because no one else wanted to play the bass, and otherwise that band would not have happened, so I did what had to be done. I wasn’t bad. That’s the good thing about electric bass — it’s very hard to be noticed as a great bass player — people only notice the bass as the general sound of the band — but the corollary is that it’s hard to be noticed as bad. Not like what I do now. Everyone knows I’m bad. I’m a bad man, a bad drunk, a tornado of chaos, harbinger of strange music. Only some of them appreciate how important that makes me in this world.

  I STARTED OUT COLLECTING RECORDS, growing up on a horse ranch outside a mid-sized town in Alberta. First I just bought albums from Kelly’s Music World at the strip mall. Then I noticed some of the albums had catalogues in them, so I sent away for more albums. Then I started bugging my mother to drive me into Edmonton to finger through the vinyl at the record stores near the university. I started talking to the music twerps who worked there, and that’s when I got truly, absolutely hooked, saving up my chore money for the rare stuff, getting in touch with other weirdos. Still remember tearing the brown paper off the bootleg copy of the Rolling Stones’ Cocksucker Blues, thinking, this is contraband from another, more exciting universe. This is nasty. This is worth staying alive for.

  It was a completely seamless step for me, from collecting rare music to collecting rare musicians. I met Sandy Mackenzie when we were both seventeen, in a record store that isn’t there anymore, on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton. We both reached for the same 45, “Hamburger Lady,” by Throbbing Gristle (“Burned from the waist up, she’s dying”) and immediately got to talking. I told him that I’d tape the single and let him have the tape for free if he’d let me buy the only copy in the store. He said he just wanted to hear it a couple of times, ’cause he wanted his band to cover it.

  Sandy was the first person I ever met who was actually in a band. Okay, there were the horrifying sad country bands that did the shitheel circuit of rural Alberta, playing Charlie Pride and Conway Twitty covers, but that didn’t count. I was intrigued. I kidnapped him and dragged him back to the empty house some friends and I had been squatting. We listened to “Hamburger Lady” over and over again, and he told me about how he wasn’t sure, but he thought his band might be pretty fucking good. Maybe even as good as the Modern Minds, some nerdy XTC fans from Saskatchewan that he idolized.

  Sandy was wrong about his band. They were fucking fantastic. They didn’t even know how good they were. That was my job.

  I was ecstatical
ly, devoutly in love with the sound that band made. I would just sit crouched in the corner of their foul, dusty practice space in Sandy’s mom’s basement, drinking hi-test beer and rocking back and forth like an autistic monk. The dryer didn’t vent properly and I still remember the warm, wet denim smell of that place, mixed with the malt of new and old beer.

  The sound hadn’t been quantified and qualified and marketified yet. The people playing it didn’t know it was hardcore punk rock. Machine-gun drums, random, power-saw guitar, urgent, thudding, repetitive bass, and screaming lyrics full of everything you wished you’d said when you were being chewed out by the principal, the cop, the manager of the 7-Eleven. Of course it sounded like “a bunch of noise” — it was the sound of breaking out of being trapped. That’s what real freedom sounds like, motherfucker, not that you would recognize it.

  I’ll never know where I got this instinct, but I found myself desperately wanting to share that sound with the world, to see what it would do to people. I was sure that if they could hear it, some of them, just some of them, mind you, would change before my eyes, just as the music was changing me. One day, I stood up from my corner in the practice space, and told them that they had one month to be ready, because I was going to get them their first show. They gave me a look I’m now used to, that mixture of awe and suspicion, the excitement of wanting to believe, combined with the stubborn Albertan certainty they’d been raised with: that interesting things only happened to other people, people on TV or something. But even if they were pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to do it, they still desperately wanted me to be able to do it. They couldn’t hide that. With that look, they invested me with their hopes, despite themselves in spite of themselves.

  Naturally, I hadn’t a clue how I was going to do it, besides some vague notions I’d derived from “the early years” segments of rock-star biographies, but the certainty with which I said it was enough to magnetize the band to my nonexistent plan.

  That first show I put on, thank God I was an indigent at the time. The money we lost on renting the hall, the posters, the P.A. rental — I could walk away from it, because I owned no assets to seize and had no place to live. Deep down, I guess I knew that I had no idea what I was doing, because at least I’d made the wise decision to put my last Social Studies teacher’s address on the forms the hall custodian put in front of me. That was the last time I have ever had the poor judgment to promote a concert under my own legal name. Maybe the key lesson of that first show was that you can’t put on a financially successful concert by marketing only to people who are just like you. Especially if you yourself are penniless, and you enjoy breaking things. Whatever the lesson was, I’ve met about three thousand people who claim to have been among that sad little dimly lit smattering of ugly kids in torn denim. The crowd was so sparse that when they attempted to slam dance, about half the time they missed slamming into anybody, instead tumbling and sliding in the broken glass and beer that they’d stamped into the old hardwood floor.

  Had to leave town for a few months after that one. Went and worked on the neighbour’s ranch back in the sticks. Even saw my old man a couple times, stalking the perimeter of our property with a mickey of Golden Wedding on his tool belt.

  When I came back, the band had transformed. Without a place to play in public, or an audience, or jobs, or any money, or girlfriends, or anything to do, the group had festered delightfully in the basement till it was powerful, corrosive, unstoppable — like black mould. The playing and the songs were so much stronger, tougher, more pointedly aggressive. Meanwhile, in the outside world, a goodly chunk of the kids had finally got tired of New Romantic schlock and smarmy white disco. The boil was engorged. I just had to pop it.

