Went to the folk festival this weekend. I am posting this, about Friday, on the morning of day 3, Sunday. I don't know what I will write yet about Saturday, but the lineup for day 3, today as I write this, is here. There are still tickets available. If you are reading this on Sunday morning, you could still come see a workshop with Frazey Ford, Allison Russell (who is stunning and essential, if you've missed her - it was my introduction to her music last night) and Clerel. You could choose between Lache Cercel - hot Roma jazz and swing, probably featuring Red Herring/ Petunia/ former Ray Condo guitarist Stephen Nikleva, and Witch Prophet ("an evolution of Toronto based, Ethiopian/Eritrean singer-songwriter Ayo Leilani," the artist's guide explains). I loved Lache when I caught him at East is East, so I'm gonna do Witch Prophet, myself - the video on that page is very compelling and I'm not going to get another chance, but follow your own heart, here, folks. There's lots else I'm not even mentioning - including Bill Henderson and Claire Lawrence from Chilliwack - like, THE BAND CHILLIWACK - in a Haida ensemble called SGaanaGwa, (Is the underlining a stylistic thing, a linguistic convention, a Haida thing or...? I have no idea but I am glad at this juncture that I only have to write it).
And of course, the headliner tonight is Alejandro Escovedo, a legend with connections in the Vancouver punk scene, more on whom here. Here's Bruce Springsteen recommending him and playing with him, playing a song of Escovedo's superb Real Animal. Maybe that would be a good starting point for some people?
Seriously, if you can afford it, you should come out. It should be a magnificent day. It was cool and lovely yesterday, neither raining on us or scorching us. You will find a space (hopefully on the inside of the fence). Buy at least one meal from a food truck, so you can have that experience. My report from Day One follows.
Some packing aside, my experience of "arriving" at the Folk Festival on Friday more or less starts with Fresh Slice pizza. You get off the #4 bus at Alma and there it is: Satan's welcoming embrace, an invitation to lower your food standards in the name of your pocketbook. Ray Davies could, if he wanted to update the Kinks' "Low Budget," sub in "I'm eating at Freshslice" for "I'm shopping at Woolworths." I mean, do Woolworths even exist anymore?
It's surely the most diabolically placed Fresh Slice anywhere. They might as well put a sandwich board out that reads: "Worried that your budget will not carry you through both lunch and dinner out of food trucks? Would you rather spend your money on merch? Come on in!"
Truth is, Fresh Slice has risen in my estimation since my mouth surgery. Those reading this who do not follow my blog regularly will find it relevant to note: I have had a repeated experience of tongue cancer and glossectomy over the past few years, each time losing a bit more of my tongue ("take it, take another little piece of my tongue now, baby") and as of December, had most of the left side of the blade of my tongue removed and replaced with grafts from my wrists, leaving me with a newfound speech impediment and some difficulty in chewing and swallowing, because my graft has neither muscle nor nerves (save what few have regenerated since December). It took me a couple of months to be able to handle a slice of pizza at all, and there's plenty out there now that I do not eat...
My "new normal" here, which I am still not completely acclimatized to, will come up again, but one impact of the surgery of immediate relevance is, the criteria of what I will eat has shifted. Things need to be easy to chew, easy to swallow. Fresh Slice, while not the most inspiring pizza, fits both of those categories. The butter chicken - probably their tastiest deluxe pizza - and the plain with garlic sauce I can eat with confidence, though I elect this time for ham and pineapple, the better to take on a bit of fuel to carry me over.
Next step: find the entrance (I really am a total noobie here). Turning down 4th, I see someone following their GPS, the unmistakable tethered-to-the-cellphone walk. Two older people, themselves lacking such a device, but also apparently en route to the folk fest - they're carrying a large umbrella and bags of stuff - check in with him and fall into place behind him, but are just far enough ahead of me that I cannot overhear their conversation. ("Are you going to the folk fest?" is surely their opener).
A noob in a bunch of noobs. A little noob processional. I fall into line myself, following at a discrete distance.
The strategy works, though note to GPSers: the GPS - I eventually checked mine, too - if you look for "Jericho Beach Park," it will direct you towards the Jericho Beach entrance, which is 13 minutes past where the folk festival entrance is. I am pleasantly surprised when I find myself at a gate much earlier than I anticipated. I put the phone away for awhile.
