Festival Man Page 4

  At this point in the narrative, my recollection naturally becomes somewhat blurred, on account of the beer, the hash, the Loza, and — always wanting to be sociable with local customs — the acid I naturally dropped when Bobo offered it to me.

  I remember a great party, and then this rumbling sound, which must have been shells falling, but at the time sounded like ravenous monsters coming to eat us, especially when the lights went off. Then I remember a lot of running and screaming in the dark, and that seemed to go on for several lifetimes. But I guess that because of growing up on a ranch, I’ve always had a little bit of sheepdog in me, and somehow I managed to keep us together, the core group of Colleen, me, Steve the bass player, and Nellis the drummer. I think the guitar player found a woman somewhere along the way.

  When I phased back to consciousness, we were all crouched in a stairwell on the outside of a large grey concrete building. It was raining lightly. I think that the sun had just come up. I heard the sound of stray rifle ricochets, but they were coming from at least a few streets away, which I take as proof that my powers of crisis management must have been working even when my mind was locked in the acid-and-moonshine blackout.

  I surveyed my people. Steve the bass player was staring at the grey concrete wall in front of him, immobile. From the rhythmic movement of his lips, he seemed to be singing something, but he wasn’t making any sound. Anyway, he wasn’t going anywhere, so that was alright. As for the drummer, you can always count on them to just keep compulsively tap-tap-tapping on whatever’s in front of them, no matter what’s going on, and Nellis was no exception as, red-eyed, his dirty purple hair stringy from old sweat, he twitchingly practised his paradiddles with his index fingers pinging on the iron railing.

  I looked over at Colleen. She was crouched, with her back to me. Her body was shuddering, and she was sniffling violently. We’d been more than manager/client for some time, and her sniffling awoke my tender feelings for her. I thought of the wonderful times we’d had, breaking into the mink farms in rural Netherlands, setting the angry little animals free, and the night we spent in jail when she attacked an airport security guard in Copenhagen with her guitar case, screaming the word “Nazi!” at him over and over. She really was wonderful in her own fucked-up way. I went over to comfort her, but when she turned around it became clear that she was not crying at all, but had just been hacking up a big yellow loogie, which she proceeded to spit directly onto the toe of my cowboy boot.

  She gave me that look she has, and enunciated very clearly, “I am never going to let you fuck me, ever again.”

  This was a drag, since, as I say, we had had a “relationship” for quite some time at that point, and I was very fond of her, in a terrified kind of way. Still, I had never thought that was going to last forever, given Colleen’s temper, which linked to her tendency to fall out angrily with pretty much everybody, and then of course there was her rapacious and wide-ranging sexual appetite …

  Anyway, I filed the “Love Affair with Colleen: Over” information away as something to Think About Later, and started peering around for a defensible next move. You can’t live in a stairwell. Also, I had noticed that the concrete dust and mould was making the drummer’s allergies act up. I notice those kinds of things. I always take care of my people.

  Then, like a gift from, well, somebody, I spotted Marko. Or rather, I didn’t know Marko yet, but I saw him, and decided that I intended to know him.

  A battered white cube van had pulled up outside a grey, nondescript building similar to our own, across the street and a block and a half away.

  I’ve always had killer eyes, since my Old Pap used to take me hunting prairie dogs and badgers with a .22 when I was five years old. My vision remains considerably better than 20/20, although I sometimes wear transparent eyeglasses in heavy negotiations, for the sake of intellectual intimidation.

  So it was easy for me to pick out, on the back of the black T-shirt of the dreadlocked headbanger who got out of the van, the symbol of a very obscure Finnish band, premier practitioners in Finland of a very specialized form of heavy metal called Goat Metal, so-called because the final mix of each track on a Goat Metal album is celebrated by the ritual slaughter and burning of a black goat. The name of the band is of course, Keskonen Suoli, which translates, roughly, as “The Intestines of a Prematurely Born Infant,” and I had been a fan since their first classic album, Nisä Thelema, or “The Breasts of Thelema,” a reference to the writings of that fabulous old Satanist, Aleister Crowley.

