Downstage Centre

I MISS DOWNSTAGE centre. People have kindly commented that it looks to come naturally to me. It didn’t. I learned and studied and practised and failed for many years. I continue to learn and study and practise and fail. Well, I was doing those things until the middle of March, when COVID-19 did the unthinkable and shut down every single stage on Earth simultaneously.

I miss it desperately. Standing in front of groups of people and facilitating their good times has been an important part of my life. I miss the band and the hangs and the crowds and the bus and the late-night gas station corn chips and the wink across a 5 a.m. Air Canada plane to a bleary-eyed bandmate that says “This is horrible” and “My God, how lucky are we” at the same time.

I’m not sure who said this first, but it is true: “The only thing worse than being on the road is not being on the road.”

I started on the side of the stage. If you are lucky, you will too.

Since the inception of the American Idol TV show and ones like it, I have worried about young singers and how some of their earliest performances are on international TV. My first two hundred performances were inside my buddy Brian’s garage with a barbecue lit to fend off the February cold. We stank of chicken wings, and we stank. We could barely get through one song. Until one day we did. Then we got through two. Eventually, we could do a three-song set for a school concert and, later, half of the school dance. Then a full one.

Downstage centre is a much easier spot to handle if you have made your way there gradually over time.

My uncle Ronnie had many bands that played up and down the Southern Shore. The venues in these fishing towns were not pubs as you might imagine. These towns had clubs with large dance floors, and on Friday and Saturday nights the band had one job and one job only: keep the dance floor full and the drinks flowing to the thirsty dancers. When I was just fifteen years old I started playing in bands with him. I was way over on the side of the stage, one of a couple of guitar players. I watched and learned for most of my teenage years.

Ronnie would sit behind his drum set, survey the club and instantly decide if we should start with a fast or slow song. If people seemed to be listeners more than dancers, we’d play a few lyrics-driven ballads or easy listening songs sprinkled with a few jokes in between. But if they jumped to the dance floor on a Friday night, Ronnie would run four or five fast dance songs together without saying a word.

Watching him over a nest of knotted cables and rusty, bent cymbal stands kick-started the quest of my life.

I remain a dedicated student to it all, but here’s what I’ve concluded so far.

Fronting a band each night is a cocktail of humility and confidence. Gratitude and swagger. Modesty and bravado. Bashfulness and balls.

The first trick is to realize this. And many don’t learn it early enough, if ever. The second trick is much harder: you have to know how much of these ingredients is required each night if you’re to get the cocktail right. For 99.9 percent of the gigs you’ll ever do, you can’t even begin to estimate it till you walk onstage.

No one gets it right all the time. The great ones get it right most often.

Watch Bono and U2 on what is arguably the greatest live concert film of all time, when their Elevation Tour rolled though Boston. The whole show is available on YouTube. This was at the height of their international fame and during a four-day sold-out run in one of the biggest sports arenas in the world. Surely this would be the place for all bravado, all the time. This would be the time to come in on a harness from the heavens in an explosion of awesomeness.

Not at all. Humbly the band took the stage with the house lights still on, and the first thing Bono—the biggest rock star in the world—does is kneel. He genuflects in humility and gratitude. The whole scene creates an otherworldly moment for the fans, yet makes it instantly human. They came to cheer for gods, but the gods weren’t having it. The lights, the knee—it’s loud and clear: “This is a night we’ll have together. Not you here to see me. Not me here to do a recital for you. Tonight we are the lucky few to be in this place and time. Let’s go.” Over the next hour and forty-seven minutes, there was not a person in that room who did not feel blessed to be there.

The modesty of that moment sets the stage for the buildup to many Rock God moments to come in the show. And as the whole thing started in such an unassuming nature, these moments are augmented in a spectacular fashion. Gratitude leads to swagger for the win.

Compare that to Freddie Mercury and Queen at Live Aid. A completely different situation that required a completely different cocktail. The band had twenty-one minutes in the middle of a day-long procession of the biggest musical acts on Earth to prove that Queen was the best stadium act in history in front of seventy-two thousand screaming fans who’d spent half a day standing in the sun.

There had been expressions of gratitude and sombre reminders of the dire situation in the malnourished world. There was no time for bashfulness. This cocktail was 99.9 percent balls.

At 6:41 p.m., Freddie Mercury trotted onto the stage like a stallion at the gates waiting for the gun. He pranced to the piano and played the intro to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” quite possibly the greatest stadium rock song of all time. They were taking no prisoners. If there was any doubt about Mr. Mercury’s cockiness, he took one of those precious twenty-one-minute-long slots and just had the crowd echo his vocal exercises. By 7:02 p.m., it was game, set, match. Queen rules.

