A FAN’S NOTES
Comes a Time
A summer tradition here is the Edmonton
Folk Music Festival which Sunday night wrapped up its 40th
anniversary. Ann and I spent a goodly portion of an overcast and unseasonably
chilly Saturday on the grounds.
The venue is Gallagher Park
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 Edmonton
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
“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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