Festival Man Page 5

  “Here, come to the festival, and listen to some of the acts that play there. That’ll give you an idea of how good you’d have to be to get in as a performer.” And she walks away. Wow. What a woman. I really needed to stay away from her till Sunday, or the jig could be up.

  PURPOSEFUL MARCH TO THE FESTIVAL

  I NEEDED SOME FRESH AIR and a break from my musicians, so I donned the fresh white terry-cloth hotel bathrobe and made ready to head down to the lobby and the short walk to the festival site. Mykola and Jenny waved their arms, trying to get me to answer their concerns, but as I had no idea what they’d been saying for the last ten minutes, I merely shouted something like, “You’re free on shore leave till the workshop at 2 p.m. tomorrow. Be there a half-hour before. Make sure you’ve got something figgered out by then if you know what’s good for ya” and then headed out to the elevators.

  There’s something about wearing a good bathrobe out in public that I’ve always enjoyed. Just the right balance between Rasputin-like madness and regal authority.

  In the lobby, the famous and semi-famous were arriving in the festival shuttle cargo vans, with their flight cases and their jetlagged, need-a-shower-and-a-shave-and-a-shit faces. I really could have used some sleep (and maybe a long bath, I guess) myself, but it was up to me as Manager to go out and Represent and Network and buy people beers with other people’s money and enlighten the ignorant as to my many unique and valuable opinions. Heads were turned by the sheer energy that I emanated as I marched briskly and purposefully toward the revolving doors. But once I’d parsed the faces to make sure there was no Richard Wren among them, I only spared them a few random R.A.F.-style salutes and tips of my imaginary hat as I strode. It was festival time.

  I love the walk to the festival, whether from the hotel or the parking area or wherever. I like to feel the excitement building in the audience as they make their way toward the gates. They chatter to each other, carrying their blankets and camping gear and extra layers for the chill when the sun goes down. For a lot of these people, this one weekend is the highlight of their entire year, when they see old pals who moved away and maybe only come back to town for Folk Fest, when they cut loose a little (or a lot), when they find the music they’re going to be listening to on their joe-job commutes for the rest of the year, the music that will give them the spiritual strength to get up in the dark of a Canadian morning and drag themselves into another workday that no matter how deadening, at least takes them a day closer to the next Folk Fest.

  They moved in little clumps of family and friends, usually somebody reading a program as they walked, figuring out what they wanted to see this weekend, what they’d heard of, what “looks interesting.”

  It did my heart good to see one clump that appeared to be three generations of counter-culture types: an elderly Beat-professor type Grampa, a couple of middle-aged Deadheads, and a teenaged punk son, all sharing a nasty-sweet-smelling joint as they meandered along. I asked them for a hit, and they shared it with me in the true spirit of Alberta horse brutality.

  Then we got to the giant opening night lineup, and the counter-cultural dopehead family stopped at the back of the three-block-long queue, and it did my heart good to breeze past them, fingering my backstage pass as they slumped in resignation for the long, boring wait ahead of them. Berner the lying Jew accordionist likes to wear a linen suit and a panama hat with mirrored shades for just these moments, when he can pretend to be a Caribbean plantation owner, surveying his “crop” of new audience. That’s taking the joke a little too far, a tendency he can never resist, but still, his un-Christian inability to feel shame in his pleasures is one of the ways that he and I intersect.

  My ears were pricked by a sound coming up from near the gate. Too loud to be a faraway stage. There was something musical happening.

  It was revealed to be a cute young ragamuffin jug band of five squeegee punks, playing a skooching fast hillbilly tune on some thrift-store acoustic instruments. First thing I noticed was the fiddle. It keened high above the other stuff that chuckered along. The big dirty tattooed pierced banjo guy with electrical-taped glasses was singing, and the fiddle would talk back at each of his phrases, rapid-fire, like your favourite drinking buddy who knows how to make your jokes funnier as you tell them. The fiddler was a little guy in a ripped black leather jacket, wearing a dark blue Lucky Lager cap. You couldn’t see his face under the brim, ’cause it was bent down looking at the banjo player’s hands. He was simultaneously leaning into a tough-looking, pretty girl playing gutbucket one-string bass, absorbing the beat through his back. Boy that fiddle kid could play. Play fast, ripping notes off with the gliss of an expert pickpocket. Play slow, lovely little ornaments on the melody, never losing the pitch except accidentally-on-purpose for emphasis, to tell you something about the jumbled way the music was making him feel. How old was he? He was barely over five feet tall. Was he some kind of tweenage runaway from fucking Julliard, dragging his classical chops through the mud?

