mixed tape: side a, track 1
“When I tell you that I love you
Don’t test my love
Accept my love, don’t test my love
Cause maybe I don’t love you all that much . . .”
I let them help me up. The security people and accident groupies dispersed. People probably assumed I had eaten too many magic mushrooms, a common festival mistake. Finn gave me some ginger ale to sip. I guzzled it back and Isobel gave me some comforting pretzels to munch on.
I was a goof—who fainted at gigs? It wasn’t like we’d been watching Elvis performing “Suspicious Minds” in his full leathers and gyrating himself into a frenzy (now that would be enough reason to faint). How was I gonna cope when we met Dan Bern later?
Finn looked a bit weirded out. He had those cartoon eyes that bulged during normal times—possibly a thyroid thing—and in heightened times, they looked like two big sunny-side-up eggs with black olives for pupils.
“I saw the whole thing. You were staring at the stage, smiling. I mean, beaming like someone who’s touched and about to speak in tongues. And then the longer he dragged out that ‘messiahhhhhh’ note in ‘Jerusalem,’ you looked like you were going to scream, or cry. You got quite red in the face and just, just as the cymbals started clashing at the end of the drummer’s solo, you went down hard, but with a smile on your face. Boom!” Finn demonstrated with his hands the kind of splatting effect my body had on the ground. “I mean, I can understand the excitement. They were rocking all right, but I’m not that sure it’s healthy to pass out at gigs. That’s twice now. You sure you’re not allergic to something, like patchouli . . . ?”
“No, it’s totally ridiculous . . . I know . . . I know. I’m some kind of train wreck.”
One word lodged itself in my brain: defeated. And so I rushed toward it, open-armed. Hugging it.
Defeated.
So Defeated. Could be a chorus.
“Ma chérie, you’re très sensitive. Think of Teresa in The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Isobel said, inhabiting one of her bilingual moods. It always got on my nerves that she got to be the self-possessed Sabine character and I was always cast as the insecure Tereza.
“You’re not a weirdo, me ducky,” Finn soothed. “We’ve all got our strange stuff. I get so nervous on escalators, I almost always feel like throwing up in random women’s purses. It’s like that writer says, you know who I’m talking about, whatshername, anyways: life screws up everyone in some way. You just need a nice cup of tea.”
I should’ve brought my smelling salts with me—bath salts worked well enough. When I got the woozy feeling, I just needed a snort of something strong, like Ocean Mist, to bring me back to my senses. Ironically, my dream had come true: I was at last living in a Victorian novel, but I wasn’t a burgundy-velvet-cloaked heroine with long curly locks, roaming the Yorkshire moors on a black horse. I was one of those swooning characters, a histrionic whinger like those Jane Austen invented as a warning to flaky women throughout the ages. I didn’t want to be confined to bed, even if it was a canopy one with billowing sheets and elaborate linens. Surely I was destined for a more rollicking ride of a life. I rallied my spirits by thinking of Hawksley’s words of wisdom: “Don’t act broken, even when you’re broken . . .”
Despite everyone’s better judgment, including my own, I went to get myself a Big Rock Grasshöpper wheat ale and had another cigarette to revive myself. I sucked on it indignantly, puffing out angry clouds of Benson & Hedges white smoke. But taking super-extended drags like that finished the cigarette off too fast. I needed more nicotine right away but didn’t dare light up again with Isobel and Finn staring me down.
Isobel insisted on walking me around the grounds for a few laps to make sure I was steady. She let me bring my beer, expertly pouring it into her antique silver flask. She stashed the flask in the alligator green, vintage Prada purse that she was never without. Her favourite aunt had given it to her on her twenty-first birthday. Despite our differences, mainly her being into haute couture and me into hippie grunge, she was how I imagined a sister to be. Iz and I had been best friends since we were fifteen—nine long years of capers and larks.
We met each other for the first time at our most cherished place in town, the Princess Theatre on Whyte Avenue (it was our Cinema Paradiso). The red velvet curtains and lush, old-style red velvet upholstered seats were more like armchairs than theatre seats. The whole place pulsed with a vaudevillian red glow and smelled of magic: salty butter and stale smoke mixed with a dash of Chaplin-era mould. It was a Saturday matinee in autumn. We were the only two people there and I recognized her from my school. We had never talked before. The Princess was a cultural gateway—it gave us the world beyond our mind-numbingly boring urban prairie; it gave us European cinema. Brooding men, smoking women, grand tours, sad endings, great styles, shocking discoveries, unbearable romance, lewd sex—real life! Betty Blue, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Diva, La Femme Nikita, The Big Blue, Merchant and Ivory. When our schoolmates were smacking pucks around the local hockey arena or sipping hot chocolate at the world’s biggest mall, we were busy trying to emulate Emmanuelle Béart’s pout in Manon des Sources.
That Saturday the strange girl and I were both there to see A Room with a View, again. Walking in, I felt awkward, like when you’re only one of two people on a bus, do you sit near or far apart? I felt it would be even more awkward not to acknowledge her, so I introduced myself. She suggested we pool resources: I had popcorn and she had M&Ms. We both had braces on our teeth and great expectations.