It is early on the first day - distant soundchecks echo - and there is not much signage visible as yet. I have been told to check in at the special media area at Will Call, but I do not know where Will Call is, and do not realize that the gate I have arrived at is - as seems to have been the case - not the Main Gate. Alas, I make a poor decision - seeing the older couple, the people I have been following, entering through a gate at the corner of things, I talk to the volunteers there first. They ARE letting people in at this gate, whethere it is the main gate or not. It does not seem unreasonable to start at the first gate I arrive at).
Ask my wife: I am directionally challenged.
The volunteers are friendly but they don't know what to do with media. No one says, "It's probably at the main gate," and direct me that-a-way. I spiel my spiel in my awkward slurry new voice and they direct me to the "Service" gate. The people at the Service gate also do not know what I am supposed to do, so they direct me into the media area proper, which is a tent inside the festival. I know from the instructional emails I have received that this is not where I am supposed to pick up my pass, but I figure they will know. I briefly explain myself to people in the lantern tent. The media tent, they direct me, is next door. "This isn't media, this is lanterns."
In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have had that pot cookie, but - wrong place or not - it helps me to take a minute to enjoy some lanterns.
"I would say after two years off we're a bit scattered!" this person says with a smile. I thank them abundantly for the directions. There is some amusement to be had explaining to the gatekeeper that I need to exit the festival to collect my pass. "How did you get in without it?"
She lets me back out. "I am the gatekeeper, I am important," she jests. I chat convivially with everyone I see.
There is a man bearing plywood - as sure a badge of authority at the fest as one could want - who mentions there have been many changes this year. "We used to have six stages." Later I will learn that they used to have a kitchen; now it's all food trucks. These changes make no impact on me, but it's interesting to contemplate, given how huge the fest seems, that it apparently used to be bigger.
In any case, everyone is friendly and helpful and I enjoy exploring: Look, there's a swamp! Are there frogs?
None that I could see, though later, I will hear one.
There is a merchant with silk shirts and bamboo kitchenware who announces he is retiring, everything is on sale. For all I know, he's been saying this for five years - it's a good line; people like a sale, especially a closing out sale - but, like, he's gonna retire eventually. I'm tempted to go back next year just to see if he's still there.
I look at his shirts - because I love a good Hawaiian shirt. There are Tommy Bahamas, many of them, at prices I can afford ($59.95 each, or two for $100? Is that what I read? Tommy Bahama's sell for around $200 new, so this is a fab deal, but they are all XL. There are a couple of 2XLs of other shirts, but not silk, not Tommy. I've lost a lot of weight with my surgery, but I still need that 2XL upgrade. I try on one shirt to confirm that I am still not a mere XL.)
There is a tree that looks like, if you were on powerful acid, it might grow faces and start speaking at you. An ent, or something. This is all, you understand, a new place for me: I've lived in Kits and explored many parks and beaches, but never this one.
I make it to the East Stage for Sinnoi, a Korean electronica-meets-jazz avant-garde quartet, whose stage setup was bracketed on the one side by a fellow on a laptop (Godam) and Jung-seok Lee on a large koto-like stringed instrument. This surely must be the "geomungo" spoken of in the festival guide (now online only, it appears), except when singer Bora Kim refers to it, it sounds enough like "conga" that I am surely not the only one who scanned the stage looking for a hand drum that I'd somehow missed.
Sinnoi's music ranges from a sort of dreamy, minimalist glitch electronica (with jazz bass and virtuosic, breathy, at times achingly beautiful vocal stylings), to something a bit more assertive, even slightly jazzy, slightly funky, slightly proggy (though not belonging to any one of those genres per se; perhaps Koreans have a better language to describe what we were hearing?). I know nothing of the musical context from which Sinnoi emerges, know nothing of Korean traditional music or the avant- or jazz scene there, but they remind me of my time spent exploring the Japanese avant garde scene, and I find myself thinking of Onna Kodomo, Ayuo, Haco and occasionally Bondage Fruit, not that Sinnoi's music sounds like any of these exactly, either.