  The song itself emerged from the din, and it clarified as a cover of “Gin & Juice” by Snoop Dogg. “Got my mind on my money and my money on my mind,” a good choice to underline the falseness of trying to separate White Music and Black Music in the history of American Music. Most of the audience of lineup people were digging it, and coins were falling in the guitar case. A handsome, skinny guitarist boy in a crushed top hat was on his back next to the case, rolling around and strumming up at the punkette girl guitar player, who I noticed had a black sling on her back with a sleeping baby in it. The little nipper sported a skull-and-crossbones baby cap. A cardboard sign propped up against the fence read “The Supersonic Ramblers! Donations Xepted!”

  The song skittered and spun to a halt like a NASCAR wall- collision accident, and the lineup applauded. The little fiddler lifted up his head and smiled a weird, pointy-toothed smile, and of course it was a girl! How dumb of me. No boy could play like that, with that kind of sophistication of feeling. Well, maybe if you kept him at the bottom of a well for a year or something.

  “Nice one,” I said as I tossed a five-dollar bill in the guitar case.

  “Thank you!” said the girl fiddler, and she smiled again. It looked like the teeth on either side of her canines had been pulled or knocked out. It made her look like some kind of feral rodent, or a wolverine or something. But the full force of her happiness at the way they’d played the song, the gladness about getting the fiver, it sort of blazed out at you. It won you over to her side of things, right away. It was strange, like her playing.

  “Hey, mister,” said the girl with the baby on her back. “I see you gotta backstage pass. You somebody important or something?”

  “You have no idea how important,” I responded.

  This didn’t faze her. “Well, then, can you get us in past the gates? They won’t let us in. We’d make way more cash on the inside.”

  “Don’t be so sure, kid. Keep playing!” I shot that back over my shoulder as I pushed on past the security volunteers, waving the pass.

  THE REST OF THE EVENING I was on a kind of drunk, tired automatic pilot, just working the exhaustion and the road out of my shoulders, drinking in the backstage, mostly not listening to the main-stage acts. I was wrung out by the ten-hour drive from Vancouver, and sometimes I find the collegial, familiar atmosphere of the beer garden soothing. The folk festival circuit is kind of a travelling small town, where the same performers and tech people see each other weekend after weekend. For the host city itself, the festival appears only once a year, like Brigadoon, but for the people behind the curtain, there’s a comforting weekly sameness to the Drinks Tent, no matter which city or town it might be located in this week. Same plastic chairs, same plastic tables sporting plastic beer company logo giant parasols, same brutalized yellow-brown beer-soaked grass under your toes, and the chattering sound of the slow release of show-adrenaline, comparisons of tour itineraries, swapped stories of bad behaviour, bad luck, bad hospitality from Timbuktu to Sudbury, et cete
ra. Comforting old jokes, stray conversation …

  “It’s an okay gig, but no good for publicity. Uncle Thirsty says playing that place is like pissing yerself in a dark suit — you get a warm feeling but nobody notices.”

  “… I said ‘that’s why they call it a guarantee, ’cause it’s guaranteed, arschloch!’ So he says they just don’t have the money, so then I said, ‘Well, this microphone looks like it cost five hundred euros, if you ain’t got the cash, I’ll just take this.’”

  “Anyway, later I’m lying there, and suddenly he sits up, and he says, ‘You know what? I like you. So you know what I’m gonna do for you?’”

  At the table next to me, Rosalyn Knight, the boozy country chanteuse, was cackling merrily, with her customary Du Maurier cigarette in one hand, glass of red wine in the other. Her crow-black hair fell careless and fetchingly over her somewhat hooky nose. I heard a rumour she’s half-Jewess and it doesn’t surprise me in the least. She’s got the gift of the gab, all right. Plus it’s kinda suspicious that someone who’s supposed to be a country singer would have so many minor key songs in her repertoire.

