Festival Man. Geoff Berner

Croats, Serbs, Jews, Albanians, Gypsies, Macedonians, all living normally. No big deal. I mean, the airport was still open, you know. I guess there was some kind of travel advisory or something, but they put that kind of thing out every time some elderly tourist gets a new strain of the flu or whatever, so you can’t live your life by that kind of thing.

      Of course there was tension, I knew that, but I rarely read the papers, and I had great contacts on the ground, some extremely interesting experimental noise musicians. Made a sound like having your face run over by the street cleaner at six in the morning at the end of an acid trip. Fabulous. And of course as soon as they heard Colleen, they went apeshit about her. They had to have her over. And they were eminently suggestible to anything else I had in mind. So that’s how I came to put on a seven-band Canadian Music Weakness Festival that, it turned out, took place at the start of the Yugoslavian Civil War. Entirely funded by Canadian tax payer money, I’ll have you know, thanks to Yours Truly.*

      Colleen is the perfect example of a musician who is too good for their own good. Too powerful. Too charismatic. She takes people too far into the emotions of the music. Sometimes they never get out. There was that joke band Spinal Tap that had all their dead drummers, but I know of at least three of Colleen’s ex-drummers who have signed their own papers to be committed to the nuthouse. No, I am not exaggerating. Certainly, many who’ve played with her never pick up an instrument again, myself included. It just doesn’t help your career to be that good.

      For instance, the time I got her the opening slot on one of the early Sarah McLachlan tours. Sarah the Pretty Guitar-Strumming Tree Nymph was just starting to take off, already drawing packed houses at the biggest university bars across the country. So it was a good gig. But it couldn’t last.

      The problem was, Colleen, somewhat dumpy, bespectacled, patchy-thrift-store-dressed Colleen, would step quietly up to the mic in her dead abusive stepfather’s parade boots, plug her pawn-shop electric guitar into the PA, no fancy amplifier necessary, and simply destroy-and-simultaneously-rebuild people’s minds, like if an ice pick to your cortex did the opposite of a lobotomy.

      By the last song, the audience was so in thrall to her dark powers that it was nothing, a mere bagatelle, for her to ask for two random white male volunteers from the crowd to don Lone Ranger masks, strip naked on stage and smash beer bottles into an oil drum that we travelled with. She liked to make them flank her and cavort devilishly to the rhythm of the final, heart-rending song about the lonely death of her half brother in the Medicine Hat municipal jail.

      I used to love to watch the audience slowly file out of the bar at the break, panicky, stunned, emotionally exhausted, mouths hanging open, eyes darting to-and-fro, like dogs after Halloween fireworks.

      Needless to say, the vampires at Nettwerk Music (who are both management and record label, a felony in most countries, just by the way) kicked her off the tour after three shows. Can’t have Sarah the Neo-Raphaelite Tree Nymph getting shown up every night by some weird lady who looks like a washerwoman but has ten times the talent.

      But I digress. Back to the war …

      When I landed at Sarajevo airport with Colleen, her band, and an assortment of other Canucks, all seemed fine. We were greeted by Bobo, my old friend who was a TV journalist at the time. But no cameras. “Where’s the cameras?” I asked, a bit annoyed. I like a bit of publicity.

      “Busy covering something else …” He waved vaguely. I could see that he was drunk, which was not remarkable. I was mainly concerned with the labour-intensive job of keeping Colleen not wholly unhappy, but she started flirting aggressively with Bobo, so that kept her too busy to find a reason to get mad at me, so I wasn’t too worried about anything, to be honest.

      Of course, the “something else” Bobo was referring to turned out to be the fucking Yugoslav National Army shooting a bunch of women on a peace march in downtown Sarajevo, and things just kinda went downhill from there, as history records.