She’d seen the film six times and I’d seen it five during its two-week run at the Princess. Since then, over the years we’ve probably watched it together hundreds of times. Once we met Finn, we made him watch A Room too. He confessed that John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had dominated his romantic psyche until we introduced him to the thrill of George and Lucy’s turn-of-the-century highbrow tennis romance. He loved the idea of us being these foul-mouthed Albertan-wannabe-Edwardians drinking Pimm’s whenever we could. We studied the characters’ every moves, both of us desperately wanting to be Lucy Honeychurch, all three of us swooning over the pair’s kiss under the baking sun in the poppy fields overlooking Florence—what could be better? We vowed we’d make it to Florence one day.
Finn was a new Edmontonian, all the way from the Maritimes via Toronto for a few years. He had the true Maritimer spirit, all warmth, Celtic strangeness, and gregariousness; he played guitar not fiddle. Over the past year we had become friends at Rigoletto’s restaurant where he and I worked, serving up gnocchi and Grappa to downtowners. Isobel had never dated someone from the Eastern Seaboard before and hadn’t been able to resist sampling him. He didn’t realize he was only an amuse bouche on her menu of men. She had an anthropologist’s approach to dating, with categories ranging from geographic, cultural, aesthetic, to occupational. She was proudest of having dated a postcard publisher—very few people had the inside scoop on that scene.
Meanwhile, I had declared myself out of the dating/mating game for a few months. I was in a reinvention period and on a dating diet. On my new romance-free regime I allowed myself to lust only after rock stars and actors. Reverting to virginal adolescent habits seemed a good way to cope with premature celibacy. Because, really, you should be spending your twenties shagging your ass off, it’s almost like an obligation.
Love with regular guys had done me no good—and none of them came close to the firecracker love-of-my-life Sullivan. We rolled around for two years. It had been three years since we stopped. By the standard mathematical equations for healing, I had now spent more time without him than with him and so was scientifically guaranteed to be over him. Hallelujah. Though the fact that no one excited me as much as him, since him, worried me. It kept me up late when I wanted to have a dark and brooding night with red wine and Jacques Brel crooning about settling for being the shadow of someone’s dog.
Our Bern Baby Bern operation was conceived because Finn was constantly trying to impress Isobel. Isobel adored me like I adored her, and we all loved Dan Bern. She and I had discovered him together, smoking doobies and listening to CJSR one Monday afternoon a few years back. As all three of us were arts graduates with no serious career prospects, the idea of being rock journalists was obviously appealing. Plus, Finn had actually majored in journalism. Isobel had vague notions of fame herself and viewed any opportunity for hanging out with celebrities as good research. I saw the operation as an emotional dress rehearsal for my eventual encounter with Hawksley Workman, my most poetic hero. I believed he would be my soulmate once he had the chance to meet me. Hawksley would forever cure me of any residual Sullivan-ness in my head and heart. I chose him because he had somehow psychically mined my soul to write his lyrics, like we’d been cross-pollinated in the wildflower fields of love. My latest journal entry about him:
Sweat drops flew off his taut body. His curly black hair was slick with more sweat. His stubble pricked out of his face like a forest around his strawberry-red lips. His pirate earring shone as he belted out his flirtatious lyrics. My whole body vibrated with his sounds. I am madly in love with this gorgeous, sexy-ass troubadour of an incredible male. He is almost too sexy, his lyrics too romantic for me to bear. And as he clutched his mike and sang the last line giving it all the air left in his body I felt all woozy and lightheaded. And then I swear to God he looked right at me with his sultry eyes. Right at me!!!!
He kept looking right at me as he dragged out that last note . . .
And then it was all over, five encores was enough and he wasn’t coming back from behind the stage. The long-haired roadies were grabbing the instruments and setting up for the next act. I was so excited, so bursting, so high, so . . . I ran to the Sidetrack’s bathroom as fast as I could, barely making it before I barfed up that Kraft Dinner and everything else I’d eaten that day.
Since that gig, since that look we shared, and since that portentous vomiting—I have a feeling about Hawksley and me. It’s goddamn cosmic.
Getting back to capers: since Isobel and I hit our almost mid-twenties it seemed to me there’d been a shortage of them. We no longer tripped on mushrooms through the streets in the middle of the night or gallivanted around water fountains, stealing statues of Virgin Marys to put in our living rooms. Seemed like mostly what we did now was watch movies and watch other people have way more fun than us. Granted, I loved our times on my couch. We called it the Cadillac. It was vintage ’50s: navy velour upholstery, shaped like a spaceship from The Jetsons, with stumpy wooden brown conical legs. I got it for twenty-five bucks at the Salvation Army on the north side of the river one lucky Saturday.
Eating popcorn and chocolate. Smoking smokes, drinking diet pop. Everything happened on the Cadillac. What larks! But like Bob Geldof asked in one of my favourite books—his autobiography Is that It?—was that it?
I wanted to camp. I wanted to travel on the back of motorcycles and truck cabs. I wanted to have sex under waterfalls with exotic men with tanned bums. I wanted to make movies, paint pictures, go on road trips, have hot affairs in hot-air balloons. Living, not watching. I had extended fantasies of making unforgettable movies, operas, ballets. I had all sorts of enthusiasm but no focus or obvious talent. If it weren’t for Cadillac-induced inertia, I was convinced I could participate somehow.
Music was my religion.
More than movies. More than romance. When I went to gigs and watched musicians, I felt the bass in my loins, the melody soaring in my chest, harmonies in my heart. I shared their high as they belted out their lyrics, shook their hair, and thrashed their guitars. I felt so connected at last to humanity.
And all I really wanted in life was to “only connect,” like E.M. Forster wrote.
