Festival Man Page 6

  Manny whistled and sang, capering about, waving to all and sundry. Jenny was doing some kind of breathing exercise as she walked. Mykola was clutching a cheeseburger he’d managed to grab on the way over. He stared at the grass as he forced himself forward, occasionally bumping into the odd hippy or young vegan anarchist and splattering beefy relish on them.

  “Watch yer step, Mykola. I need to deliver you to the stage without anything broken.”

  “It’s just … so nervous. Saw Jimmy Kinnock when I was just a kid. This one Woody Guthrie song he played, ‘Deportees,’ it changed my life.”

  “You’re still a kid. And for God’s sake, don’t tell him that. He’s probably sick to death of having that conversation. Okay? All right?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “You’re gonna be fine.” I waved my hands at him, ceremoniously. “I’m putting an Invisible Success Force-Field around you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Poor bastard has terrible stage fright, right up until the moment that he actually gets on stage. Then he’s instantly more comfortable than he is in the whole rest of his life.

  We reached Stage Five, one of the workshop stages.

  “Hey, Cam.” Oh, shit. Sandy Mackenzie.

  “Sandy! Good to see you, man.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Hey, you’ve got a volunteer shirt on. You working on this stage?”

  “I’m the stage manager. ’Cause I’m a store manager now in real life, instead of a wastrel.”

  “Hunh.” What the hell do you say to something like that?

  “These your current victims, here?”

  “You bet.”

  “Hey Sandy!” chirped Manny.

  “Hey Manny. You really still work with Scam-bull, do ya?”

  “Seems like it. Too dumb to quit. Ha-ha.”

  “Maybe I should let these younger people in on a few things about working with you, Cam.”

  “Yeah, maybe you should. After. In the meantime, I think the workshop’s starting in, like, seven minutes.”

  “Jeez, Cam, that’s not like you to underestimate how little time there is to get something done. So. Where’s Athena Amarok?”

  “She’s not here. New plan: these guys will just play their own stuff in the slot where Athena would have played.”

  Sandy pursed his lips. “Yeah? So where is she, though?”

  “I got a message this morning saying her floatplane was delayed and she missed her connecting flight in Whitehorse. Has to wait for the next one. Now can we get rolling on the setup, here?”

  “Just for the record, just so’s you know, buddy, I know you’re lying right now.”

  I decided to just say nothing and stare at him blankly, to see if he really wanted to get into all of our past bullshit right now and delay the show.

  There was a pause.

  “Okay, well, you guys better tell me your mic specs, then after the show, Cam, maybe you and I can have a little talk about the final report for the travel grants on that Europe tour you screwed us on five years ago.”

  “Sure thing, Sandy. Okay, let’s get this thing rolling.”

  THE CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH HE QUIT THE BAND

  MACKENZIE DOESN’T DRINK ANYMORE. He manages a health-food store in Calgary now. But when he did, he was heroic about it. Besides the sheer legendary scale of his drinking, I guess the main difference between his consumption and mine was that he didn’t ever do it for fun. He never got to that moment of cheerful bonhomie where everybody links arms and sings “Galway Bay.” He was serious about drinking, like the Finns, not talking at all for long periods while he addressed himself to the bottle.

  Sandy was the nominal “leader” of that hardcore punk band I mentioned before. We’d been on a hell of a roll of good luck up until when his sister drank a bunch of pills and checked out of her confused, fucked-up life. I could tell at the funeral that Sandy was in no shape to go out on the tour I’d planned out. I cancelled everything and bought a case of Southern Comfort with the advances. Sandy and I spent the next three months in the basement of his mom’s house, playing Ping-Pong and shooting the nasty, mouthwashy liquor. Karyn had been a big fan of her brother’s music, helped out at the shows, and was a leading light in the local hardcore scene in general. Somehow it was immediately apparent that hardcore was the last thing we wanted to hear during that period. It was too positive to fit our mood.