  My heart leapt like a kid on a griddle. This guy was a rocker who loved one of my favourite bands, and he had a van. I ran toward him, shouting, alternately “Hey! Keskonen! Keskonen!” and “Kaivos Emätin!” (“Vagina Mining.”) “Kaivos Emätin” was a track that appeared only on the original Estonian vinyl pressing of the album. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t just a superficial dilettante Keskonen fan.

  I guess my Finnish pronunciation wasn’t so hot, and after being up for forty-eight hours, counting the plane ride, and also being all covered in plaster dust and other debris, maybe I looked a bit threatening, because the headbanger saw me and made a panicky break for it, abandoning his van. I jumped in it to find the keys in the ignition and the engine still running. I threw it in gear and gave chase, leaning my torso out the window and shouting the name of the deleted album track at the top of my voice as I drove just behind him. It took a whole city block for him to finally get the point that I wasn’t some crazed Serb out to murder him.

  “Keskonen! ‘Kaivos Emätin!’ Keskonen!” I was waving the secret Ronnie James Dio rock ’n’ roll devil horns at him with my right hand, pumping it enthusiastically above my head. “You know?”

  I watched a look of puzzlement cross his face, and then the penny dropped. He stopped. His face lit up. “Keskonen! Keskonen Suoli?”

  “Right!” I stopped the van and jumped out, still holding up my devil horns.

  “Nisä Thelema?”

  “Yes! You got it, buddy!”

  He frowned thoughtfully, pushed his dreads out of his face, looked me right in the eyes, and spoke: “I must say that I don’t like that one as much as the third album, the self-titled one. Talk about a band’s true statement. That is the real deal, that one. Mindblowing.” That’s the thing with Scandinavians — because they generally speak better English than we do, their grasp of the idiom can actually be a bit disconcerting at times.

  As if in response to the man’s carefully considered and totally wrongheaded statement, the stray zings of the ricochets started noticeably ramping up in volume. But there was no way that I was going to let such an outrage pass without comment.

  “That’s ludicrous. The third album was a completely obvious, commercial bid for crossover into mainstream speed metal.”

  “Commercial? Please. They couldn’t even play their instruments properly on their first album. Even those who are deaf can hear it in the first bar of the first track!”

  Even those who are deaf would have been able to discern the unmistakably solid, dependable sound of AK-47s approaching.

  “No way, that’s youthful energy. The guitarist’s mother was a concert pianist. You can’t tell me they didn’t know how to play.”

  We both cringed involuntarily as an artillery shell screamed, what seemed like inches overhead. The headbanger waited for the explosion in the next neighbourhood over before he made his point.

  As he grabbed my arm and pulled me into the van, he shouted, “She wasn’t a concert pianist, I knew the family. She was an amateur light opera singer, and not a very good one, at that. You’d better come with me — I want you to listen to track six, the first track on the second side of the vinyl.”

  So that’s how, thanks to my interest in Satanic Metal, we found ourselves drinking forty-year-old wine from Czech crystal in a beautiful chateau overlooking a beautiful city burning beautifully, listening to records on a first-rate stereo with beautiful warm old Soviet vacuum-tube amplification, safe as could re
asonably be demanded, under the circumstances. Turns out Marko was in Sarajevo because his girlfriend was a Bosnian Muslim. Her uncle was some kind of businessman with links to Albania, and he had this skookum joint on the hillside.

  Marko’s girlfriend took Colleen off to show her the bath. I couldn’t be sure, but as she walked away, she (not Colleen, but Marko’s girlfriend) seemed to be kind of looking at me funny, like I had a bug on my head or something. When women find me attractive I never look for an explanation, I just go with it. I wasn’t sure that was what the look meant, though. Reading women’s desires is kind of my one social Achilles heel in my charm juggernaut.

