Festival Man Read online

  HERE COMES TEAM FUN

  AT ANY RATE, ALTHOUGH MANNY would never have been booked into Calgary on his own, he had enough of a name in folk circles that if I vouched for him and made it clear that he was there as a sideman, Leslie Stark, the artistic director of the Calgary Folk Festival, was willing to tolerate his presence. She has a thing for weird shit, anyway.

  I woke when I hit the back of the seat in front of me. I’d been lying lengthwise on the back bench of the minivan, taking a beer-nap.

  “Mother fuck!” Jenny shouted.

  Mykola was at the wheel, his panicky deep breathing interfering with his attempts to calm us. “It’s (gasp!) ooookay, everybody (gasp!).”

  Jenny leaned over to take a look at the speedometer. “One-sixty! In a fucking minivan! You crazy fuck! You slow this thing down!”

  “It’s (gasp!) okay, everyone! Just caaaaalm down. There was a deer or something, but we avoided it, it’s long gone now.”

  Jenny’s a person who’s mastered that delightful alchemy of conquering fear by instantaneously transmuting it into anger.

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll fucking punch you in the mouth right now if you don’t fucking slow down.”

  “I think ya better listen to the lady.”

  Mykola is not tough. Not that way, anyway. He slowed down, pumping the brakes erratically.

  “Sorry, everybody, I guess I’m just sorta nervous, excited about this festival, so I wasn’t watching the speed. Sorry, sorry.”

  Jenny relaxed a bit. “Just fucking watch that speed. I don’t know what you’re in such a fucking rush for, we’re probably not even gonna get to play.”

  I wiped the beery eye-gunk away. “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, what the fuck are we gonna do when they figure out that Athena’s not coming?”

  “Look, I told you, I got that all figured out.”

  “Yeah, right. I’m beginning to figure out your deal a bit more, Ouiniette. You know, Cole Dixon says he spent Canada Day in a sports bar in Charlottetown that didn’t even know he was coming, and he wound up having to buy pitchers for his band, his band that he flew all the way over from fucking England to do the gig. And they didn’t even have music at that bar anymore!”

  “Look, that was a misunderstanding that was actually completely sorted out between me and Cole.”

  “Oh yeah. He said you demanded a booking fee for that gig.”

  “Well, listen, you’re here, aren’t you, so unless you have a different plan, let’s go with mine.”

  “Which is what, exactly? They want Athena, not us.”

  “They don’t know what they fucking want. They ‘want’ good music, as in, they are in a position of ‘want’ for it, seeing as how their headliners are Great Big C U Next Tuesday and fucking Tom Cochrane. You guys have a hundred times the talent in your fucking little fingers of half the bullshit they’ve got there. Once they get a load of your amazingness, they’ll be in the right frame of mind where we can make it all work. I’ve done this before. Just trust me.”

  This emphatic reference to their collective brilliance turned the temperature of the whining down considerably. Flattery is like heroin: people use it because it works.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll fucking see.”

  “Cam?”

  “What is it, big man?”

  “Athena’s okay with us going in and using her name for cover to get into the festival, right?”

  That was a fair question. You didn’t want to make Athena mad. She might have been about five feet tall, but when I went up on the trip North to sign her, her Nova Scotia transplant ex-boyfriend told me he’d seen her single-handedly take down a caribou, dress it, and carry it back to camp seven miles on her back. “She’s not vegetarian, but she won’t eat what she calls ‘southern shit-meat.’ Our freezer used to be full of things Theen had killed.” He’d confided in me, nostalgically.

  “Athena is so far up into the Big Time now, she doesn’t give a flying fuck what we do. But, yes she knows what we’re doing, and she’s totally okay with it. She loves you guys. And she knows she wouldn’t have got where she is today without me. Without us.”

  That seemed to do it.

  “I’m just excited to get to play such a big folk festival. And Jimmy Kinnock is kind of my hero since I was a kid, and —”

  “Yeah, well don’t get so excited that you crash us off the side of a mountain.”

  The girl had a point there. An average of one band per year dies driving Canada’s Highway 1 over the Rocky Mountains, through Rogers Pass. You’re like to get smoked by a logging truck skidding over the yellow line, or if you slip and go off the side there, you better pack a lunch because you’ll get hungry on the fall down.

