A FAN’S NOTES

Comes a Time

A summer tradition here is the Edmonton Folk Music Festival which Sunday night wrapped up its 40^th anniversary. Ann and I spent a goodly portion of an overcast and unseasonably chilly Saturday on the grounds.

The venue is Gallagher Park, a large, groomed portion of the river valley surrounded by residential districts and adjacent to downtown. Despite its location, access to the steep, natural amphitheatre is limited. Factor in nearby summer City road and transit construction, and the migration of some 25,000 music fans, and well, gee, that’s some kind of jam.

This year’s festival artist roster might have been the most memorable in recent history had the legendary and very prolific of late John Prine not cancelled all of his appearances in Alberta this summer due to unforeseen medical issues. Advance tickets are sold with conditions only, including no refunds and no guarantees. It’s important to remember too that in a festival as well-run and tightly scheduled as Edmonton’s, the headliners on any night are obligated to perform abridged sets. In 1989 Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts described his tenure with the band thusly: “Five years of work and 20 years of hanging around.” Welcome to the pop-up commune! Enjoy the brevity! Share the boredom and irritation!

Ann stuffed a knapsack with rain ponchos and blankets. We shouldered our low-slung festival chairs and hiked half an hour to the University of Alberta’s Butterdome – a hot yellow local landmark athletic facility which has an official moniker nobody remembers – to board an Edmonton Transit shuttle to the site. Younger close friends and relations had arrived at folk fest earlier in the day and our mission was to spot a camouflage tarp staked down somewhere on the slope Main Stage right.

“What Beatles song did Ani DiFranco mess up during her workshop with Bruce Cockburn?”

“Rocky Raccoon.”

“Rocky Raccoon?”

“Erm, yeah, it’s from the ‘white’ album and what’s known these days as a ‘deep cut.’”

“A deep cut?”

“Erm, it was never released as a single.”

The only lines I find tolerable these days conclude jokes. Mind your queues to pee in disgusting portable toilets. You stand in another line aware that the hipsters running the food trucks have mismanaged their inventories and you will be gouged for any sustenance settlement you’re able to negotiate. You lineup for beer tickets and then join another line to get a beer. You fret about the likely and horrific possibility of having to use a Handi-Can again. Why are there dozens of them set in a semi-circle but only one impossibly long, snaking line? And because it’s an outdoor festival, there is mud; there is always mud, and other people gathered in the mud, and still other people with their muddy children but saints preserve us, there are actually a few streams of actual running water in the children’s play area. Just have to muscle in.

I suspect the festival’s most intoxicating performance area was Stage 1. The expanded beer garden, still demarcated by snow fencing, encroached significantly onto the audience’s traditional tarp and chair space. Atop the hill, a well-appointed and very comfortable and civilized smoking area sponsored by a pot company drew a steady stream of visitors, all of whom evidently still possessed a modicum of lung capacity. My hunch is that Stage 1 performers imagined they were giving the concert of their lives, that this set was the grail or the Grammy, that ever-elusive career breakthrough gig. “Everybody came to check us out and stayed!”

Ann and I had our wristbands applied outside the main gates of the festival camp a little before three in the afternoon. I was ready to bust out of there inside of an hour. I dislike being herded and directed by minions however cheery whilst paying to be treated like a privileged refugee. Five hours later I had my still-game face on and decided I could tolerate the 27 minutes’ wait for Bruce Cockburn to grace the Main Stage. When he finally did, he wasn’t exactly seated or exactly standing, he was sort of perched on the edge of an anchored, ass-high prop. Then again, Cockburn is 74-years-old now. By this time of the night, I would’ve welcomed my own ass-high prop. My knees and lower back were aching, colluding to inflame my pain threshold. There were mosquitoes too; mosquitoes the size of ‘Naked Lunch’ hallucinations.

The folk rock icon and guitar virtuoso deserves to be in the same national conversation as Gordon Lightfoot. I wonder if Cockburn’s prickly and articulate social and environmental activism can sometimes be something of a yoke rather than a badge; casual fans can’t always withstand a barrage of rhyming harangues. Somewhat incongruently, his stage outfit was full camo and his white hair was short back and sides, creating a very precise senior’s discount Hitler Youth look. Cockburn’s lyrics continually astound me. His way with words is cinematic, sort of Soviet montage: “Grey-suited businessmen pissing against a wall/Cut to crumbling guardrail, slow motion, cars fall!” I may not know the makes and models but I can vividly picture metal lemmings framed in 35mm black and white.

Saturday’s finale was Blue Rodeo. I thought they should’ve supported Bruce Cockburn and ceded him the extra ten or 15 minutes to play but what do I know. Ultimately the sequencing shook down in our favour. Ann and I have seen Blue Rodeo so many times before; we admire them and have paid for their music in many ways in various formats. But Blue Rodeo has become a Canadian summer festival circuit cliché akin to ‘Kind of Blue’ being the sole jazz LP in a rocker’s record collection: brilliant yet all too obvious. The multitudes would cheer the stoned sunset line from Hasn’t Hit Me Yet as they always have.

Consequently the decision to exit ahead of the hordes and be back at the Crooked 9 before midnight was not a difficult one to make. Home is where the plumbing is and where the chairs on the front porch are at a comfortable height, the beer in the fridge is reasonably priced and there’s no petty regulation dictating us to walk 200 metres uphill to enjoy a cigarette.

In the lead up to the excruciatingly long day, Ann was more enthused about folk fest than I ever could be. Although I don’t like to think of myself as a cranky, middle-aged drag, sometimes I become a little anxious about my involvement in events whose scope is way beyond my control. I am afraid of getting lost in the crowd. Ann jokes that I’m “delicate.” I’d prefer “peculiar.” At home, alone together, outside communing with the bugs in the peace and quiet of the darkness we concluded that maybe paying for a faint promise, enjoyment, never properly fulfilled isn’t worth the expense anymore. We agreed there comes a time when enough is enough.   

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