It's an interesting window into a culture, encountering their traditional musics and instruments through a very contemporary window. I am pleased to learn that Korea has an avant garde scene that supports music like this, since the Korean cultural exports we get here on the West Coast seem to mostly involve excessively spicy food, hyperviolent (and occasionally quite twisted) movies and K-pop.
Bora Kim is particularly compelling as she sings, though her nerves come through when she speaks (this comes through later with Frazey Ford, too, a little, though she was not negotiating English as a second language. It's rather sweet to see nerves, uncertainty, confusion. We are all, every one of us, out of practice at all this, and it actually serves as a bonding point). "This song is called 'Han River,'" Bora announces at one point before a fairly somber, soundscapy cut, and I note as a (now probably former) ESL instructor and tutor that she could use some L/R work ("Han Liver" is just not the same thing).
Once, before my surgery, I could have helped her.
The Han River. by the by, is the river the monster emerges from in Bong Joon-Ho's The Host, but also, I think, contains in its name a reference to an important cultural concept in Korea, "Han," "an internalized feeling of deep sorrow, resentment, grief, regret and anger" that students of mine have connected to the experiences of Koreans under the occupation of Japan and the divisive, painful, and still unfinished Korean war.
Apparently - I learn from the vocalist's introductions - the double bassist is the leader, Won-sool Lee (the catalogue gives it as Won-soo Lee, but "Lee" is a family name in Korea, and they are otherwise putting family names last. It is not always easy to have the right instincts in these matters). He looks like the jazzman he apparently is, playing with that fingery intensity; Kim looks like she's at a classical music concert, and the laptop fella and geomungo player look pretty much like former students of mine, though they aren't.
I'm enjoying it - just sitting on the ground, on a combination of a towel and a waterproof jacket - but the urge to explore is stronger. My wife said something about wanting silk. I can still hear the music from the nearby merch tents, where there are dresses made from recycled saris, some silk, on sale. The fabric is terrific, and - were these $10 each? Did I read that right? They were very affordable (if too small for Erika).
Apparently one of the many changes this year is the absence of the artisan silk merchants who used to set up outside the festival proper - near the beach, on the far side of the gates, where the "cheap seats" are logs of driftwood. It must be sad viewing the festival from the wrong side of the fence!
(In fairness, it does look like there ends up being quite a "wrong side of the fence" crowd later in the evening. The view is crap - the main stage is too far to view from this distance - and the sound is getting a bit echoey, but, y'know, for the broke or extremely thrifty, there are worse places to be on a weekend evening. I could see this being a very pleasant scene, actually!).
Delightful things happen just wandering the grounds. An immeasurably cute young duck, seeing me at a bench, comes running up from the swamps, thinking I might have food, and extends its beak towards my empty hand as I sit on a bench checking in with my wife. Seeing I have no food, it wanders off elsewhere. I reach out my hand again hoping to convince it to come back ("so I can take a picture") but the duckling is like, "screw you, deadbeat, pay me or no photo." Even if I wanted to, I have no food.
Wandering further down the trails, I spy the merch tents. The CD tent is run by Neptoon, and I see they have a combination of artists' merch and - Satan, get thee hence - boxes upon boxes of used CDs. I had chatted with Ben in the store the day previously and bought the one used Alejandro Escovedo CD they had on their shelves. Ben, at that point had thought they just had The Crossing on CD, but I'm very pleased to see that they also have it on vinyl, and better yet, Burn Something Beautiful, too.
This photo is by the merch guy. Didn't get his name!
This is the Escovedo I am most keen to own, exactly the album I am hoping to find, as it features members of my most-beloved Seattle rock group the Young Fresh Fellows (who really need to play a show up here sometime) and REM's Peter Buck, all of whom I believe also had done things to support Robyn Hitchcock around this time (to say nothing of the Minus 5). It's a fine team and a rockin', energetic album, kicking off with one of my favourite Escovedo songs, "Heartbeat Smile." $40 no longer seems like an outrage, more like, "That's what vinyl costs nowadays." I grab it. And The Crossing. Merch budget blown (on Saturday, I will make room for Fortune Block, more on whom later; they will be doing a workshop with Escovedo and Ford Pier on Sunday).
