FROM JUNE 2024 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

“In the summer of 2014 I was the production chief for a music festival out of the city.

A young man had just discovered his girlfriend in his tent with another guy, so, broken-hearted, he did what any person would do: he got backstage and climbed the stage, professing his love by threatening to jump.

We scrambled into action. Some stage crew climbed up after him. We harnessed up an OPP officer who was shaking like a leaf, got him in a boom lift and went to rescue (i.e. arrest) the climber. The OPP sergeant yelled at me to get more harnesses so they could ‘get more officers up there.’ I told him, ‘We have five or more riggers up there. We’ll be fine.’ He asked, ‘What the hell is a rigger?’ I responded, ‘They’re the people I sent your officer up to protect the jumper from. If he wasn’t there, they’d probably just finish the job for him.’

After getting his attention and talking him back from the edge with some smokes, the riggers tackled him, the officer cuffed him and we brought him down safely in the lift.

He was in tears, but tragedy was avoided. The riggers joked that we should offer him a job the next year.”

— Zane Van Hoek

“Summer 2022, starved for live music, I flew to London’s All Points East Festival solely to see the obscure psychedelic band Goat. Sound issues meant they only played a 35-minute set, albeit kickass. But that’s not my highlight. Nor was it seeing Caribou, the Canadian math nerd, commanding the ecstatic dancing of thousands. The highlight was when my friend played a cryptocurrency game and won. It went like this: She entered a clear cylindrical pod and the door sealed shut behind her. I assumed you entered knowing nothing about crypto, then emerged fully understanding Blockchain and NFTs, forever wealthy. The operator pressed Start. My friend’s long hair billowed as tiny pieces of folded paper flew all around her. She plucked one from the air, hoping it was the grand prize. It wasn’t; it was better. Two upgrades to VIP passes. Did that mean backstage access to Goat and Tame Impala and Dry Cleaning? No. Better still. Our bladders full, unwilling to line up for filthy porta-potties, we won access to a private lounge with real toilets and running water. Some things are better than understanding crypto.”

— Jennifer Lovegrove

Woodstock ’99 has gone down in memory as a tragic shitshow, unfairly obscuring the merely horrible shitshow that was Woodstock ’94 in upstate New York, where the perimeter fences were pulled down the first day, the so-called ‘scrip’ system for purchasing food fell apart, and rains fell biblically. I was covering the festival for The Globe and Mail, when not cowering in my sodden tent. But Woodstock ’94 did have its highlights, including a stomping headline set by Metallica. I was walking away from the stage, warmed by metal and a flask of Jack Daniels, when a curly-haired, wildeyed figure loomed out of the dark.

‘Do you know Inatress?’ he yelled at me in a comically thick German accent.

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘Inatress! Do you know Inatress!’

‘I don’t know anyone named Inatress,’ I replied.

The German frantically mimed putting a mask over his face, and I worried that this mysterious Inatress was giving birth in the mud somewhere. The journalist I was with leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘He’s asking if we have any nitrous oxide.’

‘Sorry, man. No nitrous. But we do have bourbon.’

But he didn’t want the mash, he wanted to get mashed, and he disappeared into the dark, never to be seen again.”

— Elizabeth Renzetti

“Five musicians, one sound man, a bunch of amps and drums, all stuffed into a rented RV and heading west. That was in 1988, the summer I fell in love with Canada. Up until then, my musical world had been confined to van rides to small clubs in towns along the 401. The idea of getting over the massive hump of the Precambrian Shield was a task too daunting to even consider.

The Grievous Angels had just released our first cassette, Toute la Gang, and the Edmonton Folk Festival promised to give us a Saturday-morning side gig if we made it to the city. We had been pestering them for months, and they probably thought we wouldn’t actually show up. But this was the holy grail. We were going to make it happen. Stop number one was a six-night booking at a very wild francophone country bar in Timmins. We were told we would be run out of town if we didn’t sing Top 40 country hits, but we sold all our merchandise by night three.

Then there was the 10-hour drive to Thunder Bay, where we were put up in a very dodgy ‘band house’ with bikers who were on acid. Then onto Winnipeg for two nights in a motel complex that doubled as a strip club and new music venue. On to Regina and then finally Edmonton on the most beautiful of summer weekends.

The Edmonton Folk Festival opened my eyes to music forms I had never heard. We played our heart out on the side stage with the group Timbuk 3. What we lacked in skill we more than made up for in enthusiasm, and the Festival actually squeezed us in for a two-song spot on the main stage Saturday night.

It was a summer of bad road coffee and all-night drives, but it was a rite of passage: dipping my feet into the cold waters of Kakabeka Falls; seeing the Rocky Mountains for the first time; driving through the Prairie night as the aurora borealis shimmered like neon curtains above us. And I remember the people. They were so open, so fun, so friendly. So Canadian.

1988 seems like a long time ago. My world is increasingly online – a place of dissonance and rage bots. But in my mind I keep that summer close.

Maybe it’s time to take another long drive.”

— Charlie Angus

“In 2013 our tenacious drummer/ booking agent Stich Wynston found us a gig at a festival in a remote town six hours from Sydney, Australia, called Dubbo. My Tasmanian neighbour summed it up nicely when I asked her about it. ‘Dubbo?? Dubbo?? Why the hell are you going to that shithole??’ The trip from Sydney was incredibly scenic. We traversed the gorgeous Blue Mountains and eventually drove down lonely country roads, braking repeatedly for magnificent snowy owls hunting for errant mice on the pavement.

