The previous winter, I had found myself, through a mixture of happenstance and self-interested chicanery, in a remote region of Canada’s newest official territory, Nunavut, the place of the Inuit. I was in the capital, Iqualuit, for a conference of Northern bureaucrats, a conference for which I had obtained false credentials, in the interest of getting a chance to make contact with these two eighty-year-old ladies who did Inuit throat-singing, which is this breathy, growly music that they played up there as a kind of game between two girls to try to see who would crack up laughing first. Apparently it’s funny to them, but the sound of it is evocative of a storm whipping furiously over an awe-inspiring, unspeakably vast Arctic landscape.
All attempts at finding electronic or postal means of communication with these ladies had been fruitless. I began to think that they were deliberately avoiding contact with southerners and their technology. But I had to have them. I’d heard them in a sample by this Mongolian electronica DJ, and I knew that if I could get even just a Dictaphone recording of their thing and whip up a one-page bio, I could probably book a full Canadian folk festival tour for them, with flights and all, and me getting 15 percent of the fee as booking agent, another 10 percent as manager, and then 15 percent of the Canada Council for the Arts grants that I would “help” them apply for and that they’d inevitably get.*
So I had figured on catching these ladies’ set, while scoping the room to see what younger relative was chaperoning them, translating for them, handling them. I would find that person and try to suss out by watching them what my way into their confidence ought to be. Would it be a young militant firebrand, who I could impress with outrageous political rhetoric and my connections to friends who were hereditary Blackfoot chiefs down in southern Alberta? Or would they be bloody Catholic goody-goodies (you’d be surprised how good I can be with Christians) who would respond to the idea of a tour as a kind of missionary appeal work? Or would I just do my usual and be the only guy in the place holding decent weed and hard liquor, get them matching me hoot for hoot, drink for drink, wait for them to get to the crucial vulnerable state, and then infuse my victims with my vision of descending on the southern folkies with the kind of music that would fill audiences with despair for the paucities of Western European culture?
I was standing in the gym at the opening ceremonies, sipping an energy drink and scanning the crowd for sexy octogenarians. The cheap institutional public address system whistled with feedback as the announcer spoke softly into the mic with an Inuit accent.
“We have a special treat today, ladies and gentleman. A young lady, who recently joined St. Margaret’s Elementary school as a new teacher, a proud Inuit young lady who will demonstrate her skills at our own Inuit art of throat-singing. The young lady says that this is something she’s been practising in her living room, by throat-singing alone with her record collection over the last three winters. I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m sure it’s going to be just dandy. Please welcome Athena Amarok.”
A small woman of about twenty-four walked shyly onto the stage. She was wearing a traditional cloak. She thanked the emcee and took the mic.
“Okay, well, I’m going to do my thing here, and I hope people don’t think it’s too strange. As you know, throat-singing is usually done with two people, I know, but I was a bit depressed sometimes in the winter, alone in my house, and I just sort of started doing this. You might not like it. Anyways …”
Quietly at first, she started her back-and-forth, back-and-forth slow, flowing breathing, humminah, humminah, humminah, slowly adding a hint of something, a roughness that became a growl. The growl extended, mutated, grew, there was a sense of imminent threat in it now, the rhythm of the breathing carrying it with more urgency, and then suddenly it stopped.
And then the world exploded.
I guess I hadn’t noticed the hip-hop kid hook up the decks to the PA, so when he dropped the beat at full force, it was like getting defibrillated. The room lit up for me. The scariest, bass-heaviest slouching-towards-Bethlehem backing track shook the architecture of the gymnasium, as Athena let forth a terrible howl like a giant wounded animal destroying an abattoir with its hind legs. Then the performance turned into this hypnotic, non-verbal explanation of the life of a woman from birth to death, and everything (everything) in the middle. It took about twenty minutes. When she stopped, everyone in the audience looked dazed, like they’d just awoken from a dream.
Once they woke up, a lot of them came to themselves and realized that they ought to be offended by such a brazen display. But not me. I had been waiting quite some time for an experience like that, and I knew exactly what to do. And I did it. And yes, then eventually I lost her, just like I lost many others. The important thing to note is that I lost her, not to the Big Time, but to the fact that I didn’t have the Big Time clout that I rightfully ought to have had. So this Calgary Folk Festival was going to be different. This time I was going to light the rocket and remember to take care to hold on to it when it took off. And then people would finally understand me as the Visionary that I’ve always been. And Marina, you would go back to seeing me as the man of passion and courage who whisked you brilliantly out of Yugoslavia as it crumbled to ruin, not as the guy who rolls endless hash-and-drum smokes and talks endlessly at the kitchen table while the sad, desperate musicians troop in and out of our little Vancouver east-side apartment, hoping I can find them a break.
* If you think I’m the only one out there doing things that way, then you are a certifiable moron. Don’t get me started.
A REFLECTION ON FESTIVALS
I’VE HAD UNTOLD ADVENTURES at festivals, and without them I wouldn’t have a career at all, I guess. Okay, well, possibly I now don’t have a career, but you know what I mean.
A decent festival is always crazy, stupid, and beautiful.
Here’s how you make a festival:
You gather thousands of people together in a place that’s usually not considered fit for human habitation, like a farmer’s field, or a racetrack, and then those people proceed to lay waste to the land and themselves for about two-to-three days or more. By the end, the people are exhausted, ravaged by the forces of nature and the forces of booze and drugs, and the land is a churned-up wound full of garbage, piss, and shit. People die, people are conceived, marriages begin or collapse. And there’s music!
Somehow, magic emerges from the process. And everybody knows that the source of the magic is the music. I know that’s a cliché, but nevertheless, it’s just a fact, a fact that’s as factual as E=MC squared or what-have-you. I can’t state it plainer than that. Some people talk about “community” or whatever, but that’s just a political word. Nothing against politics — politics can be a great source for wonderfully powerful songs. But when the music works, that’s what makes the real sense of community happen. Everybody feeling the same thing at the same time, invisible tendrils of emotion stringing out from somewhere in the core of the musician, creeping into, yes, the souls of the people in the audience, fucking with their insides, messing with their way of being in the world. Changing them. I’m not into the stuff that soothes the savage breast. I want to see those savage breasts get all hot and bothered and get savage-er. That’s my agenda.
That’s why I’m so careful about working with the right musicians. Of course, almost all musicians wanna be rich and famous and get laid with people they have no right to be laid with. That’s a given. But I can instantly spot the ones for whom that’s the only reason they’re into the music. The careerists. The ones who are solely concerned with “making it,” whatever “it” is. I only work with people who expand my ideas about what people can think or feel, kind of illuminating their little corner of existence, without shame or hesitancy. That’s the key to what makes me truly great.
And the musicians need to be able to embrace the festival-ness of festivals, the possibility that someone’s, anyone’s, life could be thrown sideways, just