  We found ourselves listening to his mom’s old Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia, and Johnny Cash records a lot. This was the stuff we’d always said we hated, and somehow it was giving us more deep comfort than anything else except the booze and the Ping-Pong. Ping-Pong is a beacon of hope in a troubled world. I guess we were sort of understanding that when shit goes truly bad, you wind up resetting to your roots or something. “I never got over those blue eyes …”

  When he started to pick up the guitar again, it just seemed natural to start playing those songs, and when he started writing again, it was country songs, with some of that punk sneer, that came out. I had him revive a couple of his old hardcore songs, and it turned out that after all they were country songs, too, if you played them right. We just hadn’t known it.

  I helped him assemble a band, with some of the same players as before. People started calling it Cowpunk. People said it was the coming thing. I didn’t care about that. It just felt more subversive, somehow, to fuck with the kind of music that regular people actually liked.

  I’ve found a lot of Truly Greats, with my uncanny, laser-like talent for spotting talent. Some of them have come closer to the Brass Ring of Success than others. Sandy and his band were Truly Great, and I came close to getting them the Brass Ring. But the two big problems that usually come with the Truly Greats are that they tend to be Ahead of Their Time, and Their Own Worst Enemy. Sandy’s group were definitely Ahead of Their Time. And I’ll tell you, near the end of the band, Sandy was like an eight-division army of Worst Enemies for himself, with air support.

  When we used to play places like, say, Red Deer, where the band had a good following — so we had what you call an “open bar” situation — he’d walk in, and before load-in (being a lead singer, he rarely helped with load-in anyway) he’d order a row of eight shots of Jägermeister. As the bartender lined ’em up for him, Mackenzie would pull out the big pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol that I made sure he kept with him at all times.

  He was only twenty-seven by then, but he’d already hurt his stomach lining so bad with hard liquor that in order to drink at all, he needed to take a big swig of the chalky-minty-sweet antacid medicine as a prophylactic measure. When I first started seeing him double over in agony, clutching his belly before the set, I knew just what to do, having seen my dear old dad dealing with the very same issues when I was just a nipper. I went right to the twenty-four-hour Shoppers Drug Mart to get what was needed for Sandy’s condition.

  Through the rumour factory of the Canadian independent music scene, which runs in three contiguous eight-hour shifts, I’ve heard some people call me an “enabler” of Sandy’s drinking. Some of those people include Sandy, just to tell you how ungrateful these yowling string-pluckers can be. But I was his Manager. What is the word manage, really, if it’s not essentially a synonym for enable, I ask you? And if I sometimes felt that I had to Manage, in a participatory manner, some of Sandy’s epic eight-month drinking bouts, all I can say is, how far are you willing to go to keep a Truly Great musical outfit running? I go to the limit, my friend. Every goddamn time.

  Since I was essentially the glue that held them together for those last couple of years, on the never-ending tour in support of their final album, Burning the Furniture to Keep Warm; since I was the Rock on which the operation was founded, it naturally falls to me now to tell the actual, True version of how Judge Brighton came to quit the band. And frankly, once he was gone, that was it.

  THERE IS NOWHERE AND NOTHING between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg. It’s just endless driving over flat rock, forever. I try to expl
ain it to Europeans as the distance between Amsterdam and Kazakhstan, but they never believe me. Look it up, it’s true.

  Sandy’s strategy for dealing with the mind-numbing melancholy horror of the boredom of the unending Canadian plains was to numb his mind even further, aiming for unconsciousness for the whole trip. That turned the journey into a kind of teleportation, like on Star Trek, he used to say. Sandy loved Star Trek. One time, he closed his eyes on the outskirts of Thunder Bay and didn’t open them till we got to Vegreville, Alberta, 3,000 kilometres away. Vegreville has the World’s Biggest Easter Egg. When the van stopped to refuel in front of this massive Ukrainian monstrosity, I had to get somebody to wake him up to get more gas money out of him. The first thing he said, digging in to his wallet, was, “This shit is got to stop.” Not sure what he was going for, there. Then he dragged himself out of the van, stretched audibly, saw the giant painted egg, and observed, “Hey, we got one of those things in Alberta — in Vegreville.” That kind of oblivion was his ideal.