I discover that it's just pleasant to walk in a park filled with so many friendly, happy people. It feels a bit alien - a taste of normalcy, after two very strange years indeed, made even stranger for me by cancer ordeal. A few people wear masks, but mostly the vibe is quite relaxed. This is what community should feel like. This is not how living near Metrotown, as I do, feels. I can see why this festival becomes a way of life for some people.
Plus there's food!
I miss some music to survey the food trucks. Again, my recent survey makes ease of chewing more of a factor than it once was. I explain at the fish and chips truck - Mama's, is it? - "I've had tongue surgery - is it possible I can get extra tartar sauce?"
They oblige me. I like it when my main complaint about a meal is that there's a lot more to it than I was anticipating. Yes, it cost $35 with drink, but that's a huge portion.
I chat with a fellow fish-and-chipper at a picnic table, where we sit in corners not spackled with crow poop, about how - we agree - we would have gotten only one piece of fish if we'd realized how big they were. I use the word "ordeal," he uses the word "commitment." We both are very well fed by the end.
Remember the friendly, cute duck? As I eat, three crows, reminding me of the Mexican hoodlums from Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, saunter over menacingly as I stuff in another french fry, almost like they're trying to convey, "Give us a chip or Hector up there will poop on you." (There is a crow directly overhead in the tree). You half expect them to break out switchblades, a little corvid gang. I do not play their game, however: as I wrap up, I take the remaining food across the field to be composted. Poop falls near where I sit - "spack!" onto the tabletop, a little grey pyramid - but nothing gets in my food.
There's a lot of goose poop everywhere, too, so watch where you sit! (This seems to be cleaned up a bit by day two - perhaps there are behind the scenes goose pooper scoopers surveying the grounds?).
Again, to flash ahead to Saturday, I try the chicken teriyaki, which is good but lacking the carrots in the photo. They have no qualms about my "extra sauce" request. A friend I spot (who does not wish to be identified) recommends the Mexican food truck, Dos Amigos, which has some sorta spicy chicken thing served on French fries. Mexican poutine? She didn't seem sure what it was either.
The one quibble about the food area - if you have trouble getting down on the ground, as one fella with a cane who was awkwardly two-fisting some meat skewers and a beverage, trying to eat while holding his cane - there weren't that many picnic tables to be had! I ended up just sitting on the ground, myself. Overall there was a lot of consideration for the differently abled, but that's one area the fest could maybe improve on next year.
Back to Friday: as I finish my meal, I still have not figured out where anything but the main stage and the east stage are, and nothing is happening at the main stage, so I saunter over to the East Stage again. The volunteer introducing the next act, Housewife, gets their name wrong, calling them Housewives, which places us on some sort of slippery slope to "the Wives," the other name of the notorious, all-male Toronto punk band the Battered Wives). Housewife is very different, a Toronto indy-rock unit, 3/4s female or non-male or however you're supposed to do that in the move towards a non-binary world (there has to be a politically correct way to say "it's not all dudes," which matters when it comes to bands, since so many of them are all dudes, still!).
Housewife begin their set with some pretty conventional songs, then start getting a bit more musically ambitious as their set progresses, and a bit more discordant; they are much more interesting for it. Maybe they just grow on me.
They seem to have a feminist angle to some of their music. One song seems to return to a refrain about "keeping your ___ off my body," where the ___ is either head, hand, or hands. I have never been very good at hearing lyrics in a live context, but I assume it is tied into recent developments in the United States. They also ask us if we like the colour orange, but I can make out too few of the lyrics to figure out if the song is about the colour orange, or perhaps some sort of Every Child Matters reference. It could have been.
Housewife is a kind of depressing name for a female-fronted group to adopt, but I like what they do plenty, especially as their confidence grows.
At one point, one of the guitarists takes the mike to tell her Mom she loves her, "but please stop filming our set, I'm really nervous up here!" The Mom does a little theatrical mea-culpa routine for the chuckling crowd and puts away her phone. The guitarist giggles along with the audience at all this. It's a sweet moment.
The singer also quips that "The air is so much fresher here than in Toronto! It's amazing!"