  I went around to the bars, demanding that they book us. I told them that if they didn’t agree to hire us now, they’d be begging us to play there in six months, and by then we’d be demanding ten times the money. Each time I finished making that pitch, I paused, waiting for the bar owner to respond, certain that he’d be swept up in my atomic tsunami of enthusiasm. I was very young.

  So it was back to renting halls for us. This time, I picked the Polish Community Hall, across the river in the nicer part of town, instead of the scummy former church I’d rented downtown the last time. It was more expensive, but I reasoned that more parents would let their kids go there. I talked Sandy’s mother into giving us the cash for the deposit. She was feeling guilty about the divorce, so frankly, I barely had to manipulate her at all.

  Then we just promoted the living Hell out of it. We postered over every other poster on the street with past-due canned condensed milk for glue. Takes hours to get that shit off. You need a chisel and a bucket of industrial solvent. We hung around the high schools, giving out handbills with the gig details and big bold print that said “Fuck Your …” and then a long list of things that ought to be fucked. Kids love that.

  Even after we had paid the whole (woefully inadequate, it would turn out) damage deposit, the gig was a financial success, by our standards. And it was a perfect evening.

  Fuck! The sense of release, the exhilaration in the boys’ and girls’ whole bodies, as they hurled themselves around the hall, bashing into each other, bashing into the stage, bashing into the band. These kids who had been waiting all their lives for this band, this music, these songs to come along. Finally, somebody with access to a VERY LOUD sound system was saying everything they’d been dying to say to the people who’d been crushing their horizons and sense of self-worth since they could crawl.

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you stupid? Who do you think you are? You think the world owes you a living?”

  “Oh yeah? FUCK YOU! I’m a punk rocker now! Look at me! I’m a disgrace to everything you believe in! Go tell the priest, the school, your boss, that you all failed as authority figures, that my very identity is an incontrovertible rebuke to your values — I’m living proof that you’re a wash-out as a parent, because I’m a punk rocker!”

  And once a bunch of kids decide that an event is the place to go on a Saturday night, a bunch of other kids come, too.

  These were the kids who had no idea this kind of thing even existed. Children of comfort, of affluence, whose parents voted Conservative, not out of the usual idiot false consciousness, but because it aligned directly with their interests as members of the elite one-party Petrolaucracy of Oilberta.

  You could see the fear in their eyes, as they watched the Rabble celebrate their Rabbleness. It was Magic. We were comforting, no, thrilling, the afflicted, and giving the complacent a good, honest scare.

  Also, we all got laid.

  After a few shows we had the money thing down to a science. Sandy and I would sit with a bottle of Bulgarian wine and his little cigarette maker and spend an afternoon calculating out the best way to relieve a middle class kid of his entire week’s allowance.

  Admission: $4

  5-Song home-duplicated cassette of band in practice space: $4

  Band shirt (band logo spray-painted on random 50-cent Salvation Army rag): $6

  Band pin: a buck.

  Sticker: ’nother buck.

  Poster: $2

  And I made a good side business out of selling pre-rolled joints and speedy acid. Okay, well, that was more like where most of the real profit came from. And so it ever shall be.

  We had a good run for about nine months. I started hearing from other bands that would get in touch, looking for a gig. I was getting known as a guy who got shit going. When things became muddled or confusing, the band, and others, too, would look to me, because they knew I would always come up with a strong opinion. Later, they could bitch about me talking bullshit, and say that I was steamrolling them into disaster, but they still counted on me as the only person in the room who could forcefully state that he Knew What to Do. People started to call me the band’s “manager.”

  Then Sandy’s sister committed suicide, and we all took a break for a while.

  MY PLAN

 
BUT THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, and it was just by way of telling you what a genuinely extraordinary sort of fellow I am — my important strengths in terms of my ability to inspire, my vision, my perfect sense of art, my knack for Making Things Happen, et cetera. I return now to the story of what happened at the Calgary Folk Festival last weekend, which is what this is all about, of course.

  I WAS ON MY WAY TO THE CALGARY Folk Festival, without the headliner. I was beer-drunk, and more or less out of money, but I had a plan.

  The previous winter, I had discovered Athena Amarok, and managed to book her for every major summer folk music festival in the country, on the strength of a grainy Betacam tape of her performance at the Opening Ceremonies of the Canada Northern Games, in Iqualuit, and of course also on the strength of my nigh-irresistible persuasive powers.

  I knew she was going to be a killer success. She was young, sexy, and had a sound that no one had ever heard before. Plus she was Inuit, and the Leftiness of the Canadian folk circuit is always dying to book “First Nations” people, so that they (the folkies) can demonstrate their Super-Virtue and Lack of Prejudice and what-have-you. And here was a Genuine Eskimo who made everybody who heard her simultaneously terrified and sexually aroused. I knew I was on to a winner.

  The only problem was, she was even more of a winner than I’d planned for. After the first performance I arranged for her in the South (as the Yukoners call it, “South” meaning the Whole Wicked Rest of the World Below the Arctic Circle) some journalist jerk from Iceland had seen her and sent a tape of the show straight to this crazy Icelandic experimental disco Superstar, and this had caused the Superstar, when she saw it, to “change her whole thinking about music forever,” and so of course she emailed Athena directly to invite her to New York on the first available plane, to “see if we could collaborate,” and then naturally that led her to fall in love with Athena and invite her on tour immediately, and although I made some perfunctory attempt at stopping her, you can’t say no to Superstars, so in fact, at this moment, as we drove towards Calgary, Athena was actually in Reykjavik, where she was participating in the secret rehearsals for the Giant World Tour, slated to start in a week and a half in London.