  Needless to say, this shirking of any driving duties, the moaning, the implied duty of the rest of the group (usually me) to nudge him now and then to make sure he wasn’t dead, and the smell when he invariably pissed himself and lay that way for days afterward, that all exacerbated the effect of the various irritating aspects of his personality in those days. Other fun habits he’d developed included the sartorial decision to wear whatever outfit he’d last got laid in, ad nauseum, and a recent tendency to threaten hitherto-friendly journalists with a punch in the chops if they mentioned the word “cowpunk” in his presence. “Music ain’t about labels, man.” Oh, yeah, and that was the tour where we opened for this Big-in-Canada band called Blue Rodeo, in Peterborough, and he called their singer Jim Cuddy a “Pretty Boy Cocksucker” and then dropped to his knees and, staying with the cock-sucking theme, offered to suck his cock and swallow if Cuddy would just promise not to play their simpering love-ballad hit song “Try” that night.

  So things were going great.

  Judge Brighton, in particular, was on edge about the situation.

  Judge was the youngest in the band, and Sandy had been his idol for years, long before he actually became a member. He was only allowed to join the outfit at first because the kid wouldn’t stop following Sandy around anyway, and in the beginning they just made him sell T-shirts, but then it turned out he could tune guitars, which was handy, and then it turned out he could play keyboards, and then it turned out he could play lead guitar, too, then it turned out he was actually the best musician in the band.

  Judge was a brainy kid. His dad was a professor. The boy read Kierkegaard and listened to Gang of Four. When he first heard Sandy’s band, he’d been a teenage volunteer at the local university radio station, and they came in to play live on the air. Kid was amazed. Changed his life.

  With Sandy, Judge made that classic error of mistaking a laconic guy for a guy with a lot of amazing shit on his mind that he didn’t deem you worthy of talking to you about. If you get seduced into trying to “get to the bottom” of a guy like that, you might be a little bit pissed off at what you find in the end.

  To be fair, Sandy was a hell of a songwriter. He wrote about our obscure pointless little lives in a boring backwater of a boring country as if we were all dramatic heroes of great consequence and romance, and it was convincing. Shit, the spell was so effective, when I look back on it now, we were all living in a Sandy Mackenzie song for about seven years there. But as a person, at the time, he was really just a drunk, selfish, morose, skinny little fuck whose inner life was a narrow universe of self-destructive self-mythology. Judge had a calling to be a musician for life, and was developing into a genius songwriter himself, not that Sandy would admit it, and over a period of about two years, his disillusion with Sandy and Sandy’s shenanigans had come pretty close to completing itself. He was just about there …

  Also, Judge was doing a lot of speed then. That might have accounted for some of the edginess, too, I guess.

  SO SANDY WAS PURSUING HIS teleportation concept when he downed several painkillers, a few Tums, and a mickey of Southern Comfort and wedged himself down in the back, with the equipment, as we pulled out of the Tim Hortons parking lot, still with the irreversibly polluted Lake Superior in view.

  I guess his tolerance for depressants had gone up since the last trip, because we’d only been driving for about seven hours when we heard a banging from the back. The threatening sound of glass on metal. Clank! Clank!

  Sandy poked his head up from behind the seats, goggle-eyed.

  “Ey! S’no mre SouthrnCmfrt! Who the fuck drank it?”

  “You did, you idiot!”

  “Rmph.”

  He crumpled back down.

  This repeated itself a couple more times, but then somewhere around Brandon, Manitoba, the clanking started up again, but this time it was Clank! Clank! … Smash!

  Sandy was in a rage, demanding to know who the fuck kind of bastard would steal a man’s liquor? What kind of fuck?

  He threw the broken mickey forward. It hit Jeanine the backup singer keyboard player in the side of the head, making her bleed. Being a true tough Albertan girl, she waved it off, saying it was nothing. But for Judge Brighton, crashing on the speed, looking at the blood, it was a fuse-lighter. Before I could react, he picked up the bloody, headless bottle and stared at it, growling in a keening, animalistic kind of way.

  He hurled himself at Sandy like a stone age cruise missile, screaming, “I’ll fucking KILL you!” Actually landed with his hands clasped right around Sandy’s throat. Sandy’s body having no more heft or balance than a freestanding pool cue, they both continued in the direction of Judge’s momentum, into the equipment area at the very back, into the door, slamming it open.