We arrived around 10 p.m. at the local Retired Servicemen’s Club that was hosting the festival. ‘Take yer hat off, please!’ barked the doorman as we entered. ‘Oh, sorry,’ I offered timidly. ‘We tried to check in at the hotel, but it was closed.’ ‘Guess you shoulda thought about that, eh?’ he smirked. We heard music in the distance and shuffled off to the bar, where a geriatric band called Short and Horny were playing some equally ancient tunes. ‘Oh it’s the Canadians!’ gushed a volunteer. ‘Do you play Dixie or swing??’ Gulp, ‘ummm, neither???’ We were introduced to Ross, the burly organizer with massive, rock-crushing hands. As I rubbed my newly bruised mitt, he said, ‘Great to see you boys. Listen, about your music, the old people aren’t gonna like it very much. But we have a bunch of high school music students that stand around like warm bottles of piss when they play, so hopefully you’ll inspire them.’ We played the next day to a full auditorium. The old people didn’t like it very much. And the students stood around like warm bottles of piss, perplexed by the costumed Canadian freaks spouting ’80s jazz rap.”

— Richard Underhill, Shuffle Demons

“In the late summer of 1994, I had just started dating a Toronto musician – a keyboard player and record producer. He was off to the U.K. to play at the Greenbelt Festival with a singer-songwriter buddy of his.

I had high hopes for the relationship – it was young, but full of fireworks. In this prehistoric age before cellphones, he told me he was going to send me a postcard every day for the two weeks he’d be abroad.

I checked my mailbox every day, but nothing came. Maybe he’d found someone new? A lot of people attend festivals as much to find romance as new music to love, and musicians – even keyboard players – get a lot of attention. I’d told my guy I’d pick him up from the airport when he came home, and I had no way to cancel the plan. Besides, I’m the sort of person who follows through. So I brought along a copy of Waiting for Godot and stood far back from the arrivals gate, my head in my book. He found me, hugged me, kissed me, told me he’d missed me. Told me the buddy he’d gone over to play with at the festival had ditched him to visit friends, and he had no money and knew no one. He couldn’t change his flight to come home earlier. Some people he’d met at the festival kindly invited him to return with them to Belfast. He was broke, a true starving artist, so he imposed on strangers. He remembers hearing a car bomb that exploded near the Sinn Féin headquarters one night, remembers how nonchalant his hosts seemed about ‘the troubles.’ He couch-surfed until it was time to get back to Heathrow.

In the following weeks, a barrage of postcards reached me, some of them homemade. Once he ran out of money, he cut up a cereal box and other cardboard he found to make cards. He’d written to me every day. Thirty years later, I still have the postcards and I still have the guy.”

— Patricia Westerhof

“Although there were some younger, hipper members of the audience, the majority of the mid-afternoon crowd at the Rocky Mountain Ranch festival in Sudbury that summer of 1994 were families and older folks in lawn chairs. For the local act whose battle-of-the-bands prize had been a slot on a sunny Saturday afternoon bill headlined by country singer George Fox, this was their Lollapalooza, their chance to shine. They were primed for the moment and they

were going for it, playing a style reminiscent of Jane’s Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and other SoCal groups of the day. After the third or fourth highly energetic song, the lead singer, full of bravado and slightly out of breath from the previous song, bent over and screamed into his microphone, ‘C’mon you mother fuckers, let’s get a mosh pit going!’ As they started the next song, you could see the puzzled looks on everyone’s faces. The imaginary hook came out from the side of the stage. The power was shut down and the set was over.”

— Andy Maize

“In 1973 I turned 21 years old. On July 27 that year, three of my friends and I – Howard, Dave and John – got into my red 1970 Datsun 510 and headed for Watkins Glen, NY, to see the best three bands in the world. We arrived in the late afternoon and parked miles from the site, hiking in with our supplies and camping by the first stage-right delay tower. The bands sound checked, we drank Baby Duck, smoked ourselves into oblivion and eventually fell asleep. We woke to find another 500,000 people had shown up.

Grateful Dead started at noon, followed by The Band, who were interrupted by a thunderstorm but came back to finish their set, and then three hours of The Allman Brothers followed by a jam including everyone and everything – ‘Not Fade Away,’ ‘Mountain Jam,’ ‘Johnny B Goode’ – that continued as we made our way back to the car.”

— Dave Bluestein

“For many years I lived in a very small B.C. town that multiplied its size exponentially for a music festival once a year. It was special for a lot of reasons, but for me, it meant that many of my touring friends who I rarely saw visited my remote town for a few days. One year, a pack of friends arrived in the middle of the night, and decided it couldn’t be that hard to find me in a community of 300, no matter what time it was. They wandered the 10 streets of town screaming ‘DAVID NEWBERRY!’ over and over. As other festival goers began to arrive, for some reason they joined the search party, and their calls got increasingly creative. Instead of just my name, they began to wander around shouting ‘DAVID NEWBERRY IS A (various expletives),’ and other accusatory ephemera. It's significant to note that my girlfriend's mother lived in this tiny town and her bedroom window overlooked the campground. I am told it became a game of sorts that – despite its use of my name – became detached from the reality in which I was a person who someone had been looking for. I never woke up, or saw the mob that was ostensibly out for me. It must have been sizeable, because for the rest of the weekend when I would play my sets, there were always people in the audience who were either surprised that I was a real person, and not just the name of a hip, new, night-shouting game, or curious if I was indeed a (various expletive) or had really done the things they had heard shouted about me around town.”

— David Newberry