I got this euphoric relief, reprieve, from feeling alone and existential, from staring at the lonely abyss. Life with a soundtrack was so much better than without. So from my perspective, boys with guitars were the luckiest people on earth. I lapped up what they strummed and I wanted more and more while their hands galloped to musical Nirvana. But I didn’t know an arpeggio from an armadillo—I was doomed to be forever a fan, not a player.
Music was also my medicine.
I needed some strong medicine post-Sullivan. Something to make me forget how he had claimed the soft places on my body with his lips on those hot August days we floated naked on lilos around our own private lake in southern Alberta. More than drugs and drink and smoking cigarettes and more than sex, I needed new music. Dan Bern and the others were a salve. They sang about angst like mine, universal love angst, and elevated it to a thing of glory and beauty. When I saw Bern play for the first time the year before at the Sidetrack Café, I felt queasy. After his twelve-song set I had to go outside to get some air. He was full of irony and rebellion and big-time boner sex appeal.
It wasn’t just me, the music press had been all over him: likening him to Dylan, the Gandhi of Folk, a gift from Iowa. So when I heard he was coming to town for the annual Edmonton Folk Festival I was practically delirious with lip-smacking anticipation. Isobel and I had rhapsodized for so long about him that Finn used his limited connections, from his intern experience at a Toronto magazine called Tilt, to wandangle us an interview.
It was true that Finn had genuine rock journalism ambitions, but the lengths he was prepared to go to orchestrate such a potentially massively embarrassing stunt impressed me. I felt a little guilt over the fact that by pleasing me, I knew he knew he was somehow pleasing Isobel.
“We could meet him, I mean, why the heck not? No, really . . . we’ll get an interview,” he told us the week before the Folk Fest.
“Ça va pas arriver. Pas possible,” Isobel warned. I half believed he might come through though. The month before he’d grown a beard after Isobel casually observed that all intelligent men had beards. Plus he was always threatening to dye his hair blond and have it straightened so he could look like George Emmerson in A Room with a View.
Earlier That Day
Saturday Morning, Edmonton Folk Festival
+25 Celsius, blue and cloudless = full-on big prairie sky
mosquito alert = big batch of little fuckers, big but slow
8:00 AM: We waited on the exit side of the entry gate. We hadn’t arranged for the press passes early enough to get them by mail, so we had to wait for the girl to find the girl who knew the guy who talked to the girl about our Tilt passes. We were the Three Stooges.
9:30 AM: “LADIES, we are in the GATE! Woowee, these press passes are SWANKY,” Finn said. “Now, Annie, if you feel faint or nauseous, let us know, babe.”
“Finn, I’m sorry, but I think you should perhaps tone it down un p’tit peu,” Isobel said, demonstrating lower volume with a hand gesture.
I would never have had the nerve to say it. But it was true, his loudness could blow our cover. Before he had time to feel wounded, we high-fived to celebrate free entry onto the grounds.
I felt mighty in my new persona as big-city press photographer. Isobel seemed to be relishing her role as enigmatic assistant, and Finn, I think he was running on nerves spiked by gasoline. Like if I smoked too near him, he might combust.
We made our way down grassy Grassy Hill, toward the depths of the city’s river valley. We wove our way around the hundreds of blue, yellow, and orange tarps, Mexican blankets, plastic flower markers, backpacks, rainbow-coloured tents, camping chairs, coolers, stoners lying on their backs making daisy chains, and hippie toddlers dancing in the buff. It was a steep hill, so you had to navigate strategically, walking down switchback-style, like a goat. In winter it was a ski hill. Our descent was toughest for Isobel, who was wearing high-heeled wedge sandals—her response to Birkenstock fever.
“Look, j’arrive and this is as political as I get,” she said when I complained she was slowing us down with her glamour.
On a good festival weekend, the hill could seat up to ten thousand Edmontonians. This one was cracking up to be a big one, with not just Dan Bern, but Elvis Costello headlining and Joan Baez and loads of African bands in the mix. Mainstage was at the bottom of the hill, which meant every seat had a good view of not just the stage but also of the strong and steady North Saskatchewan River below, with the city’s downtown skyline framing the whole vista. As we walked through the crowds, I told Iz, “I hope we don’t make such asses out of ourselves that we have to leave town and never come back—I’d miss this festival too much!”
“I know. It’s great, isn’t it? The cute boy-to-girl ratio is unparalleled.”
Fiddlers, drummers, dulcimer, washboard and spoon players, viola aficionados, steel guitarists, and big names from all around the world collided in a musical jamboree for three and a half days every August. Here at the Folk Fest, our city reached heights of coolness that it never matched the rest of the year; except maybe during the odd gig at the New City Likwid Lounge or the Sidetrack Café. It was the one time of year when Isobel and I didn’t talk about moving away for good. Edmonton was the kind of place that most young people longed to leave (like New Zealand but without the epic beauty). But in this parkland of grassy fields, balsam poplars, trembling aspen, and eastern cottonwood trees, muddy hills and multiple tents, a kind of utopia exploded every summer.
Everyone remembered the years when it rained too much and the hill morphed into a mass of slip-sliding muddy mayhem. But today was looking like a perfect Big Sky Alberta day. Even though it was still early morning, most of the prime spots for sitting were already taken; the hill looked like a patchwork quilt in progress. I’d never made it up that early, but I’d heard that the tarp run happened every morning at sunrise. Once the gates opened, super-keen folkfesters charged down the hill, toppling over one another, doing accidental roly-polys to get the prime locations for stargazing. We laid our tarp on some free grass mid-hill to the far left of mainstage, beside a wholesome-looking family who seemed like they would defend our tarp and maybe share snacks.
