At first, it seemed like a shamefully bad idea to put the Poet Rabbi in front of 150,000 drunk, druggy, muddy English people. You could have got a similar auditory experience by sitting at home, putting on a Leonard Cohen record, then phoning up a bunch of rowdy football hooligans and inviting them over for a keg of lager. “I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder,” intoned the low, raspy voice, and his young, stupid audience seemed to be there for some kind of jaunty illustration of the lyric.
Then an odd thing happened. The band slowly summoned up (Cohen’s band never could be described as “kicking in” to a song) the opening of “Hallelujah.” I’d forgotten that mainstream English people love Jeff Buckley, for some reason, and that Buckley’s one good recording was a cover of that. Immediately, the chavs started to hoot and scream, as if “Wonderwall” were coming on the stereo. And they ALL sang along. Every last philistine, drugged-out, tracksuit-sporting, ballcap-backwards one of that enormous throng lifted their voices and swayed together for a cold, broken Hallelujah. You could see a moment of surprise flicker across Cohen’s giant ancient eagle face on the superscreens before he also gave himself completely to the Song, to the Word. It was strange and unexpected and beautiful. Festivals are like that.
Later that night, back at the circus tent where I was stationed along with a burlesque troop, assorted jugglers, a midget swing band, and a guy who lifted weights with his testicles, Gordon the DJ and I came across a well-dressed man, lying muddy and comatose, face-down against our perimeter fence.
We roused him to make sure that he wasn’t dead. “Hey, buddy!”
“Hallelujah.”
“Saw the Cohen show, didja?”
“Nnnng. Hallelujah.”
“You all right there, mate?”
“All right? No I’m not. I’m a corporate head-hunter. I’m just making money for no purpose. I’ve been wasting my life! I’d rather die than go on as I have.”
Festivals are good for that kind of thing.
HERE COMES TEAM FUN
AT ANY RATE, ALTHOUGH MANNY would never have been booked into Calgary on his own, he had enough of a name in folk circles that if I vouched for him and made it clear that he was there as a sideman, Leslie Stark, the artistic director of the Calgary Folk Festival, was willing to tolerate his presence. She has a thing for weird shit, anyway.
I woke when I hit the back of the seat in front of me. I’d been lying lengthwise on the back bench of the minivan, taking a beer-nap.
“Mother fuck!” Jenny shouted.
Mykola was at the wheel, his panicky deep breathing interfering with his attempts to calm us. “It’s (gasp!) ooookay, everybody (gasp!).”
Jenny leaned over to take a look at the speedometer. “One-sixty! In a fucking minivan! You crazy fuck! You slow this thing down!”
“It’s (gasp!) okay, everyone! Just caaaaalm down. There was a deer or something, but we avoided it, it’s long gone now.”
Jenny’s a person who’s mastered that delightful alchemy of conquering fear by instantaneously transmuting it into anger.
“I’ll tell you what, I’ll fucking punch you in the mouth right now if you don’t fucking slow down.”
“I think ya better listen to the lady.”
Mykola is not tough. Not that way, anyway. He slowed down, pumping the brakes erratically.
“Sorry, everybody, I guess I’m just sorta nervous, excited about this festival, so I wasn’t watching the speed. Sorry, sorry.”
Jenny relaxed a bit. “Just fucking watch that speed. I don’t know what you’re in such a fucking rush for, we’re probably not even gonna get to play.”
I wiped the beery eye-gunk away. “Excuse me?”
“I mean, what the fuck are we gonna do when they figure out that Athena’s not coming?”
“Look, I told you, I got that all figured out.”
“Yeah, right. I’m beginning to figure out your deal a bit more, Ouiniette. You know, Cole Dixon says he spent Canada Day in a sports bar in Charlottetown that didn’t even know he was coming, and he wound up having to buy pitchers for his band, his band that he flew all the way over from fucking England to do the gig. And they didn’t even have music at that bar anymore!”
“Look, that was a misunderstanding that was actually completely sorted out between me and Cole.”
“Oh yeah. He said you demanded a booking fee for that gig.”
“Well, listen, you’re here, aren’t you, so unless you have a different plan, let’s go with mine.”
“Which is what, exactly? They want Athena, not us.”
“They don’t know what they fucking want. They ‘want’ good music, as in, they are in a position of ‘want’ for it, seeing as how their headliners are Great Big C U Next Tuesday and fucking Tom Cochrane. You guys have a hundred times the talent in your fucking little fingers of half the bullshit they’ve got there. Once they get a load of your amazingness, they’ll be in the right frame of mind where we can make it all work. I’ve done this before. Just trust me.”
This emphatic reference to their collective brilliance turned the temperature of the whining down considerably. Flattery is like heroin: people use it because it works.
“Yeah, well, we’ll fucking see.”
“Cam?”
“What is it, big man?”
“Athena’s okay with us going in and using her name for cover to get into the festival, right?”
That was a fair question. You didn’t want to make Athena mad. She might have been about five feet tall, but when I went up on the trip North to sign her, her Nova Scotia transplant ex-boyfriend told me he’d seen her single-handedly take down a caribou, dress it, and carry it back to camp seven miles on her back. “She’s not vegetarian, but she won’t eat what she calls ‘southern shit-meat.’ Our freezer used to be full of things Theen had killed.” He’d confided in me, nostalgically.
“Athena is so far up into the Big Time now, she doesn’t give a flying fuck what we do. But, yes she knows what we’re doing, and she’s totally okay with it. She loves you guys. And she knows she wouldn’t have got where she is today without me. Without us.”
That seemed to do it.
“I’m just excited to get to play such a big folk festival. And Jimmy Kinnock is kind of my hero since I was a kid, and —”
“Yeah, well don’t get so excited that you crash us off the side of a mountain.”
The girl had a point there. An average of one band per year dies driving Canada’s Highway 1 over the Rocky Mountains, through Rogers Pass. You’re like to get smoked by a logging truck skidding over the yellow line, or if you slip and go off the side there, you better pack a lunch because you’ll get hungry on the fall down.
APOLOGY FOR DIGRESSION
DAMN, I WAS SCRIBBLING AWAY HERE, and I was having trouble seeing what I was writing. I started to worry if maybe I was going blind, but then I looked up round me in this dilapidated kitchen and realized that the sun was going down. My ass and back hurt from being bent over scrawling, and this poor old kitchen