When I moved to St. John’s to go to university, I was quickly immersed in pub culture. Small rooms with small Celtic bands or solo singers instead of four-piece rock bands was the fare. And much to my dismay, no dance floors. The bulk of my apprenticeship of keeping the dance floor full was not applicable in these situations. So I had to learn a whole new frontman skill set.

I started studying the popular musical comedy acts of the day, many of which were very adult in nature. Long before political correctness, there were several acts around Atlantic Canada who commanded the pub scene. Acts like MacLean & MacLean and Lambert & James played acoustically and sang parody songs with less than wholesome but hilarious content. Their between-song banter was even less wholesome, as they would basically abuse everyone in the room with locker room insults and jibes.

Still underage, I snuck into a bar on Water Street to see Lambert & James one night. As I entered, they made fun of my jacket to the knee-slapping merriment of the drinkers at the bar and at tables. “Look a’ Buddy sneaking in the back there with his sister’s coat on. Does that come in men’s?!” Two bearded men wearing baseball hats had the place in the palm of their hands.

When they played and sang, they were very skilled and could fill the room with strumming and solos and harmonies. But no matter how good the music was, the patrons’ attention would always drift during the songs unless they got to sing along. And they did, almost all the time. If the clubs on the Southern Shore required you to keep the dance floor filled, the job here was to continuously engage the audience with jokes or singalong songs or whatever it took to keep their attention. My first gigs in the pubs of St. John’s, either on my own or in a musical comedy duo called Stagger & Home, were modelled after the pub masters I was lucky enough to see.

When Sean and Bob and Darrell were looking for a new addition to form a new band, they wanted someone who was schooled in this exact skill set. The combination of the traditional music skills the boys already had and my eagerness to engage the room quickly made GBS the most successful act in downtown St. John’s in just a few months. One of our early tricks was to do Celtic pub versions of popular rock songs. Our version of Slade’s “Run Runaway” became a pub hit so much that when we were eventually signed to a major label, this song was our first single and video. The same trick that worked to get people’s attention in the pubs worked on the MuchMusic video station too.

It wasn’t long before we graduated from pubs to theatres. I remember an early GBS gig at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s. It was a big deal to have a pub band play in the one-thousand-plus soft-seat venue. I wanted it to go so well. I called upon all my apprenticeship experience, from the dance floors on the Southern Shore to commanding the attention of noisy pubgoers in downtown St. John’s.

I strode confidently to the mic to open the show, and two things struck me like a stone. There was no dance floor, and the audience was sitting quietly, looking right at us.

Shit.

The two main skill sets I’d developed over the past decade were little use to me in the cold, hard spotlight. More studying to do.

Greg Malone was the de facto ringmaster of the most influential band of my young life, The Wonderful Grand Band. Every time he interacted with the band, he did so with a mix of compliment and ribbing. Older Irish acts had more theatrical paths to front the band. Liam Clancy often strode onstage confidently and did a two-minute monologue that led to the first song. It was completely spellbinding.

And then there were the singers who led the night by completely occupying each song they delivered. Bruce Springsteen and Irish Folk God Christy Moore led the way with this. They often spoke or lightly bantered between songs, but when the song kicked in, they transported the audience from one world to the next as the circumstances of the song required.

Concerts held in a soft-seat theatre require a completely different cocktail. The patrons are seated, but they don’t always want to be. Yet they did not pay for that plushy seat to have their view of the stage obscured by drunken punters in front of them. So I started arranging the set lists to allow for the rises and dips I thought would accommodate what most people would enjoy.

A pal once said, “Man, a GBS concert has more standing and sitting than Holy Sunday mass.”

I started making lists of how the sets of songs were arranged in my favourite concerts—when did the front guy speak in between songs, and when did he link a bunch of songs together. I recalled that one of my favourite moments watching bands who were visiting St. John’s at the Memorial Stadium was when they’d say, “Hey, great to be in St. John’s. We walked the Signal Hill trail yesterday.”

I made it a point to mention each night onstage at least one local experience I had in every town. It has served me so well since it forces me, in the rare occurrence that I am not in the mood, to get out and see the town each day. It has been great for my physical and mental health.