There were families who had been coming for twenty-five years, since the very first festival. Singing “Four Strong Winds” on closing night at the top of your lungs was practically a universal Edmonton experience. Once you got past the mosquitoes, toxic porta-potties, mud, and patchouli miasma, the Edmonton Folk Fest was the best of its kind Canada-wide. Admittedly Vancouver had the ocean, and the North Country Fair in northern Alberta had the homegrown, middle-of-nowhere bonus, but E-town really had the perfect combination of river valley, prairie sky, and grassy hills.
The beer garden, a central feature, was a cordoned-off section of the park with picnic benches and canopies, for shelter from sun or rain, where you plowed through beer and scoped cuties. The danger was going in for one and then staying there all weekend and never seeing any music. Two beers into our first beer garden shift we perfected our plan. Finn was the chief of operations. An unassuming CEO, he was endearing in his standard gear: a New York Rangers baseball cap, vintage Hawaiian shirt, ginger stubble, and freckles. His plan was two-pronged: 1) impromptu all the way 2) imagine we are Hunter S., Annie Leibovitz, and Tallulah Bankhead (H.A.T.). Isobel’s role was clearly the best: she just exuded her natural air of importance and decadence.
9:35 AM: We reported to the sterile, khaki, safari-looking media tent. In my pre-interview day scenario-izing I had envisioned a gigantic tent full of press people milling about, where nobody would notice me and my straw hat. But this tent was the kind you go camping in with your boyfriend (maybe) and dog (possibly), if it was a small dog, or small boyfriend, for that matter. The tent was full of hardcore types, looking like foreign war correspondents in their khaki multi-pocket pants and utility vests carrying tripods, bipods, pods, and fifteen hundred lenses. They were screamingly legitimate-looking. It must have been the khaki. Us though—the Bern Baby Bern Operation, with my orange overall shorts, blue bandana around my neck, and general ironic cowgirl chic and Isobel’s high-heel disaster—looked at worst like hacks from a small-town weekly or at best university journalists (neither would garner a lot of respect from the Khakis). We hadn’t scripted anything beforehand, having agreed we would leave it all to our natural wit and alcohol.
The only reason I was pretending to be the photographer and Finn got to be the writer was because I might suffer from stress muteness during the interview. Finn, after all, had actually worked for a real magazine, and Isobel didn’t have a nerve problem. To calm down and stop myself from flailing my arms in anticipation, I strolled around the tent while Finn lined up to talk to the coordinator girl with the hippie skirt. Isobel got busy looking bored and sexy. Unfortunately a lap took almost no time in this pup tent—if I circled more than three times, they were going to think I had a disorder of some kind—so I concentrated on looking serious, ready to speak journo at any point. As I stared at a map of the river valley, Finn stepped up to bat.
“Finn Hingley, PLEASED TO MEET YOU. JOHN, from Tilt in Torono, got in touch with CINDY last week and told her he’d be sending myself, my colleague, and my photographer to do a think-piece on DAN BERN.”
Coordinator Girl: “Hi, I’m Ursula . . . Ya, I think I saw you on the list . . . so, you guys from TO?” I could recognize a bit of that small-town defensiveness that all we E-towners have.
“YUP, JUST FLEW IN.”
“Great, well, just pick a time on the board where that girl with the huge hat is and sign up. I think he still has a slot open.”
When I looked under Dan Bern’s name, every slot was checked off; he was full for the day. I felt winded by the blow. Finn came up beside me and smiled like I was a stranger. He saw the look of despair on my face, looked at the board, and lightning fast he grabbed the Jiffy marker and made a whole new row. He wrote Tilt Magazine, Toronto and put two serious-looking asterisks beside it. We now had the new last opening of the day.
He walked back over to the girl and reached out his hand to shake hers. “Hey, thanks a lot, we really appreciate the last-minute thing—YOU’RE DOING A GREAT JOB HERE. Are you going to be able to catch Bern’s set? You really should, ya know.”
“No, I doubt it, I’m committed to Stage 5. Ron Sexsmith. Same timeslot, you know how it is. But, uh, listen, do you have a card or a copy of the mag?”
“OH SHIT . . .” He slapped himself on the forehead. “No . . . sorry, they screwed up with our luggage at the airport. But we’ll send the Folk Fest office a copy of the issue when it comes out. Should I forward it to your attention?”
It was a good recovery, but Finn was right, we should’ve picked up a copy at 7-Eleven. Was that skepticism in her eyes? Did she know? Would she tell?
We exited the tent one at a time, so as to not look too eager. As soon as we were out of her sight line we high-fived it one more time. The gesture was starting to become a compulsive thing, our collective nervous tic.
10:00 AM–2:00 PM-ish: The three of us spent the sunny hours roaming the grounds, checking out workshops. Each of us wore unusually large black sunglasses just in case we’d bump into people who might blow our cover by accident. Between Isobel and me, we probably knew half of Edmonton, so we had no alternative but to snub people. We had to focus on our mission. I was convinced the coordinator girl was going to get on her walkie-talkie and then some Security Guy with cartoon Popeye muscles and a fog horn was gonna start yelling in front of all of Edmonton: “STOP THOSE FAKES, THEY’RE NOT FROM TORONTO; THEY’RE NOT REAL JOURNALISTS; TWO OF THEM WORK AT RIGOLETTO’S DOWNTOWN AND THE OTHER ONE IS UNEMPLOYED!” We’d be hopelessly exposed. The trauma, the trauma . . .