  Nellis was a big fan of expensive booze, so he was keeping himself busy trying different vintages. The uncle had brought his best bottles up from the cellar, working from the sound principle that when the country’s falling apart, you might as well drink the good stuff now. I decided to tangibly endorse that principle, with vigour.

  Steve still wasn’t speaking audibly, just doing that silent lip-moving thing, but I did manage to get some wine in him, and I put on Neil Young’s version of “Four Strong Winds,” kinda the Western Canadian national anthem. It seemed to calm him down.

  “Steve, look at me,” I said, summoning my best Certainty Tone. I raised my right hand, two forefingers together at my forehead. “I swear, Scout’s Honour, I’m gonna get us all home safe and sound. I promise. You can take that to the bank.”

  He just stared down at the city as the shells pinged off bits of the taller buildings in the centre. He was weeping, softly singing, “Think I’ll go out to Alberta, weather’s good there in the fall …”

  * * *

  * You’re probably not interested, unless you’re hoping to go into the music business yourself, but here’s the thing about Canadian music grants, especially this organization called FACRAL (The Foundation to Assist Canadian Records and Licensees): They’re designed as a subsidy for the music business, not as a way to help musicians. That’s an important distinction. They’re a back-door giveaway of money that’s not supposed to go to people who really need it, but to people in the Music Biz Establishment. People like Sarah McLachlan’s managers dipped into that dough forever, from their houses in Shaughnessy. The bureaucrats deliberately set up the criteria as best they can to keep independent types like the kind I work with out of their trough. But almost none of the bureaucrats have ever been on tour, or run anything in the actual music world. They just toodle around on the government dime, seeing shows for free and jerking each other off at conferences and the like. They don’t actually have a clue how it all really works, so they’re laughably easy to fool. So for the last fifteen years, me and them have played a game of cat-and-mouse, where I find tricky ways to meet the letter of their fucked-up criteria (mostly under assumed names), and then when they realize how much money they’ve handed to a bunch of people they’ve never heard of, they revise the criteria again to keep the riff-raff out. And then I figure out a way to beat it. They say, “You must have national distribution to apply.” So I smoke up some guy from a distributor of toasters and talk him into putting my grunge band’s cassette in his catalogue. Then the next year they say, “You have to have shipped this many albums.” So I pay a couple hundred bucks to ship ’em from Vancouver to Innisfail, and trigger a $15,000 grant. Then the next year they say, “You have to have sold this many records.” So I purchase that many albums from the toaster guy, get the grant, and sell the albums again back to the band. It’s a process, like I say. But it really was my greatest coup ever to get FACRAL to inadvertently fund an entire music festival in Yugoslavia at the moment of that nation’s demise. Of course, there was a price to be paid after that. They really tightened up the rules after they looked at their end-of-year receipts and saw how many of them were in Serbo-Croatian. I’ve heard that any time Ivy Easton-Day at FACRAL hears someone speak my name, her eyeballs literally spurt blood.

  FRIDAY NIGHT, WESTIN HOTEL

  SURVEYING CALGARY’S ARID SKYLINE of oil-money office towers from the window of the eighteenth floor of the Westin, I cracked open the tiny bottle of wine in the cute wicker basket and drained it in a swallow. A corner of Prince’s Island Park, where the festival takes place each year, was visible in the lower right corner, like a small green attempt at a backhanded apology for the rest of the dystopic beige city. Manny had already buggered off to jam with some Iranian Reggae band or something, but Mykola and Jenny were standing in the doorway of the hotel room, asking me skeptical questions about petty logistics. Luckily, I have a remarkably strong ability to ignore things that I don’t want to pay attention to, so I managed to tune them out completely, in order to contemplate the overall situation and the status of my strategy for the weekend. I lit a cigarette.

  As much as I had successfully parried Colleen’s accusations, it was obvious that the festival check-in had resulted in, overall, a strategically mixed outcome. It was essential that I extract the full fee for Athena’s performance as soon as possible, before Leslie Stark, the director of the festival, figured out that Athena wasn’t coming. There was no way I would get Leslie herself to agree to paying out before the performance, so I had to find some unwary underling with cheque-signing authority to take care of it, meanwhile avoiding Leslie for as long as possible, because Leslie is sharp. Yikes.

