Festival Man Read online

  So Athena was in fact not going to be at the Calgary Folk Festival, nor was she going to be at three of the five other festivals that I had already negotiated large guaranteed fees for, fees that, just by the way, I had already spent the entirety of, in the form of advances from said guarantees. Yes, I know. But that money had to be spent. Which is something I will explain. But right now, I’m explaining my plan.

  SO HERE WAS MY PLAN:

  First of all, nobody knew that Athena wasn’t coming. Using the management tool called Guilt, I had extracted her secrecy about her Big Break, since I personally, after all, was the one responsible for it happening. Also, even more importantly, nobody knew that I knew that Athena wasn’t coming, and had known for about four weeks. Four weeks would have been long enough in advance for the artistic director of the festival to cancel her contract and scramble to make other plans for a Sunday headliner set. But we couldn’t have that. That wasn’t part of the plan. So that’s the first of all.

  Second, and more importantly, I still had her band with me.

  The plan all along, once I figured out what I had in Athena, was to use her as a kind of Arctic Trojan Horse, to help me sneak some of my most interesting (weirdest) acts inside the Hallowed Gates of the Folk Festivals. Festivals are generally very conservative, and tend to book things that are easily explainable. African Drumming. Traditional Celtic Harp. Third-Rate Ontario Bluegrass. I generally go for stuff that’s very hard to explain, but is the kind of thing that if you see it live and you’re not some boring asshole, it amazes you about the possibilities of music, and the permutations of the human mind and soul. But those hard-to-explain things can often be kind of hard to sell to the bookers. So the plan all along was to get my weird people through the gates, disguised as Athena’s band.

  As band leader I had Jenny Reid, a lesbian singer-songwriter- bass-drums-and-saxophone player who sings songs so sexually aggressive that if a man sang them, he’d be tarred and feathered as a misogynist pig. Then there was a turntablist, guitar player, weird sound-maker and interpretive-dancer named Manny Canoe, and, as a last-minute addition, there was Mykola Loychuck, a 220-pound kobza-playing singer-songwriter of Ukrainian descent, who plays a combination of traditional Ukrainian songs, translated into English in an offensive way, and original Ukrainian-sounding songs that are also mostly offensive. That was the band. It was supposed to have had that lying Jew bastard accordion player Berner, but he had taken off without warning for some wild-goose chase in the backwoods of Bulgaria, hunting for nonagenarian kyke fiddlers or some such nonsense. Good riddance if he wanted to miss this opportunity after all I did for him.

  Anyway, the band had been working. The weirdness of the group underlined the weirdness of Athena, who was by no means a conventional Inuit throat-singer. She’d been denounced in the local papers as a cultural heretic and sexual deviant. People in Iqualuit threw rocks at her when they saw her on the street, so she was very much one of My Kind of People. And the fact that the band were actually all experienced improvisers, and surprisingly good at listening to each other and to Athena, meant that each performance was an unrepeatably odd, but oddly musical event. People didn’t just dance, they smashed things and fucked on the dancefloor. That’s when you know that you’re doing something right.

  And from a manager’s point of view, it was perfect, because these festivals are full of little stages, workshops, small performances, open mics, campfires, all places where you could actually put these strange people in front of an audience, so that they could finally just be heard by somebody. I’d just say to the artistic director of the festival, “Well, Mykola’s here as Athena’s kobza player, but he has a bunch of great tunes of his own. Maybe he should just sit in on the ‘New Visions in Old Traditions’ workshop.” And then this unknown freak would be suddenly playing to a crowd of a thousand relaxed, listening people. And suddenly, the poor idiot savant bastard had some fans, for the first time in his life, for Chrissakes.

  But that was when Athena had actually been with us for the festivals. Now I was going to try to blague my people through an entire large-scale, prestigious festival, sneaking them into the workshop stages, et cetera, when the actual marquee name of their band was not even going to be there.

  My plan was to just keep acting expectant about her imminent arrival, showing myself to be getting more and more irritated, and then, maybe sometime on Saturday, totally blow my top, outraged, pretending to have just gotten a message from Athena saying that she had run off with the popstar. By this time, hopefully, her bandmates would be so successful that everyone would forgive the small problem of the lack of headliner, and the artistic director would have no choice but to let my weirdos play Athena’s Sunday night huge-exposure main stage slot on their own, to shocked acclaim.

  SO THE MAIN PLAN WAS A BIT of a gamble, I know. I admit that. Then there was the long shot gamble:

  Richard Wren was coming. Wren was the manager of Jimmy Kinnock, the world’s most famous punk-folk singer, and was also the head of the International Conference of Music Managers. He had managed Cream when Clapton was good, was one of the organizers of the Rolling Stones’ famous free concert in Hyde Park in memory of Brian Jones, where ten thousand doves were released into the audience, and had managed a little band called “The Clash” during the period when they had their only hits in America.

  My plan with Wren was to find him, seduce him with my outsized and charming personality, get him drunk as a lord, and then bamboozle him into signing binding documents of commitment to co-manage and promote one or more of my artists (I hadn’t decided exactly which yet), in partnership with Yours Truly, of course. I was carrying the legal papers on my person, blank in strategic spaces, easily alterable to suit my purposes, as the finer details of my purposes developed. I like to leave myself room to manoeuvre.