Dan’s afternoon show on Stage 4 was a raging success. Mid-way through his concert, he had the whole crowded hill giving him a standing ovation. His song “True Revolutionaries” was the big hit.
And in Berkeley
And in Greenwich Village
And in Paris
And in Scottsbluff, Nebraska
No one sits around funky little coffee shops
anymore
Talking revolution
They get a Starbucks to go
They go back to their basketball games
Where they see who can jump higher
Who can jam
Who can take it to the rack
And they all wear baseball caps
’Cept they don’t say Yankees or Dodgers or
Cardinals anymore
They say Nike; Reebok; Adidas
Because the pro players don’t play for teams
anymore
They play for shoe companies
I was so happy to see him play again. It rebustled my spirit. The man could give you shivers one note in. He was a new kind of protest singer, not corny, not overly earnest, but wry and swaggering. He juggled songs about baseball with ones about Henry Miller and Van Gogh. He navigated a fusion between literary and macho sports stuff. He wasn’t just a set of gorgeous biceps; the man could think and had obviously read some books. But it was his next song, “Jerusalem” that sent me off the deep end and straight to the ground, unconscious.
2:30 PM: Back on my feet, I was revived, the fainting episode way behind me—three Big Rocks inside me. Isobel was off buying jewellery and summer dresses she didn’t need in the big tent while I stooged out back in the beer garden and Blue Rodeo sweetly played mountain love songs on the mainstage. There were speakers in the tent, so you wouldn’t miss the music if you were stuck there. Under the feverish sun, sky-high poplar treetops gave us serene shady spots. Five flavours of beer flowed non-stop from keg spouts into pitchers and plastic glasses. Happy people puttered about, like children on the beach. You could hear a hum of “ahhhh”: the rapture of the beer garden scene. Collective contentment that was the essence of the folk festival—never-ending good times. A fuzzy, sunshine beery haze eclipsed my paranoia. I pointed my face up at the sun—to hell with the danger—my skin drank the sunbeams and I felt warm all through my chest and heart, legs and toes. I looked at the inside skin of my eyelids and dwelled in the orange until I felt like I was inside a tangerine. I forgot about my towering student loans, my nerve problem, my fainting issue, my lack of direction, Sullivan. Gorging on music and sunshine, what could be better?! Plus, I was going to interview Dan Bern later.
3:50 PM: Fearless Finn was off getting Dan Bern, and I was sitting alone at a picnic bench, as far away as possible from other beer garden dwellers. I was scared back into sobriety and felt a little dizzy from all the sun. Plus I had tumultuous guts—intestines gurgling in waves of fraudulence all the while writhing with small bubbles of righteousness—I was a freelance writer—I wrote (in my journal) and I was free. Ya! Granted I wasn’t a photographer and Tilt didn’t specifically commission Finn to cover this piece. But, I mean, c’mon: “the survival of folk music in an increasingly electronic/ironic age,” it was a totally plausible hook, even if a little pretentious.
3:51 PM: I was starting to doubt that we were actually doing this. My body couldn’t help but to express my disbelief; my fidgeting was getting out of hand. I wrestled with my postures. I couldn’t decide if I should put my bag on the table, take out the camera, hold a pen, have a smoke, scratch my head, look in a mirror to make sure I didn’t have any green onion cake stuck in my teeth. I fixated on my hair, making sure my badly positioned cowlick right at the top of my skull wasn’t doing its standing ovation. Before I could censor myself, I dipped my finger in my beer and tried to flatten the rogue strands. I wondered if the Princess Leia hairdo was a good choice for today.
I objected to that groupie word. Guys didn’t get called groupies, fan was a much better tag. I think the first big crazy fans were those bobby-soxers who went goofy over Frank Sinatra. I guess I must be a descendant of that tribe. But at least I wasn’t like those nutbars on Bern’s website; those people were rabid. It’s just like he explained in his “Abduction” song. After he returns home from the alien spaceship where he’d been abducted, he sang:
Well, my life’s back to normal now
I do the things I always do
’Cept once a week I meet with 12
Other folks who’ve been abducted too
I tell my story
They tell theirs
I don’t believe them, though
3:53 PM: What if someone came to sit down? This was exhausting. I needed to prepare, dammit. Should I take out my pens and paper? Despite the nerves, I had a feeling that I would look back on this as a great adventure as soon as it was over. I was already looking forward to being nostalgic. This was my first caper for ages as far I could remember—barring those you have on a smoked salmon pizza.
Just then I caught sight of the last person in the world I wanted to see. I squinted.
Not him . . .
Shittttt.
Better hide, I couldn’t explain that I was suddenly a photographer. Bern Baby Bern hadn’t properly accounted for civilian sightings.
Why did he always look so good?
I suppose he wasn’t everybody’s type. His tanned skin, his slender toes poking out of his ratty tennis shoes, his wild dark eyes and longish floppy black hair that usually smelled of campfire smoke. It was his eyes that got you. Sultry, come-fuck-me eyes.
I bent down to tie my shoe. I realized I had no laces, so I stroked a couple of blades of grass.
“Hey, Annie, how’s it going?”
“Fantastic.”
“You enjoying yourself? Seen any good bands?”