  I’m not embarrassed to say that I’ve always had a lightning- quick sense for danger — I’m not bragging, it’s just a fact — and my danger sense told me that the bass player was just about to stand on the brakes. That same sense also told me that a sudden deceleration would have been exactly the wrong thing to do. With split-second alacrity, I shouted to the driver — “Maintain this speed exactly! I’ll deal with this!”

  Naturally, even I had no idea whatsoever how I was going to deal with it as I scrambled over the seats.

  When I reached the situation, I saw the kid holding Sandy’s throat, with Sandy’s head and shoulders hiked out over Canada Highway Number 1, as it rolled by under him at 140 kilometres an hour.

  “I’ll KILL you! I’ll KILL you!” was Brighton’s key theme.

  “No! No! Hey!” was about the best I could do. I worried that if I grabbed for something or somebody, it would all go awry and I’d wind up having to walk back several miles, collecting pieces of both of them with one of those garbage pokers, putting them in a sack for later cremation.

  But Sandy was calm, just lying there as the prairie and the asphalt and his own gruesome demise whizzed by, inches away.

  “Gimme one reason why I shouldn’t! You waste everything you touch!” Judge screamed.

  “Don’t do it, Judge.” said Sandy, in a preternaturally urbane, dreamy way.

  “Gimme one good reason!” Even at this moment of crisis, it was funny in a way to hear him lapsing into action-movie dialogue — the boy had such a fastidious horror of cliché most of the time.

  “Gimme one good reason!”

  I could smell the oily exhaust of the Ford Econoline farting up from the tailpipe, mixing with the puke-and-Drum-Tobacco scent of Sandy’s leather jacket, Brighton’s musty lumberjack shirt, and a faint note of wet potato — Brandon, Manitoba, used to be the clearing house for McDonald’s french fries for all of North America. I remember it so clearly.

  Sandy looked his former acolyte in the eyes, and spoke slowly. “If you do, my troubles’ll be over, but your life’ll be ruined. Don’t ruin your life for me, man. I’m not worth it.”

  Judge paused. Exhaled. And hauled him back into the van.

  “You’re right. I
quit.”

  Sandy soldiered on for another year after that, but there was no question that right then at that moment, that was it for that band.

  NOW THE WORKSHOP ITSELF

  NATURALLY, IT WENT JUST EXACTLY as great as I always knew it would.

  You may not be familiar with the idea of a “workshop” in a Canadian folk festival. The most important thing to understand about it is that it’s not a workshop. No work gets done, and nobody learns anything. What you do, you get three to five different acts up on one stage — people who often don’t know each other, who play different styles of music, who might not even like each other. Each act takes a turn playing a song. The act that’s playing might or might not invite the other acts to play along, and those other acts might or might not choose to accept that invitation to play along.

  The result can be absolute cacophony and chaos. When a Pakistani circus brass band jams along with the Scottish piper and the Mexican cowboy outfit, you can wind up with the aural equivalent of a haggis doused with sag paneer wrapped in a taco.

  But the secret of the workshop format is, when the Pakistani haggis taco surprises everybody and tastes good, then the audience feels like it’s been witness to a bloody miracle, which they have. It’s the quotidian miracle of what music can do for you, so fucking help me.

  IN THIS WORKSHOP, WE HAD my crew of reprobates, plus the legendary British punk folk star, Jimmy Kinnock, the one managed by Richard Wren, in case I forgot to remind you enough. Also, we had a pretty half-Maori girl from New Zealand who sang trad and original material with some kind of loop pedal gimmick that allowed her to harmonize with herself. Then for added spice, we had this guy, I can’t remember his name; he was ostensibly a Norwegian Sami guy, who engaged in this traditional kind of singing/toasting vocalizing thing called Joiking. But he didn’t look Sami to me — he was as pale and aboriginal-looking as Truman Capote. Anyway, he did his Joiking overtop of the standard looped warmed-over nineties hip-hop beats, “played” on a laptop by some anonymous dude with fashionable spectacles.