  APOLOGY FOR DIGRESSION

  DAMN, I WAS SCRIBBLING AWAY HERE, and I was having trouble seeing what I was writing. I started to worry if maybe I was going blind, but then I looked up round me in this dilapidated kitchen and realized that the sun was going down. My ass and back hurt from being bent over scrawling, and this poor old kitchen table is full of defaced yellow legal paper. Also, I was dimly aware of myself picking with my fingernails at the flaking baby-blue paint on the table top, but I now see that someone seems to have stripped the entire table to bare pine, and there’s paint flakes everywhere. Don’t see anybody else here so I guess that was me. I remember promising to only write a dozen pages or so, just the bare bones of the story of what happened at the Calgary Folk Festival, and here I am at twenty or more and I haven’t even got us to the festival. Sorry about that, reader, but what can you do? There’s stuff people need to know, in order to understand what an extraordinary figure I am, and what it is I do for people. Sometimes a digression or two is necessary, and I’m not sorry. Genius works in mysterious ways. If I had more time, I’d try to winnow the thing down, but I think it’s a better idea to just take a short break, get some candles lit, eat a tomato, do some more speed, take a shot of whiskey, and get back down to business. If a job’s worth doing, I always say, it’s worth doing half-assed, so long as it gets done.

  ARRIVAL: COWTOWN

  RIGHT. I’M BACK AT ’ER. Got my writing hat on. Let’s cut straight to Calgary.

  Nobody has ever called Calgary a pretty city. “The big city with the small town feel” is the slogan that boosters like to cite, and for once, the P.R. guys aren’t lying. Calgary is big, and it’s getting bigger all the time. The people who run Calgary would give Jane Jacobs an aneurysm, if they ever met her, but they don’t run in the same circles. Calgary believes in ’50s-style suburban-development sprawl. If you see it from the air at night, its lights and grid make it look exactly like a massive Pac-Man game laid out flat on the dark screen of the prairie, and the high price of oil is making it ever-expanding, like a flood, but a flood of garbage. When we passed the city-limit marker, I noticed the green-and-white sign was mounted on a John Deere lawnmower, trundling west along the shoulder of the highway at five miles per hour. There’s eight of these lawnmowers, constantly moving outward from Calgary at every point of the compass.

  Small-town feel? Absolutely. If you think of small towns as places full of small-minded people who mistrust racial minorities and single mothers, where the downtown turns into a ghost town at 5 p.m., then yesiree, Calgary’s got it, by gum. Only lucky thing about Calgary is that the lefty weirdo people can’t be laid-back and pathetically over-confident, like in Vancouver. Calgary oddballs have to huddle together against the storm of SUV materialism and shitty New Country music.

  So as we pulled into the Westin Hotel in Renty the rental minivan, I naturally took the attitude of a regiment of cavalry, coming to relieve a besieged holdout. Triumphant, swaggering, cheerful, task-oriented. I drank a couple Red Bulls as Jenny swore us through the midday downtown traffic. I had to have the cheerful nonchalance of a busy man with nothing to hide and nothing on his mind except Achievement.

  I told Jenny to guard the gear and Manny, and dragged the Fat Boy along with me to keep him from wandering o
ff. Mykola is always wandering off, either daydreaming a song and forgetting where he is, or just chasing pussy, which he is surprisingly good at. Just off the lobby was a meeting room with a Jiffy Marker sign that said “Artist Registration, Liaison and Transportation.” I marched in.

  A friendly looking late-middle-aged chubby lesbian in a festival sweatshirt and bifocals was at the folding table, where the piles of artist envelopes sat.

  “Well hello there, sir!”

  “Well hello there yoursleff, ma’am. I’m here to register Athena Amarok.”

  She smiled, “Okey dokey …” and started ticking her fingers over the envelopes, checking names through the bottom of the bifocals.

  “And you are?”

  “Cam Ouiniette. Manager.”

  “So I’ll tick her off then.”

  She handed me the envelope. I checked that it had passes, drink tickets, and meal vouchers for everybody in the band.

  “Do you know if Jimmy Kinnock’s manager, Richard Wren, is around nearby? Has he collected his package recently?”