“Ya.”
He looked at me, weirdly, and I wondered if there was any possible way he could know what I was up to.
“That’s a pretty fancy camera you got there?”
“Uh, well . . . actually, ya . . . I’m kind of a rock journalist . . . photographer . . . for the day anyway, you know . . .”
“Really? Cool . . . How did that happen?”
“I gotta pee.”
4:00 PM: I hid by a falafel tent for a while. I just wanted to be cool. This had the makings of being pretty cool. I think Sullivan probably noticed how cool I was with all my gear. Or maybe really lame. We were behaving like total weirdoes. Everyone else was happily sitting on their ass watching music. But us, we were in the heart of the action. Maybe Dan would notice how cool I was and we could hang out and I don’t know, maybe I’d find something to do on the tour bus when he was gigging. I could be a real photographer. The technical side of cameras always buffaloed me, but I was excellent with a Polaroid. Point and shoot, baby, point and shoot!
I was sweating with the strain of trying to look casual and relaxed and natural. Should I go check my hair? There were no mirrors in the porta-potties. Where was Isobel? I lit another smoke, and put a mint in my mouth to counteract tobacco breath, then worried about the combination giving me mouth cancer. In a worried blur I watched the falafel man roll his little dumpling balls and drop them into the deep fryer one after another like a Zen master.
God, Finn was brave. Isobel was brilliant too, not being at all nervous. There must have been something wrong with me to be so nervous. It was hard to believe we were going to actually meet him. For real.
I knew I shouldn’t keep thinking I’m nervous. I’m nervous. I’m really really nervous. Nervous nervousnervousnervousnervousnerrrrrrrrrrvusususususus us nerve us. What did it mean . . . nerve us?
I was looking at myself in my pocket mirror every couple of minutes. This happens when I panic, I start to feel at odds with my body. Like my soul is floating away. Badly attached. Disembodied. However you want to call it, I stare and stare at myself trying to attach the image to my soul. It’s not an easy fit.
I changed my mantra to: I’m calm. I’m relaxed. I’m super cool and super suave and what . . . the hell is that? Bird shit on my sleeve?
That is so unattractive.
I walked back to the Bern Baby Bern headquarters picnic bench, which was miraculously free. Sullivan was nowhere in the vicinity. I pulled out the novel I was packing, Ana Karenina, my favourite love story after A Room with a View. It was a bit tragic with her pelting herself on the train tracks, but boy oh boy was it romantic.
4:00 PM-ish: “Hey,” said Isobel just as I was contemplating potential exits. I could see myself taking the fence if I took a running leap. Meeting a hero really wasn’t for the meek.
“Tell me when they’re coming, I can’t look,” I said and put on my big glasses again.
“C’est vraiment dommage they don’t serve Kir Royales here. I mean, a little bubbly would be parfait in this setting . . . Oh look, ils sont là bas. ETA: une minute. Is that bird kaka on your shirt?” Isobel asked. “Don’t worry, this is just like the time we did that stakeout when I was trying to seduce that Ukrainian guy, do you souviens? What was his code name, Ski?”
It’s true, we did have a bit of a history of stakeouts and harmless stalking. Accidentally bumping into people was my personal specialty. But I couldn’t muster any of the nonchalance I needed for this. Man, I wished I was up on the hill, stoned and happily watching Blue Rodeo. I felt nauseated.
But I couldn’t abandon Finn.
More than anything, I wanted desperately to go home to my couch and my fuzzy blanket. But I was stuck, the only thing I could do was act completely disinterested as I watched Finn walk up to the table with Dan Bern.
Mister Dan Bern.
I pretended to fiddle with a camera lens; I took another gulp of beer.
He was right in front of me.
He wasn’t your average lanky rock star, he was big and had peachy-tanned guitar-muscled arms, angel-food-cake-blond-coloured hair, stubbly face. He was gorgeous in a Californian surfer dude kind of way. I looked over at Finn; he looked unbearably nervous. You could almost see individual nerves dancing just beneath his skin. Finn sat down, and Dan headed to the porta-potties for the pre-interview pee.
“Oh man, it’s not going well, is it,” I said, noticing the hundreds of crazy sweat bubbles reproducing by the minute on Finn’s forehead.
“Shite . . . he’s not very talkative. I gave him the Tilt spiel on the way over and all I got was uh-huhs. We got really confused because he thought I said Spliff instead of Tilt.”
I realized then how terrible it could be—the full scope of the horror. If Finn couldn’t charm him, we were hooped.
Not having a proper strategy was moronic. We weren’t improv veterans.
Isobel got up and dashed off. She was too fast for me, though I considered trying to lasso her with my bag strap.
Dan ambled back over to the table. He looked like he was dreading it.
“Dan Bern, this is Annie Jones, photographer for Tilt Magazine.”
“Hi. I’m a big fan,” I said, standing up and sticking out my hand, knowing it was probably clammy.
“Hey,” he said, shaking my hand.
Did I feel an antagonistic vibe?
“Let’s sit,” Finn said.
I poured us four pints of Big Rock from the pitcher and pressed play on my professional-looking little tape recorder.
“Who’s the fourth beer for? Do y’all have like, I dunno, an invisible friend or somethin?” Dan joked.
Finn and I laughed way too loudly. It was a horrible, staccato burst: HA HA HA HA.
We looked at each other and stopped laughing.
Then it was all silent except for the angry wasp circling my beer.