  I knew that if I could pull all that off, I would be justified in continuing to speak of myself as a Genius. And I also knew, my Love, that I had to do something Genius to replenish the glamour that first drew you to me, long ago, when we first met. I knew that glamour had been receding for some time, as each successive heroic failure looked less heroic, and the low hum of collection- agency phone calls rose in frequency. I had made a conscious decision not to wonder if there was any point in returning home if I returned empty-handed.

  HOW DID I FIND ATHENA? That’s what they all asked me, and that’s why those festival directors still take my phone calls. Well, I don’t know if they still take my phone calls, but they were taking them at the beginning of this summer, anyway. The truth of the matter, I can’t emphasize enough for you young aspiring Campbells-to-be, is that to find the truly strange music, there’s no easy shortcut around doing strange things, in strange places, with other strange people.

  The previous winter, I had found myself, through a mixture of happenstance and self-interested chicanery, in a remote region of Canada’s newest official territory, Nunavut, the place of the Inuit. I was in the capital, Iqualuit, for a conference of Northern bureaucrats, a conference for which I had obtained false credentials, in the interest of getting a chance to make contact with these two eighty-year-old ladies who did Inuit throat-singing, which is this breathy, growly music that they played up there as a kind of game between two girls to try to see who would crack up laughing first. Apparently it’s funny to them, but the sound of it is evocative of a storm whipping furiously over an awe-inspiring, unspeakably vast Arctic landscape.

  All attempts at finding electronic or postal means of communication with these ladies had been fruitless. I began to think that they were deliberately avoiding contact with southerners and their technology. But I had to have them. I’d heard them in a sample by this Mongolian electronica DJ, and I knew that if I could get even just a Dictaphone recording of their thing and whip up a one-page bio, I could probably book a full Canadian folk festival tour for them, with flights and all, and me getting 15 percent of the fee as booking agent, another 10 percent as manager, and then 15 per
cent of the Canada Council for the Arts grants that I would “help” them apply for and that they’d inevitably get.*

  So I had figured on catching these ladies’ set, while scoping the room to see what younger relative was chaperoning them, translating for them, handling them. I would find that person and try to suss out by watching them what my way into their confidence ought to be. Would it be a young militant firebrand, who I could impress with outrageous political rhetoric and my connections to friends who were hereditary Blackfoot chiefs down in southern Alberta? Or would they be bloody Catholic goody-goodies (you’d be surprised how good I can be with Christians) who would respond to the idea of a tour as a kind of missionary appeal work? Or would I just do my usual and be the only guy in the place holding decent weed and hard liquor, get them matching me hoot for hoot, drink for drink, wait for them to get to the crucial vulnerable state, and then infuse my victims with my vision of descending on the southern folkies with the kind of music that would fill audiences with despair for the paucities of Western European culture?

  I was standing in the gym at the opening ceremonies, sipping an energy drink and scanning the crowd for sexy octogenarians. The cheap institutional public address system whistled with feedback as the announcer spoke softly into the mic with an Inuit accent.

  “We have a special treat today, ladies and gentleman. A young lady, who recently joined St. Margaret’s Elementary school as a new teacher, a proud Inuit young lady who will demonstrate her skills at our own Inuit art of throat-singing. The young lady says that this is something she’s been practising in her living room, by throat-singing alone with her record collection over the last three winters. I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be just dandy. Please welcome Athena Amarok.”

  A small woman of about twenty-four walked shyly onto the stage. She was wearing a traditional cloak. She thanked the emcee and took the mic.

  “Okay, well, I’m going to do my thing here, and I hope people don’t think it’s too strange. As you know, throat-singing is usually done with two people, I know, but I was a bit depressed sometimes in the winter, alone in my house, and I just sort of started doing this. You might not like it. Anyways …”

  Quietly at first, she started her back-and-forth, back-and-forth slow, flowing breathing, humminah, humminah, humminah, slowly adding a hint of something, a roughness that became a growl. The growl extended, mutated, grew, there was a sense of imminent threat in it now, the rhythm of the breathing carrying it with more urgency, and then suddenly it stopped.

  And then the world exploded.

  I guess I hadn’t noticed the hip-hop kid hook up the decks to the PA, so when he dropped the beat at full force, it was like getting defibrillated. The room lit up for me. The scariest, bass-heaviest slouching-towards-Bethlehem backing track shook the architecture of the gymnasium, as Athena let forth a terrible howl like a giant wounded animal destroying an abattoir with its hind legs. Then the performance turned into this hypnotic, non-verbal explanation of the life of a woman from birth to death, and everything (everything) in the middle. It took about twenty minutes. When she stopped, everyone in the audience looked dazed, like they’d just awoken from a dream.