  PORTRAIT OF LESLIE STARK WITH THE AUSTRALIAN SINGER-SONGWRITER

  LESLIE STARK IS ONE OF THE BEST of the A.D.s, because she actually has extraordinarily good, far-ranging taste in music. Runs some kind of unlistenable experimental jazz show on the university radio station. I like her ’cause she gets bored easy, and she doesn’t have the social skills to hide it. She’s almost autistic in her ability to obtusely trample people’s feelings. A lot of people — hippies, especially — can’t handle her. She traumatizes them.

  My favourite story about Leslie to illustrate her hilarious insensitivity is about this awful Australian singer-songwriter who was in Canada, trying to build an audience here on the folk circuit.

  First of all, you may call me “prejudiced,” you may think I’m not “politically correct,” but I have a right to my opinions, and I personally feel that Australians are subhuman. Not the Aborigines of course, I mean the blond ones that surf or whatever. They have a kind of easy friendliness that reminds me of Californians, but worse. My favourite peoples in the world are the Finns, the Czechs, and the Bosnians. These are sullen, melancholy, suspicious people who are extremely difficult to impress. Australians will call you their “mate” within the first five seconds of meeting you. I despise that. If a Czech decides that he’s your friend, he’ll fucking die for you. But you have to earn his friendship and respect, over a period of years. He will not hug you. Australian friendship, like their culture, goes about an inch deep. Don’t mistake their blond bounciness for the stupid but endearing loyalty of the Golden Retriever. No. At their core, they’re like cats — once you leave the room, they’ve forgotten you exist, and they’re thinking about lunch. And their songwriting is like that. An Australian lyricist is aiming, with her words, for a kind of McCartney-esque mellifluousness, like the waves crashing soothingly, mindlessly, repetitively, on the beach. They’ve never met a cliché that they didn’t like. Australian songs are full of lyrics like

  “I feel like I live in a mind of my own

  And all I can learn is all that I’ve known.”

  Or

  “Runaway train, gonna run all night,

  Got on board this ev’nin’ and I’ll be there by daylight.”

  Or

  “We can change the shape of the world, just by seeing from a different point of view!”

  Not that there aren’t Canadian songs that are just as awful. But for Australia, apart from Nick Cave, that’s all they’ve got.

  So this Australian chick has been campaigning for a year and a half to get into Leslie’s festival. Demo CDs with scented candles, recycled-paper bags of home-baked muffins, weekly emails, monthly phone calls. Leslie listens to
half of one song, with its lyric about how we need to love our Mother, and our Mother is Mother Nature, or how it’s Lonely Out On the Road, or something, and writes her off.

  But the Ozesse persists. She “networks” with other Canadian singer-songwriters, pressuring them to ask Leslie to “give her a chance” and at least go see her play live.

  So finally, Leslie gets sick of this and takes the situation in hand. She goes out to the little café where the Australian is the featured performer at the open-mic night. After she’s done, the chick goes straight to Leslie’s table to start lobbying for the festival gig.

  Leslie responds, “You aren’t ready to play the festival.”

  “Yes I am! I am ready. Why not?”

  Others would hem and haw. Others would put her off with promises of “maybe next year.” Not Leslie. She just smiles and lets her have it, point blank. “Your singing is just okay, you can barely play guitar, and all that wouldn’t be such an issue, but your songwriting is intensely unoriginal. You’re just very unoriginal.”

  You’ve got to give the girl credit. She doesn’t quit. Like a cheerful young piece of cannon fodder at Gallipoli, she continues charging, undaunted, into the unconquerable heavy guns of the enemy — to get her empty head blown off.

  “No, I’m not unoriginal. That’s so unfair! I’m actually very … original.”

  At this point, Leslie offers the coup de grace. She fishes into her purse and hands the girl a pass to the festival in July.