  “What?”

  “He says, ‘You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go and wash my penis.’”

  “Oh my God! No!”

  “Yeah. Kind of a mood killer.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing. He went off to the can and I made a run for it. Shwip. Gone.”

  “Wow. Good for you.”

  “Yeah, he was pretty cute, but his band kinda sucked. They still cover ‘Ring of Fire.’ Every time somebody plays that song, a little angel loses its wings.”

  “Where was that? Toronto?”

  “You called it! They really know how to treat a lady out there.”

  “Weren’t you just up North too? Get up to anything there? There’s a lot of lonely men up there, not many ladies, I hear.”

  “Please. I mean, the odds are good, but the goods are odd, if you know what I mean.” More cackling. “Nothing is free, my friend. Nothing is free. Remember that.”

  My old pal Dugg Simpson, the artistic director of the Vancouver Folk Fest, was sitting with a couple of other A.D.s. These people get paid to go and check out each others’ festivals. Nobody ever quits that job. It’s too good. You either die or get fired. I gotta get me a job like that someday.… Anyway, he looked relaxed and satisfied with himself, so I decided to try to bait him into an argument of some kind.

  “You know what the problem is, you’ve got all this fake ‘gypsy’ shit played by fucking jazz college kids from fucking Vancouver or Toronto or New England or whatever. Gypsy Jazz. Gypsy Punk. Pretty white Pentecostal girls who ran away from home to play old-time country and write songs about how they’re Gypsies. And meanwhile the real Gypsies are back starving in Eastern Europe, ’cause you fuckers are too lazy to jump through the hoops to get them a visa to come here.”

  “Getting a visa is not a matter of jumping a couple of hoops, Cam! You should know that. The Canadian government will not be convinced that these guys aren’t coming in order to stay and go on welfare, like immediately.”

  “Let them go on welfare!” I was starting to roll. “It would be an immeasurable enrichment of Canadian culture to have a few hundred thousand Gypsies over here, on welfare. Besides, nobody works harder than the Roma, and that’s a fact. I just can’t believe you’re booking some asshole from some indie rock band who just discovered this music last summer while he was backpacking, rather than the real deal. Like this band I found in Romania, the Changa Band. I could get them for you — they’ll fucking give you a conniption! You’ll never book that college boy bullshit again.”

  “I’m never booking the Changa Band again, that’s who I’m never booking again.” Dugg crossed his arms.

  “You booked them? When?”

  “Nine years ago, before you’d ever heard of them, boyo. Never again.”

  “What happened?”

  “I paid them a huge fee. In euros. And I got a grant to pay for their flights, went through like, nine months of visa bullshit to get them here. They come to the festival, and they start busking.”

  “Well, that’s what they do, they play. They play on the street, they play wherever. They’re fucking Gypsies, man.”

  “I’ve got six outdoor stages going simultaneously, each where I try to keep the music sonically separated so there’s not too much bleed, and all day Saturday, people are trying to do their concerts, workshops on the stages, what have you, and then the bloody Changas come through, dancing along, playing, and steal the fucking audience like the Pied fucking Piper.”

  “Well, fair’s fair. The audience just liked them more, ’cause they’re the real deal. They’re geniuses, man.”

  “Yeah, well my audience has paid, like seventy bucks a head per day to come into this festival, and these jokers finish a song, and start passing the hat around, literally begging for money.”

  “Busking! Just ’cause they pass the hat around doesn’t mean they’re begging.”

  “Man, they were passing the hat around with photos of their children, explaining to people that their children needed medicine and operations back home. They were crying, okay? That’s begging. I was paying them ten thousand dollars for one weekend! Plus flights and hotel! But that would have been tolerable, if it wasn’t for the tapes.”

  “Tapes?”

  “They sold cassettes while they were busking.”

  “So the merchandise tent guys were mad that they were selling merch outside the tent, not payin’ them their 15 percent cut of the action, eh?”

  “Well, that would have been manageable.”

  “I guess they sold them for less than they would have cost in the merch tent, too, eh? Undercutting.”