I couldn’t possibly start the interview, so I gave Finn what I hoped was a serious, let’s-get-to-work kind of a nod.
“Ya, our colleague just went missing. But we don’t want to waste your time, so we’ll get started. So, uh, what do you think about protest songs in this day and age, it seems like the only way they can happen is if they’re ironic, why is that? Like your song ‘True Revolutionaries,’ it’s great, but is it the audience that changes the interpretation of it or is it you? I don’t know . . . I don’t know,” said Finn, looking confused but earnest.
There was a bad-tasting silence as Dan looked at him quizzically, cocking his head sideways, like a dog that’s perplexed.
The awkwardness was reaching toxic levels.
“. . . I don’t know what you’re asking . . .” Dan finally answered.
“Ya, me neither, man, sorry about that . . .” Finn replied quickly, sweating some more, eyes shifting back and forth.
Thank God! Gorgeous Isobel with her honey-brown skin and Lake Louise green eyes was back at the table with a baggie full of those little sugary doughnuts that no one is immune to—seductive golden nuggets of deep-fried lardy dough sprinkled with sweet crystals.
Finn and Dan looked at her like she was an angel. Finn announced, “This is my colleague, Isobel Sparks. She’s our doughnut supplier . . .”
“That was very rude of me. We need to keep Annie’s blood sugar up, and I thought I could get back in time, but I got waylaid by the crowds headed to the bathing pool.” Isobel laughed.
“I sure hate it when I get waylaid.” Dan laughed back. He looked sexy. It was a bit painful for me (the flirty winds not blowing in my direction but hers), but the vibe seemed to have instantly gotten better—flirting more potent than beer, I scribbled in my notebook.
Stuffing a couple doughnuts in my mouth, I glimpsed the Coordinator Girl checking us out with a look on her face that could mean we were busted.
“So what were we talking about?” Isobel asked.
“You know, folk music thriving in an increasingly electronic age,” Finn said.
“Oh, that’s tedious. Let’s get to the more interesting stuff, like . . . I don’t know . . . what kind of underwear do you prefer wearing?” Isobel said, laughing at her own humour.
“Well that depends. Mostly boxers, cotton ones. But I hate to say it, lately I’ve been going through a commando phase, particularly in the warmer months. But then . . .”
“Right, right, that’s great. But uh, Isobel, we do have to give Tilt what they want, it’s a mag for techies after all.” Finn was a little red in the face.
“Yes, yes, sorry. Finn can’t write a story about underwear. Mind you, I think somebody should write something about thongs, they are truly absurd.” Isobel laughed some more. I was in awe of her boldness. “Why don’t you tell us some stories about being on the road. What’s it like being a rock star? What kind of gossip do you got?” she asked in a mock Barbara Walters tone.
Dan smiled coyly at Isobel. She always knew how to play it right.
“I don’t got a lot of gossip. I’m a guy, for freakin’ sakes. We don’t talk about shit. We grunt. We watch sports. We talk sports. Sometimes we talk about chicks, but it’s kind of like talking about cars. I hate to tell y’all, but the stereotypes are true.”
“There’s no myth more appealing to girls than a bad-ass with a golden heart. I don’t believe what they say about musicians—you can’t tell me they’re all cheating, lying sons-o-bitches. How could they sing all those love songs then?” This was a subject so close to my heart, it was practically sitting on it. Finn, Isobel, and Dan Bern looked at me like I was on drugs.
“Look, I just started playing music so I could score some chicks! I’m sorry—it’s true, and almost every other guy musician I know is the same,” Dan said.
It was a good time to get more beer. Even if I wasn’t doing so well as an interviewer, the most important thing was that our Subject was warming up, loosening. I walked over to the beer pourers. From the lineup, I could see the back of the Coordinator Girl’s purple tie-dyed T-shirt. She was talking to one of those crew people with the shirts that read: SECURITY. He turned around to look at our gang. I steered myself and the beer quickly back to the table. Surely they wouldn’t interrupt us mid-interview.
When I got back to the table, I topped up everyone’s beer and then circled the table, pretending to take some arty pictures. At one point, I squatted and realized I was actually aiming the camera at Dan’s thighs, which looked pretty luscious at that angle. I snapped the picture quickly, feeling a little self-loathing over objectifying the guy.
I got up to take some less demeaning shots. As I clicked away, it seemed like the rapport at the table was growing.
But the Coordinator Girl was holding her position.
“How do you make that eeenn eeen waaah noise?” Finn asked while air-guitaring.
“Funny you should notice that, that’s a new technique I’m working on. It’s kind of like a combo slide/hammer pluck,” Dan said, demonstrating with his fingers on his own air guitar.
Isobel took hold of the conversation again: “How long have you been playing?”
“I’ve been playing since . . . I play all the time, since I was a little kid, thank God I didn’t forget how. Do you play?” Dan asked Isobel.
She shook her head no. Dan continued, “Not at all? You never play?”
“Music?” Isobel asked, arching an eyebrow coquettishly.
Oh God help us. This was nauseating. I looked over at Finn, he winked. He was squirming too. I looked over to where I’d last seen the Coordinator Girl. She’d moved. She could be anywhere.
“Oh ya, I play,” Isobel replied.
“Well okay then, gotta play!” Dan smirked and took a gulp of beer.
Disgusting—they were raunchy flirters.
Being a journalist is a cinch, I thought for a fleeting second, but then the Coordinator Girl came back into my range of vision. But she was smooching the security guy! Like full-on power necking. Maybe we were off the hook. I stopped holding my breath.
