Festival Man Read online

  My personal favourite moment was in the Joiker’s main song. He and his buddy with the laptop were going for it, super full-on (in their own minds, anyway), raising the dynamic tension (actually just getting louder and louder), and then the Joiker would point to somebody with his traditional sceptre thingy, indicating that it was time for them to take their solo. Manny did his crazy animal-sound thing to much applause, and the “Sami” came over and gave him a big, emotional hug, as the beat went on. Then he looked over at Jimmy Kinnock, who kind of shrugged and looked at the guy, a look which very efficiently conveyed the message: “I have no idea what you think I could do here, mate, because I’m just a folk singer, I sing folk songs, and I have nothing to contribute to your weird pseudo-aboriginal jam.” So the Joiker pretended he hadn’t even looked over at him in the first place, and cast his theatrically intense gaze at the pretty New Zealand half-Maori girl.

  She was more than ready to pick up the baton, and began this kind of amorphous singing that oddly reminded me a bit of Athena, without the balls. I’ve seen Athena eat raw seal heart with relish, her face all bloody. This girl sounded vegan.

  I think her thing was kind of based on some kind of Maori traditional thing, but there was a cheesy Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey kind of aspect to it, too, and she kept raising her voice in the manner of a suburban housewife faking an orgasm, which I guess was a turn-on for some people, because when she was done her solo, as the backing track continued, the Joiker dude came over to her and gave her a bit more than Manny’s comradely bear hug. He started with a nice, friendly embrace, but once he had her pinned, as the cheesy beats and bass thumped away, he sucked onto her face and literally stuck his tongue right down her throat, causing her to kind of freeze in a horribly uncomfortable way, although Buddy didn’t seem to notice or mind. He went at her for a good minute before he pulled out and then pointed his sceptre thingy at Jenny Reid, in a kind of “you’re next” kind of way.

  Jenny nodded over at Manny, who stopped his playing to give her space, and she went into a decent little slapping bass solo. The bass jocks in the crowd went wild, drowned out by all the girls, and she just smouldered out at them, not looking at Joikey at all.

  But when the solo came to an end and the drums kicked back in, Joikey started dancing over toward her, clearly looking for some more lovin’. Jenny deftly picked up a drum stick from the kit nearby and glowered at him. She made a gesture with the drumstick that was meaningfully anatomical, and he wisely decided to boogie backwards, toward his own spot.

  All that’s beside the point of the total triumph of the workshop, which was all about the artists I brought to the table. Jenny played a song that was inarguably obscene, in which she, as a lesbian, got away with talking about the object of her desire, essentially, as a piece of meat. No male folksinger would ever even contemplate singing a song like that, and rightly so, because he’d be run out of town on a rail. But with Jenny singing it, she not only had the (sizable) lady-loving lady contingent in the audience singing along, but all the straight men in the crowd grabbed hold of this opportunity to sing nasty lyrics about tits in public, all in the spirit of supporting a marginalized voice of gay pride, of course. Naturally, Mister Jimmy chortled along in his best cockney barker voice. There wasn’t a dry seat in the house.

  Mykola was a big fan of Jimmy Kinnock and knew half his songs, so he did a very worthy job of plunking along on his kobza and singing backups. When it was his turn to play his own tune, he played a funny little love song he’d written on the way up, and in the manner of these things, I noticed many of the girls in the audience looking at him just slightly differently, if you know what I mean.

  Which is all as much as to say that by the time the hour and a half was over, everybody had completely forgotten that Athena’s name was on the list of performers. Several hundred people had discovered music they’d never known existed, and many rushed up to the back of the tent-stage to meet their new favourite artists.

  One of them, I recognized immediately, was the stately, genial, white-haired presence of Mr. Richard Wren himself.

  He ambled up to the barrier line and ducked under, calling out, “Right ho, Jimbo!” as he moved. Kinnock waved to him, but then Wren made a beeline for Mykola and Jenny, who were packing up their instruments. He had a big smile on his face, his right hand extended to shake.

  “Bloody great! Bloody great, you two!”

  I strode toward the situation, my own right hand extended for interception.

  “Cam Ouiniette, Mister Wren. I’m these geniuses’ manager.”

  “Well, I tell you that was bloody great. The real stuff, there. Don’t see it that much these days, you know.”

  “See!” I whapped Jenny on the back and tousled Mykola’s hair. “I told you you had the goods. Listen, Mr. Wren, I’m hoping we can have a chat about these two.”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Ah, there you are, Cam.” There was Sandy, of course. And he had his awful wife with him.

  “You’ve got some explaining to do, mister. We’ve had some letters from Revenue Canada demanding income tax on money that Sandy never even made!”

  “Listen, Sharon, can I talk to you guys later about this?”

  Wren, as a top-flight manager, clearly recognized the awkward situation I was in. I once read in a rock tell-all book about a roadie taking a broken light bulb to Wren’s throat in order to get paid his wage for a tour. He began to back away.

  “Listen, yeah, why don’t we chat later tonight. See you at the After-Party, I understand Buckwheat Zydeco’s playing, yeah?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll see you there.”

  Sharon Mackenzie took my arm. “You come with us. We have some things to discuss.”