  Once they woke up, a lot of them came to themselves and realized that they ought to be offended by such a brazen display. But not me. I had been waiting quite some time for an experience like that, and I knew exactly what to do. And I did it. And yes, then eventually I lost her, just like I lost many others. The important thing to note is that I lost her, not to the Big Time, but to the fact that I didn’t have the Big Time clout that I rightfully ought to have had. So this Calgary Folk Festival was going to be different. This time I was going to light the rocket and remember to take care to hold on to it when it took off. And then people would finally understand me as the Visionary that I’ve always been. And Marina, you would go back to seeing me as the man of passion and courage who whisked you brilliantly out of Yugoslavia as it crumbled to ruin, not as the guy who rolls endless hash-and-drum smokes and talks endlessly at the kitchen table while the sad, desperate musicians troop in and out of our little Vancouver east-side apartment, hoping I can find them a break.

  * * *

  * If you think I’m the only one out there doing things that way, then you are a certifiable moron. Don’t get me started.

  A REFLECTION ON FESTIVALS

  I’VE HAD UNTOLD ADVENTURES at festivals, and without them I wouldn’t have a career at all, I guess. Okay, well, possibly I now don’t have a career, but you know what I mean.

  A decent festival is always crazy, stupid, and beautiful.

  Here’s how you make a festival:

  You gather thousands of people together in a place that’s usually not considered fit for human habitation, like a farmer’s field, or a racetrack, and then those people proceed to lay waste to the land and themselves for about two-to-three days or more. By the end, the people are exhausted, ravaged by the forces of nature and the forces of booze and drugs, and the land is a churned-up wound full of garbage, piss, and shit. People die, people are conceived, marriages begin or collapse. And there’s music!

  Somehow, magic emerges from the process. And everybody knows that the source of the magic is the music. I know that’s a cliché, but nevertheless, it’s just a fact, a fact that’s as factual as E=MC squared or what-have-you. I can’t state it plainer than that. Some people talk about “community” or whatever, but that’s just a political word. Nothing against politics — politics can be a great source for wonderfully powerful songs. But when the music works, that’s what makes the real sense of community happen. Everybody feeling the same thing at the same time, invisible tendrils of emotion stringing out from somewhere in the core of the musician, creeping into, yes, the souls of the people in the audience, fucking with their insides, messing with their way of being in the world. Changing them. I’m not into the stuff that soothes the savage breast. I want to see those savage breasts get all hot and bothered and get savage-er. That’s my agenda.

  That’s why I’m so careful about working with the right musicians. Of course, almost all musicians wanna be rich and famous and get laid with people they have no right to be laid with. That’s a given. But I can instantly spot the ones for whom that’s the only reason they’re into the music. The careerists. The ones who are solely concerned with “making it,” whatever “it” is. I only work with people who expand my ideas about what people can think or feel, kind of illuminating their little corner of existence, without shame or hesitancy. That’s the key to what makes me truly great.

  And the musicians need to be able to embrace the festival-ness of festivals, the possibility that someone’s, anyone’s, life could be thrown sideways, just by the fact of being there, even accidentally, for just a verse of one song.

  I remember seeing that brilliant old hustler, Leonard Cohen, at the Glastonbury Festival, the biggest festival in England. The drunk Jew Buddhist monk had spent so much time on some mountain, avoiding thoughts of worldly materialism, that the World, in the form of his minx of a manager, had stolen all his lucrative publishing rights away from him, and he had to hit the road to make a buck. I don’t think he gave a shit where they put him, as long as he could make up for the five million the bitch had run off with. He’d made the mistake of fucking her, of course, so it served him right. Never play with your food, kids.

  At first, it seemed like a shamefully bad idea to put the Poet Rabbi in front of 150,000 drunk, druggy, muddy English people. You could have got a similar auditory experience by sitting at home, putting on a Leonard Cohen record, then phoning up a bunch of rowdy football hooligans and inviting them over for a keg of lager. “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder,” intoned the low, raspy voice, and his young, stupid audience seemed to be there for some kind of jaunty illustration of the lyric.

  Then an odd thing happened. The band slowly summoned up (Cohen’s band never could be described as “kicking in” to a song) the opening of “Hal
lelujah.” I’d forgotten that mainstream English people love Jeff Buckley, for some reason, and that Buckley’s one good recording was a cover of that. Immediately, the chavs started to hoot and scream, as if “Wonderwall” were coming on the stereo. And they ALL sang along. Every last philistine, drugged-out, tracksuit-sporting, ballcap-backwards one of that enormous throng lifted their voices and swayed together for a cold, broken Hallelujah. You could see a moment of surprise flicker across Cohen’s giant ancient eagle face on the superscreens before he also gave himself completely to the Song, to the Word. It was strange and unexpected and beautiful. Festivals are like that.

  Later that night, back at the circus tent where I was stationed along with a burlesque troop, assorted jugglers, a midget swing band, and a guy who lifted weights with his testicles, Gordon the DJ and I came across a well-dressed man, lying muddy and comatose, face-down against our perimeter fence.

  We roused him to make sure that he wasn’t dead. “Hey, buddy!”

  “Hallelujah.”

  “Saw the Cohen show, didja?”

  “Nnnng. Hallelujah.”

  “You all right there, mate?”

  “All right? No I’m not. I’m a corporate head-hunter. I’m just making money for no purpose. I’ve been wasting my life! I’d rather die than go on as I have.”

  Festivals are good for that kind of thing.