  “That was not the problem.”

  “Well what, then?”

  “The tapes were blank, man. They were selling them for ten bucks a pop to my audience, and when people took the tapes back to their Kitsilano homes, there was nothing on them. Just hiss. Never booking those guys again.”

  I guess I was supposed to take a cautionary lesson from that story. But me, that just made me love that band even more.

  “ Those Kitsilano people shoulda felt honoured to have bought blank tapes from the Changas. That’s like getting shat on by a raven or something. It’s good luck.”

  Then I’m pretty sure I might have changed tables and ranted at some sensitive Ontario folk kid about the evils of the Newfoundland band Great Big Sea, with their airbrushed harmonies, theme-park Irishness, and goddamned Takkameany guitars. Hate that band. They were on the main stage that night, smarmily romping about with their didley-dee smiley-smiley bullshit, fuelling me, motivating me in my crusades.

  After that there’s a vague memory of wandering up to the beautiful dancers from the Camerounian band as they shivered under thick blankets in the cool of the Canadian summer evening. I was just drunk enough to speak French at that point. They seemed pleased to finally meet someone who spoke it, in a country that had been, they felt, fraudulently pitched to them as bilingual. They complained about the bland quality of the food, especially the beef. I warned them not to say such things in English while in Alberta.

  I know that Leslie Stark was kind of around the whole night, but I cagily slipped out of the vicinity any time she seemed to be headed my way. It wasn’t hard, since everybody wanted to talk to her and she was mostly trying to get the attention of her assistant with the BlackBerry, to get an update on the attendance numbers for the night. I didn’t spot Jimmy Kinnock, or more importantly, Richard Wren, his legendary string-puller.

  I must have made it back to the hotel room, because that’s where I woke up. Mykola was in the single bed next to mine, buried, snoring under the duvet.

  THE MOTIVATOR

  I WENT DOWN AND SCARED UP some breakfast from the coffee shop, returned to the room, and woke up Mykola by blowing bacon-tinged cigarette smoke in his face. I called Jenny and Manny to come over.


  Manny started to manically jump around, climbing the furniture and talking a river of bullshit, like he does when he’s nervous. Mykola ate everything on everybody’s plates, and Jenny scowled.

  “People are going to be expecting Athena to jam with Jimmy Kinnock. That’s what they paid for. They’re gonna tear us apart.”

  “They’re not going to tear anybody apart. These are folkies. They don’t tear. They whine, maybe. They harrumph. They mutter. They are not going to stone you, even if you blow it.”

  Manny launched into a soliloquy about “positive energy.” I should have tolerated it, since he was trying to back me up, but I just couldn’t bear it at 10:20 in the morning.

  “Shut up. All right, listen: I don’t want to hear any more about what the audience wants. Not only do these people have no idea what they want, but if they did, they’d probably be wrong to want it. We know what people need to hear. They need to hear real fucking music, not a performance, not fake, sanitized overly slick sentimental ritualized packaging of something that maybe once used to be real. That realness would still matter to them, if only they could hear it. If only they could hear the fundamental crazy emotions at the bottom of it. YOU PEOPLE CAN DO THAT. And you’re some of the very few here who can. As soon as you get up there and do what you know how to do, they’ll forget all about what they thought they were there for. And just as importantly, Mister Richard Wren is going to forget about everything and want to be part of the feeling that you’re going to create up there. Now fucking stop whining, and go out and fucking do what you were born to do.”

  There was some grumbling, but they picked up their instruments and started to move. I tell you, I am a supreme motivator of artists.

  As we marched across the park toward the stage, I kept my sharpshooter eyes systematically scanning the flow and counterflow of sunburned crowd for any sign of Leslie Stark’s explosion of black curly hair, but I guess she was off dealing with some emergency. There’d been a rumour the night before that some famous American roots singer-songwriter lady had arrived fresh from a divorce and was insisting on playing none of her hits, instead wanting to “try out” all-new songs that she’d written over the past several grief-stricken days. To add to the effect, the Star was planning on doing all her appearances for the weekend in a Muslim Burqua made out of the American flag. If I was her manager, I would have backed her 100 percent. And it was also good luck for us, keeping Leslie busy.