  COME ALL YE BOLD CANADIANS

  AFTER I HAD BLAGUED AND BULLSHITTED Sandy and his wife for a while with various half-truths, red herrings. and false promises, and they had yelled at me, and I had yelled at them, they finally had to let me go, since Sandy, who is still quite slight of build and has replaced booze with weed, was not going to hit me, after all.

  I was feeling pretty low at that point. Then I just happened to glance down at the cellphone. Three missed calls from a Vancouver number. I didn’t want to recognize it, but there was no mistaking that number. It was of course the payphone on Commercial Drive, just up the hill from our apartment on East Fourth. I didn’t really want to know, but in case it was a medical emergency with Maevey, I needed to just quickly check it.

  So yes, I did hear your message, my Love, telling me that the phone had been cut off at home, and I heard your sadness and anger in your voice when you said, “You said that you’d paid it, but the phone company says that we owe five hundred and forty-five dollars, and I need the phone in order to register for my university courses in the fall, and could you please call me?”

  Yes, okay, I did get the following two messages, where the anger boiled off, leaving thick despair. My thinking was, I’ve got something absolutely brilliant on the go. I have to stay absolutely focused on the mission at hand, so that I can return as the conquering hero, with cash and a major management deal in hand. Yes, I did spend the phone money on the rental van to get us to the festival, because I’d spent the travel money on the cellphone bill and part of my tab at Café Vasco da Gama, because I’d spent the pay I got from the last Canada Council for the Arts grant on a plane ticket to Nunavut, et cetera., backwards in a never-ending chain of spinning plates of barely serviced debts and expenses. But I was certain, given my abilities, and the talent I work with, thanks to my amazing ear for musical genius, I was certain that I would bring back such an amazing carload of magic beans that all would be forgiven. It’s an old saying, but still powerful as ever as a rule for living: It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

  I’m sorry, I’m so sorry my Love. I should have called you. But can’t anyone see why it seemed wrong to do so at the time? I had to Stay On Target, and to do that, I had to get my head together.

/>   I WAS SHAKEN, SHAKEN BY the sound of your voice falling slowly, unglamourously out of love with me. So at that moment, I just found myself unable to cope in the complex hand-to-hand social battlefield of the backstage beer garden, where managers, agents, bookers for festivals, and lastly, musicians and the people they are hoping to sleep with, congregate in a drunken, milling hornet’s nest. I needed hard liquor, and I needed proper music. I gripped the Nalgene bottle full of Scotch in my bag and marched out to hear Paddy McGraw play the main stage.

  Not too close to the stage, just back a bit, and to stage left, where I could see the man do his thing without worrying about people jockeying around me for a better view. Or so I thought.

  Paddy McGraw, eighty-three years old, the mentor for all the young Cape Breton fiddlers who came down to Toronto out of Nova Scotia and got their hair up in a gelled quiff and laid their birthright down on top of generic nineties hip-hop beats that Chuck D wouldn’t have bothered comment on as he tossed them out the studio window, Paddy McGraw, still better than them all, still innovating and messing around with the tradition in ways that few would understand, but some could feel.

  Watch those fingers if you like, for their uncanny speed, even in their ninth decade, see the fingers fly, but listen, listen to what he’s doing. He’s got ahold of the tune so it’s talking about the fire of his youth, and the regrets of his middle age, and the return to the home note is a coming-to-terms with it all in old age that never entirely resolves, an intentional dissonance filled with awe at the things a man can see and do in one lifetime and still never truly understand the world and its terrible wonder, a dissonance that announces that this musician hasn’t finished his story, and just maybe if there’s any pretty ladies out there interested, this old boy still has a few surprises up his kilt, and the hustle just might still be on, no quarter given.

  This is a tune that every student of Celtic fiddle from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Galway to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to Osaka, Japan, is taught in their first year, a tune that was played a hundred thousand times by travelling minstrels under a thousand different names, the way you do when you’re in that life: “Oh, your Excellency, your hospitality has been so perfect and so kind, I’ve been inspired to write a piece of music for you, and with your permission I’d like to name it for you, the Duke of Bunbury’s Reel” or whatever the name of your patron that night might be …

  “Excuse me!”

  I turned. A late-middle-aged, bearded, pot-bellied man in yet another Genuine First Nations sweater, with his wife, who resembled him.

  “Excuse me! We’re trying to enjoy the music.”

  “Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy it, it just takes a leap of imagination and a bit of human feeling.”

  You see, I know how to deal with Canadians.

  WE WERE NOT TRAPPED, PART II

  “WE DON’T HAVE A DOG IN THIS FIGHT,” said Andy McKay, tapping his Cross pen on his blue, pinstriped, be-suited knee. From behind his desk, Queen Elizabeth II and her bland, meaningless smile looked on from the wall.

  “Actually, Andy, I think we have several dogs in this fight. There’s Canadians mixed up in every side of this bloody circus. I hear that the Croatian defence minister used to run a pizza joint in Brantford, Ontario.”