  “Sorry, no. They haven’t checked in yet. I’m really looking forward to his set tomorrow, though. I’d crawl over broken glass for that man.”

  “Me, too. Listen, I was wondering, Athena’s playing Sunday night, so she’s sure to be exhausted after her show. Could we take care of the money at this point, so we don’t have to futz around with it when everybody’s tired and everything?”

  “The money?” She sounded surprised that there was money somehow involved in this wonderful party she was helping to throw. Volunteers.

  “Yes, can we grab the cheque here?”

  “Oh, well, I believe it’s Sheryl who takes care of the money.”

  Pause.

  “Is she around?”

  “Umm … no, she doesn’t seem to be about.”

  “Can you get her on the walkie-talkie?”

  “Is Ms. Amarok here? I believe she needs to sign the invoice for that.”

  “She’ll be arriving shortly. I have proxy to sign for her. I’m the Manager.”

  “Well, I dunno if Sheryl is on shift right now.”

  Suddenly, from behind, I heard a sharp, theatrical intake of breath, and a dropping of a guitar.

  “Eyah! I’m not going in there!”

  “What’s the matter, Colleen? Are you alright?”

  Oh, man. I’d forgotten She was coming.

  “I’m not going in there with that rapist.”

  I turned and took quick action to defend my name. “Lady, if you’re going to make accusations, you better be prepared to back them up. I demand that you call the cops and have me arrested, if you’re going to bandy that word about in relation to me.”

  Colleen’s heaving breathing began to accelerate, like someone giving birth. “What you did to me was a violation.”

  Her handler, a lady in a bulky old Cowichan sweater, took her arm, soothingly. The lesbian at the desk was suddenly not so friendly-looking any more. She used the upper half of her bifocals now to attempt to peer into my soul to see if this new portrait of me was correct. I tried to explain to the room.

  “I’m her ex-Manager. A lot of artists feel that way about their managers. Believe me, the feeling is mutual on my part.”

  “You fucked me. You fucked me! I’m not going in there with that fucking fucking monster!” Thank God. Colleen’s screaming profanity was bringing down the general estimation of her sanity in the room full of conflict-averse Canadians.

  The desk lady looked at me, authoritatively. “Have you got all your passes and everything? Maybe you can come back another time and deal with the cheque stuff. Alright, sir?” Yikes.

  “Listen, I just want to quickly —”

  “He trapped me in a gunfight! He put me in a war zone! He was directly responsible for almost killing me!”

  I handed Mykola the envelopes and his face showed that he had clearly taken another step in his long journey of reassessing me as his ticket to the Big Time.

  “Come on, let’s go. I have no interest in having a conversation with this person.”

  “Nor do I!” shouted Colleen. She shrank back from us, shielding her face as we passed as if I were emanating a visible toxin.

  WE WERE NOT TRAPPED

  FOR COLLEEN TO SAY “you trapped me in the Siege of Sarajevo” in that way of hers, narrowing her eyes and shooting accusative 1980s feminist separatist death rays at me, it’s totally unfair. And inaccurate. We weren’t trapped, and we weren’t in Sarajevo, exactly. Anyway, I saved her life, and you would think I would get some gratitude for it, but she always had to emphasize the idea that I was responsible for putting her life in danger in the first place. Negativity. That’s what that is. Negativity.

  You have to remember, before the shit all went down, Sarajevo was a normal fucking place! They’d just had the Olympics there, for Chrissakes. It had more (and better) newspapers than Toronto, and a better music scene, too. Cosmopolitan. Szechuan restaurants. Avant-garde installation art in the square. Muslims, Croats, Serbs, Jews, Albanians, Gypsies, Macedonians, all living normally. No big deal. I mean, the airport was still open, you know. I guess there was some kind of travel advisory or something, but they put that kind of thing out every time some elderly tourist gets a new strain of the flu or whatever, so you can’t live your life by that kind of thing.