But quickly I'm discovering that the folk festival is only partially about the music - maybe moreso this year than others, since we're all kind of green at this, again. Just being around so many people in a comfortable environment, giving each other space as needed, supporting each other, listening to each other, not getting aggro with each other... "being normal again" is as much as a draw for a healing city as the bands, and seems even sweeter because I'm pretty sure a lot of us are aware that this could all end again soon. The media and government aren't being very active reporting on COVID but I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels how fragile all of this is. How it might all go away again real soon.
Maybe I'm just in denial. I'm just enjoying a day in the park.
Then I start meeting actual friends. Fiona Morrow of Montecristo is there with her son Sacha. We talk about upcoming music in the city, discuss a possible article (my Doug and the Slugs one went well enough, my first thing for them since my surgery). Fiona, who has been here before, fills me in on the politics of the main stage - the lifers have all by now set up their tarps in front of the stage to stake the prime ground so they can sit in their folding chairs while dancers and less committed onlookers hang out on the sides - a fairly accurate assessment of the main stage layout. Frazey Ford, later, will make jesting reference to this, saying something like, "Get up and dance, you goddamn tarp-dwellers!"
(But to flash ahead a minute, I discover on Saturday that if you're just one guy with a pillow for his ass, the tarp dwellers are very friendly and willing to let you tromple through their area in search of a spot of green to throw down on. "As long as there's grass, you're good," one tarp dweller tells me. I end up lying down on the margins between tarps, giving my back a break during Asleep at the Wheel. No one is aggro. The view is much better. A few people step over me, some while dancing. In the end, I kinda get the sense that, entitled or not, the tarp-dwellers are doing it right, in fact. It seems like a kind of shame that there are so few people dancing in the front of the stage, but their lawnchairs do look comfortable, and they sure aren't blocking anyone's view, which is usually what happens at concerts - everyone has to stand for two hours or more because the people in front stand, making everyone else stand. Doesn't work that way here).
On Friday, I end up one of the people on the margins, sometimes sitting on my jacket and towel combo, sometimes actually dancing (a little). The view isn't bad from the side, either, though.
Do I want to haul a folding chair on transit all the way from Burnaby? Is there room among the tarps for me?
Hmm.
With apologies to the Brothers Landreth, who make very professional, smooth, fairly traditional country rock - I spent their entire set hanging out with a friend I have not seen in ages, Judith Scott, formerly of Sister DJ's Radio Band (playing guitar in the top pic here), and Mom to Emile of the Real Ponchos (who turns out to be working the media area on Saturday, and who informs me that the band is still active, even though one guy is now a married lawyer (or something like that). Judith and I have not seen each other since the first Red Herring reunion show at the Prophouse in - what was that, 2013? She taps me on the shoulder, we hug, and find that we have much to talk about, including the insanities of COVID. (I am delighted to learn that she has followed, on my blog, the stories of the death of my Mom, my cancer struggles, and my current weird new tongue. And my marriage! She's up to date on all of that, so we can just talk about the craziness of COVID.
We both find ourselves describing a similar experience, witnessing a kind of culture war, a chasm opening up between what seems two broad, irreconcilable factions in our society, and I think she feels as marooned between them as I am, able to see both sides, and saddened by the failure of communication. She's been avoiding crowds a bit, so coming to the festival is a big deal for her, her first time back in the world.
Anyhow, Judith and I got to share our impressions of all this. It's too complex to do justice to here. Both of us have questions and concerns and a sense at awe at the strange time in our lives we are beholding. And while our conversation had ended well before Ford Pier - as the middle Ford between Robben Ford (the only performer whose vibe I did not enjoy) and Frazey Ford - took the stage to do a few in-between songs, it turned out that the whole conversation with Judith was just building up to a really witty, really well-worded quip by Ford, after he performed my third favourite song on Gormful in Maya, "I Can't See You." "What I like about that song is, those freedom convoy schmos could sing it, too, and they wouldn't have to change a word."
I am going to cheat here and flash ahead to Saturday, because I got some great photos of Ford in action on the smaller stage, and talked a bit with his ASL interpreter, Ally, about how she deals with off-the-cuff lyric translations, more on which later. Ford himself, later, confessed to being curious what the ASL signs might look like for "bleeding out my ass." More on that to come, but Saturday's show may have been the best Ford Pier thing I have seen I did not ever think I would hear "Lions And Tigers And Bears" again live, so thanks for that, Mr. Pier!