  “Well, fine, Mr. Ouiniette. But you get involved in these things at your own risk. The Yugoslavian conflict is the result of centuries of frankly barbaric ethnic hatred — it goes back to the Stone Age, practically. We can’t begin to understand it, and, very frankly, we don’t care to, either. We can get your Canadians out on the next flight, but we can’t do anything about your … friends. That is not within the bounds of our power. We’re just here to maintain the ceasefire. Peacekeeping. That’s what we do. We don’t just take twenty random foreign people, put them in a Sea King, and fly them to Canada.”

  “These people aren’t random. By giving us sanctuary, they saved our lives, and also, as far as I can see, there’s no fucking peace to keep here. These people are the cream of Sarajevo avant garde artistic expression.” I left out the part about them all being members of the Sarajevo Aleister Crowley Reading Group, and the part about them being currently holed up at the mansion of a notorious Albanian gangster. “Each one of them has more culture in a single eyelash than the entire city of Kingston.” That part was true. “Where are you from, Andy?”

  “P.E.I., originally. St. Andrews.”

  “Well, there you go, they could form an artistic colony on Prince Edward Island, stage Situationist Happenings for the Japanese tourists. You’d have to agree, as a Prince Edward Islander, it’d make a nice change from all the horrific, soul-killing Anne of Green Gables garbage. My point is, if you don’t get them out, they’re gonna be fucking murdered.”

  “That’s a little overdramatic, don’t you think?”

  “No, I think you’re being typically, Canadianly underdramatic. What is it with Canadians and their psychotic need to downplay everything serious, extraordinary, crazy. ‘Nothin’ to see here, folks, move along.’ I know that by not giving them some sort of asylum, I know, and you know too, that they’re gonna get fucked. It’s a mixed-ethnic group. Serbs married to Croats, Croats married to Macedonians, Muslims.” I left out the ones that were in four- or five-way open relationships. “If the Yugo bastard Serb army don’t get ’em, the fucking Croat Nazis will.”

  “Well, as I said, there’s nothing we can do about that. We’ll get you and your Canadian musicians out, but we can’t help the others. We just can’t. I don’t even have the authority to do anything.”

  From the fact that he was making excuses now, I could see he was almost imperceptibly cracking. “There’s a crack in everything,” I heard an old man say once.

  “Do you know who Raoul Wallenberg was, Andrew?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He was a Swedish diplomat who smuggled thousands of Jews outta Nazi territory, without the permission of his government.”

  “I said ‘yes, I know,’ already, okay?”

  “He saved thousands of lives, Andy.”

  “I said ‘I know!’”

  “He was a Hero.”

  “He also wound up dead.”

  “We all wind up dead, Andy. But who among us, who among us does anything extraordinary, honourable, noble with their lives?”

  “You think I’m really that easy to play, my friend?”

  “I’m not trying to play you, man. I’m just looking for a solution, here. Okay, look: here’s all I need from you: ten cartons of smokes and a case of vodka from the PX. — put down that there was a diplomatic party with the Chinese consulate or something — and an official letter from the Canadian government, in English, denying my people their application for aid in leaving the country.”

  “Denying it?”

  “Yeah. Not a scrap of evidence will exist that says you helped. You keep a copy, so your ass is covered. Just give me 5 minutes in the PX.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing bad. Help me out that much, willya, Raoul?”

  COME ALL YE BOLD CANADIANS CONTINUED

  SORRY, I WAS IN THE MIDDLE of telling you about Paddy McGraw’s killer performance that those middle-aged Canadian folkies were trying to interrupt, when I interrupted myself. I’ve got to try harder to stay with the story.

  Anyway, the man in the Genuine Indian Handmade sweater says,“You’re standing in the sitting area.”

  “Alright, I’ll siddown.” I plunked myself to the ground.

  “You can’t sit here, we got here at 9 a.m. to put our blanket down here.”

  Oh, there it was. The twilight slowly revealed the tartan blanket, the plastic cooler, the stupid, stupid little no-leg chairs with the festival logo on them. Christ.

  “Well, I’m either going to sit here or stand here. This is my man Paddy McGraw and I’m not going to miss him.”

  “Well, this is our spot.”

  I turned to him and growled. “So go call the cops. Y
ou’ll miss the greatest fiddler alive for the sake of your own pettiness.”

  The man and wife mounted an assault on my presence in the usual Canadian way. A low-level, muttering dialogue on the subject of how some people think that the whole world was made for them and the rules don’t apply to them and was that alcohol they smelled because you’re not allowed to drink alcohol on the festival grounds outside the beer tent and some people were going to get thrown out on their ear.

  In a perfect answer to a prayer I didn’t even know I’d specifically uttered, Paddy finished his reel, lowered his fiddle, and launched into a bizarre, furious, a cappella shouting rendition of the old folk song “Come All Ye Bold Canadians,” a battle hymn from the War of 1812, forgotten for decades everywhere but the little outports of Cape Breton:

  Come All Ye Bold Canadians and gird your trusty might!

  Let’s make the American libertines regret they picked a fight!

  For Order and Good Government, we’ll fight for what is right!

  Come All Ye Bold Canadians and gird your trusty might!

  The perfidious rebels snuck across our border by the score,

  They raped the nuns on tables, threw the babies to the floor.