  Of course there was tension, I knew that, but I rarely read the papers, and I had great contacts on the ground, some extremely interesting experimental noise musicians. Made a sound like having your face run over by the street cleaner at six in the morning at the end of an acid trip. Fabulous. And of course as soon as they heard Colleen, they went apeshit about her. They had to have her over. And they were eminently suggestible to anything else I had in mind. So that’s how I came to put on a seven-band Canadian Music Weakness Festival that, it turned out, took place at the start of the Yugoslavian Civil War. Entirely funded by Canadian tax payer money, I’ll have you know, thanks to Yours Truly.*

  Colleen is the perfect example of a musician who is too good for their own good. Too powerful. Too charismatic. She takes people too far into the emotions of the music. Sometimes they never get out. There was that joke band Spinal Tap that had all their dead drummers, but I know of at least three of Colleen’s ex-drummers who have signed their own papers to be committed to the nuthouse. No, I am not exaggerating. Certainly, many who’ve played with her never pick up an instrument again, myself included. It just doesn’t help your career to be that good.

  For instance, the time I got her the opening slot on one of the early Sarah McLachlan tours. Sarah the Pretty Guitar-Strumming Tree Nymph was just starting to take off, already drawing packed houses at the biggest university bars across the country. So it was a good gig. But it couldn’t last.

  The problem was, Colleen, somewhat dumpy, bespectacled, patchy-thrift-store-dressed Colleen, would step quietly up to the mic in her dead abusive stepfather’s parade boots, plug her pawn-shop electric guitar into the PA, no fancy amplifier necessary, and simply destroy-and-simultaneously-rebuild people’s minds, like if an ice pick to your cortex did the opposite of a lobotomy.

  By the last song, the audience was so in thrall to her dark powers that it was nothing, a mere bagatelle, for her to ask for two random white male volunteers from the crowd to don Lone Ranger masks, strip naked on stage and smash beer bottles into an oil drum that we travelled with. She liked to make them flank her and cavort devilishly to the rhythm of the final, heart-rending song about the lonely death of her half brother in the Medicine Hat municipal jail.

  I used to love to watch the audience slowly file out of the bar at the break, panicky, stunned, emotionally exhausted, mouths hanging open, eyes darting to-and-fro, like dogs after Halloween fireworks.

  Needless to say, the vampires at Nettwerk Music (who are both management and record label, a felony in most countries, just by the way) kicked her off the tour after three shows. Can’t have Sarah the Neo-Raphaelite Tree Nymph getting show
n up every night by some weird lady who looks like a washerwoman but has ten times the talent.

  But I digress. Back to the war …

  When I landed at Sarajevo airport with Colleen, her band, and an assortment of other Canucks, all seemed fine. We were greeted by Bobo, my old friend who was a TV journalist at the time. But no cameras. “Where’s the cameras?” I asked, a bit annoyed. I like a bit of publicity.

  “Busy covering something else …” He waved vaguely. I could see that he was drunk, which was not remarkable. I was mainly concerned with the labour-intensive job of keeping Colleen not wholly unhappy, but she started flirting aggressively with Bobo, so that kept her too busy to find a reason to get mad at me, so I wasn’t too worried about anything, to be honest.

  Of course, the “something else” Bobo was referring to turned out to be the fucking Yugoslav National Army shooting a bunch of women on a peace march in downtown Sarajevo, and things just kinda went downhill from there, as history records.

  I knew none of this at the time, and Bobo wasn’t really talking much. He had had such high naive hopes for the peace march, he had dropped acid to heighten the anticipated experience of Triumphant People Power, so the gunfire and the blood and corpses and screaming and everything had kind of harshed out his trip, to say the least. He insisted we all go to his favourite underground bar and have a bunch of beer and hash and sausage and Loza moonshine, and since that’s what I always traditionally do to combat jet lag, I noticed no interruption of normal conditions, and no reason to break precedent.

  Now you will say that I was responsible for all those people, and that at that moment of crisis, I should have known to keep a clear head, to take the situation more seriously. But honestly, everyone who came to that festival was an adult, ultimately responsible for their own lives, their own choices. And they all managed to survive, and the only one who got shot was the keyboard player in that crummy Goth band, and only because he suddenly decided to remember that he was a Croat, and that he needed to fight for the Old Cause that his stupid grandmother had been feeding him lies about, raising him up in fucking Norval, Ontario, which is a town that is a Crime Against Humanity in and of itself, if you’ve never been there, believe me. And that is not my fault.