During Ford's tweener, Fiona, camped behind me on the margins of the stage, remarked, "Hey, isn't he one of the people at Red Cat?" I gave her some of Ford's history and played her a clip of some Buttless Chaps: "You've seen that guy there, too."
Then Frazey Ford took the stage. I wandered and checked out different vantage points, leaving one spot I'd staked out for dancing, because - curse of the Vancouver festival crowd - a cluster of people elected to have a loud conversation about a foot from where I was. (To the extent that there was any aggro in the day it was from me, giving them and their flappin' gums the stinkeye, but I decided on so doing that probably you just have to be live-and-let live at the Folk Fest about such things. I still think it's obnoxious to talk near where people are listening to music - Judith and I sat very far to the margins, so as not to interfere with people who were digging the Brothers Landreth (they also do something today, did I mention?). But - hey, this gives me a chance to see the back area, where people had a hammock staked out and children were playing with frisbees. A chiller vibe, all told.
I was impressed that from a sound-and-dancing point of view, Frazey could be a li'l speck up there and it still was quite listenable. At one point, in wandering around the margins of the crowd, I saw a woman who looked like my friend Judith, who DANCED like my friend Judith, but who visibly was NOT my friend Judith, then adjusted my view and realized that in fact, Judith was dancing WITH this woman, right beside her on the field behind the sound tent.
My camera battery had died at that point, or I would have snapped a pic. Note to self: bring charging cable! I did get a couple of shots of Frazey Ford, however.
I do not know what to say about Frazey's performance, 90% of which was devoted to U Kin B the Sun, with her set being somewhat surprisingly absent my favourite song by her, "Done," which has maybe the best rock video ever made on the streets of Vancouver. I *believe* (but am no authority) that the only song in the set from Indian Ocean was, in fact, "September Fields." There might have been one other.
She seemed at times shy - at least I thought I heard nervousness in her voice at addressing a crowd as large as that spread before her - and at times quite confident in her humour and irreverence (see above, re: "goddamn tent-dwellers"). She was also always very grateful and expressive, telling the crowd she loved them. At one point, in introducing her song "Money Can't Buy," she dropped a casual f-bomb, and I had the delight of watching two children, who had been dancing and cartwheeling near me, start to giggle that Frazey "sweared," while one of their Moms explained that yes, it was "a part of her vocabulary" and - though I saw more the gestures than I heard the words - probably said something like, "I still don't want to hear it coming from you!"
I love that Frazey swears. I sometimes dance around the apartment when Erika is listening to her and insert the odd textural "motherfucker" into the song. I would like the Lilith Fair crowd much more if they said "motherfucker" more often.
I'm quite serious.
By this point my back was getting sore. I elected to duck out before Taj Mahal, which I am sure will scandalize my friend Judith to no end, since Taj was the draw for her. I stuck around long enough to hear Fortune Block do "Hot Dogs in Heaven," which they wrote, they explained, as a tribute to John Prine ("the night after he died we got really drunk and wrote this song" - or something like that). More to come on them - I sat down on Saturday with Richard and Amber at the media area and did a mini-interview, which I suspect will be the only interview I do. It was pretty fun, though.
Waiting at the bus stop, a few miles from where Taj had just started, I was delighted that a fellow festival attendee pulled up in an Evo and said "Are any of you going downtown?" I got a car ride right to Burrard Station. Thanks, Eleanor! (She really recommended Allison Russell, later today, to me, and I Alejandro Escovedo to her).
Oh, and by the by, Judith stuck around for Taj, and wrote about his performance, in an email to me now, "Re taj. I have a giant fan crush and he can do no wrong. I danced when he asked for dancing girls, I wiggled when he said to wiggle. I danced and listened to the whole set from near the back with a warm glow in my heart. At one point near end I went to the front and gazed at the dancing festival goers, young and old, bathed in the lights from the stage, and I thought everyone looked like they were being seduced by him! So happy to be in his presence again."
i think you mean bill henderson....headpin brian macleod was in chilliwack for awhile '78-'82...i would've also mentioned that bill and claire were in the c-fun classics and the collectors...
ReplyDeleteThanks, monsterdog! I have amended the Brian/ Bill confusion.
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