“Enough of all this heavy talk. Now, seriously, tell me what level of hedonism are we talking about on tour?” Finn asked.
“How hard do I party, is that what you are asking?” Dan laughed.
“Like on a scale of one to ten, one being Cliff Richard and ten being Keith Richards, who I heard gets his whole blood supply replaced every now and then so he can survive his debauchery,” Finn explained.
“I . . . well . . . I guess I’d be around a five . . . maybe seven. You know it’s hard work, touring, you gotta be healthy. You can’t just be a drunken bum like people think. Not at my humble level of success anyway. When you get to be mega big, then maybe you can have people schlepp you around. Fly you in and out of cities. You can be wasted if you’re flying first class and staying at like the Schmilton or whatever. But me, I gotta get myself places. So that means mostly being straight,” Dan said, helping himself to the beer.
“Well, I think the formal part of our interview is done. Do you want to hang out and have beers? I could get another pitcher,” Finn offered.
“That’d be thoughtful,” Dan accepted.
Finn went on a beer run, and I took some photos of Dan by himself and then some with Isobel, who took advantage of the situation by posing with her arm thrown casually around his neck.
“Hey, let me wear some of those goofy sunglasses you’ve all got. What’s up with them anyway, makes y’all look like you’re in a cult,” Dan said.
I gave him my glasses even though they were holding my hair in place. He slid them on. They didn’t look too bad on him.
“These glasses smell like beer. What did you do, stick your head in a keg?” Dan and Isobel laughed. I tried to imagine I was delightful like Annie Hall: sexy goofy. Finn came back from the booze run with beer and armfuls of green onion cakes.
I loved green onion cakes. They were like pancakes with onions. Greasy dough with a savoury flavour. My teeth sank in to the sticky dough, oil seeped into my mouth. All of it triggering the happy chemicals in my brain.
Then Finn launched one of his classic Finnisms: “So when you’re touring in foreign countries, is it a truer you that you present to people, or just another mythology . . . I mean, that’s what everyone does, we create myths around ourselves and then when we go travelling . . . we can totally reinvent ourselves, make up new myths, d’ya know what I mean?”
“I don’t think those myths are wrong though . . .” Dan somehow clicked with Finn’s babbling.
“No, man, they’re not wrong, you gotta have ’em, you gotta live, you gotta get through the day.”
In my mind I screamed to Finn, “NOW’S NOT THE TIME TO REVEAL OUR JOURNALISM MYTH, DON’T DO IT, HE’S NOT READY!”
“Even beyond getting through the day, I mean, I think . . . I think those myths are real,” Dan repeated.
“They have to be . . .” Finn agreed with beery passion. I think Finn clung to a lot of personal myths. Like he was destined to be Canada’s Hunter S. Thompson; Isobel was sure to fall in love with him once she understood his true genius; he would become a hugely sought-after singer-songwriter, and foreign correspondent. We had often talked dreams/myths after work at the restaurant, unwinding over a few Heinekens or Gin Talkings, as we liked to call them.
I think we had reached our goal. The mood was great, or at least relaxed. We were palling around with Dan Bern and he was flirting with Isobel.
6:05 PM: The tape recorder clicked off. I was a little tipsy. We babbled some more about everything. I think we covered Woody Guthrie, High School, Tennis, Why Canada Is Fabulous, Bad Journalists’ Questions, his defence of Henry Miller, both Elvises, New York Pedestrians, Jaywalking in Alberta, Sunglasses, Dogs, and all of our astrological signs. Blue Rodeo had long finished playing, and Gillian Welch was starting up when Dan finally said, “I gotta get back ’cause I’m drunk.”
7:30 PM: After expending all that nervous energy, I was tired but feeling relatively normal about the whole thing.
“Guys, maybe we should take on Costello! Or Bowie, I think he’s on tour somewhere. We could go on the road!” Finn enthused. “It’s like that Woody Allen line about the world opening up for us like one big vagina!!!”
“Easy there, chief . . . A road trip, ya, that would be dreamy. I could use a holiday . . .” I said.
Isobel kept mumbling to both of our annoyances how charmant Bern was. He had scribbled his email address on her arm in Jiffy blue permanent ink. We’d have to see it for a while yet.
We climbed the hill later and sacked out on the tarp, ready for the candle-lit portion of the evening. Everyone brought candles to light at twilight. There was even a procession of kids walking down the hill with flickering paper lanterns held aloft. Festivals are so much better than stadium concerts; there’s just no contest. As we lay back and listened to the tunes, a feeling of widespread goodwill swept the hill and I revelled in Edmonton at its most magical. Isobel was letting Finn rub her feet. Even though I saw Sullivan sitting farther down the hill with his freaky tall new girlfriend wrapped around him, I sang along to “Four Strong Winds,” thinking this day had turned into the kind you knew you would never forget. A real Top 10 day.
The rest of the festival was a perfect lost weekend of booze, more green onion cakes with atomically hot sauce, doughnuts, smiles to cute boys, flirtations in the porta-potty lineup, and great tunes. After the weekend we were left ravaged, exhausted, and gastrointestinally challenged but happified. Mostly though we were very proud of our stunt. Finn especially felt like the King of the World. And I began to think of another quest being possible: maybe Hawksley and I could meet sooner than I thought. It might be time to meet him, in the flesh. What flesh. Mmmm.