I love the rush of the first few songs—when you see the audience checking out what the stage looks like and they’re happy to see the members of the band haven’t changed or are curious about seeing a new member. I love the breath that comes after the first block of songs when I can chat with the room before the first ballad. I love setting a big, near show-stopping song right in the middle of the show, one that could easily mark the end of most concerts but not this one. I love the big fall into the second ballad at the two-thirds mark and the big buildup to the massive finale. I love coming back for the encore with one more trick up my sleeve like a special guest or having one of the other band members sing a song. And I love the one final simple song that just says thank you.

Over the years in clubs and pubs, in my uncle’s band, during solo gigs in pubs or performing on the biggest stages in Canada with GBS or solo, I have committed almost every egregious error a front man can make. To list a few, I have:

You might think that these errors would be far in my past, and I wish you were correct. But in the winter of 2016 we had a three-song set at the Ann Arbor Folk Fest winter fundraiser. This was a multi-act, very folky affair in a posh theatre with small duos and trios coming and going around a mic or two. I figured we could make a bigger splash if we brought out the whole band with bass and drums and our big sound desk and all. We’d be the only super-pro-sounding, full-headline act to appear onstage. We’d win the night for sure.

Nope.

We strode onstage about four minutes too late, as our setup was longer than everyone else’s. Without a proper sound check it took a song and a half to get our massive audio setup sounding right. All my banter was distracted by technical issues, and my content was more geared towards a beer garden than a quiet folk festival. By the time the third song came along—another boisterous rocker for a crowd hungry for mandolin and stories—we had lost them.

Bono got it right in Boston. Freddie got it right at Live Aid. I blew it in Ann Arbor.

But luckily, I have way more memories of elation than dejection from the spotlight. In my current, or recently current, touring outfit, I am surrounded by a dream team of musicians and companions. They lift me up and make me want to be better, and I see them do that for each other night after night. That’s part of the rush and satisfaction of it all too. The feeling that the band and the audience are glad you’ve called them all together. To give each other their time and talents. It’s not the first time and won’t be the last time I say it, or shout to the heavens: “A crowd needs a band almost as bad as a band needs a crowd.”

And we needed the crowd to stick with us some years back during a Great Big Sea concert in a Fredericton hockey rink when the entire electrical grid lost power. It was a real downer, since the band and four thousand fans were having the night of our lives. As the PA and lighting rig went down and the emergency lamps cast a cold, spell-breaking light across the room, our tour manager told me they’d need a five- to ten-minute break to switch to a generator.

I recalled the bravado of Freddie Mercury, the gratitude of Bono and Uncle Ronnie’s rule to keep the dance floor full. I’d need the whole audience to keep this train on the rails.

“We don’t need no break!” I shouted, and ran downstage centre. I held my hands in the air and then against my lips, motioning everyone to hush for a second. To my surprise, they did. I knew I had one chance to hold the room, so I did not say a word. I just sang,

“Oh me, oh my, I heard me old wife cry.” The opening chorus lyrics to the Newfoundland traditional song “Excursion Around the Bay” had been a singalong favourite at our concerts for a decade, and I figured it was my best chance to engage everyone and keep us all together now. I rolled the dice and prayed the hockey rink full of people would answer. And answer they did.

Four thousand people shouted, “Oh me, oh my,” and off we went. What followed was a four- to five-minute incredible show of togetherness and commitment to a good night out from band and audience alike. In the cold emergency light, we sang the full song without amplification of any kind at all. Without fancy moving lights or any of the normal concert accoutrements, we sang and with each verse and chorus the energy grew almost as fast as the realization that we were all doing something very cool together that we could never do alone or over a phone call or a video conference meeting.

I added an extra chorus at the end, and with the luck that any good night needs, the power clicked back on as we hit the final notes. You could not have planned it better. The audience applauded me for my efforts, and I applauded them for theirs.

A mix of humility and confidence. You don’t always get the blend right, but when you do, it is the best drink in the world.

I remain a student of the craft. Constantly looking and learning and gathering notions on how to reinvent the wheel. How to do the same thing differently. How to frame and present a set of songs in an order that makes the night something more than a recital. The best concerts have an ebb and flow. They rise and fall.

Here in these COVID-19 times, it pains me to talk and type about concerts, as I fear they are a ways away. Will governments ever allow such gatherings again? Will the audiences come back if they do? I am fearful but hopeful.

I daydream about standing at the side of the stage when the house lights are called. I’ll be craning my neck around the corner and looking at the audience for any kind of insight I might glean about the best cocktail to serve.

Till the curtain calls, see you downstage centre.