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July 8th, 2006 was the second day of the Ottawa Bluesfest and as it was a Saturday it was a long one. No worries, I came loaded for bear.
The night before the Bluesfest had opened up with performances by Great Big Sea, Seu Jorge, Tony D and a see of others. But notably it had also been the debut of the Cupsucker, an ingenious little invention that had the potential to dramatically reduce the environmental impact of a festival’s worth of plastic beer cups. Though it was nothing more than a length of PVC tubing with a stopper on one end, when attached to a garbage can it became an ideal cup-stacking tube that enabled thousands of discarded plastic cups to fit into a garbage bag that otherwise could hold just a few hundred*.
I took one look at the thing and thought: I could hide something like that inside a folding lawnchair. And so I went to Home Hardware first thing in the morning and bought a piece of tubing and stuck it down the middle of a lawnchair sack along with some busted lawnchair parts to act as tactile camouflage. I could slide four tallboys and one smallie inside that tube but it sure was heavy when I did. On my way in to the fest security gave my lawnchair bag the once, twice, and thrice over. After a very thorough patdown he let me pass, albeit with a furrowed brow.
I was onsite really early, hardly a bit past the noon-ish opening hour. I made it in time to catch a bit of Kelly Joe Phelps, who stood onstage alone with his acoustic guitar and rode a razor-thin line between mesmerizing and boring. Then I headed over to the MBNA Stage for The Brazilian Girls, who are not Brazilian and are 75% not girls. They were really good in a 4am-dark-and-flashing-Berlin-nightclub kinda way, but unfortunately they were playing a 3pm-sunny-field-in-front-of-an-apartment-building kind of venue, so the spatial/aural disconnect prevented them from being truly great.
Next I made my way to the Blues ’Til Dusk Stage for the Deadstring Bros. which the program described as an Exile-era Rolling Stones-sounding band. I don’t know who nailed it more, the band or the program, ‘cuz man-o-man that’s exactly what they sounded like. They were great. So much so that I emptied my lawnchair. I had intended to see Walter Trout next but I had to go home to reload. I made it back in time for Trout’s last chord. It was an E.
I glanced at Torngat with their French horns and melodic niceness on the way over to Keb’ Mo’s set and I should’ve turned right back around as soon as I got there. I was making a point of seeing lots of the actual blues acts at the festival that year but man, Mr. Mo’ just doesn’t do it for me. His guitar playing is more than adequate (although nothing to write home about), but at this show it was his lyrics that were especially grating on my sensibilities. Write what you know, sure, but it’s more than a little weird for a blues tune to find rhymes for words like “cellphone” and “iPod”. I stuck it out hoping it would get better. It didn’t.
With that kind of warmup mixed with my more-than-subtle regret at not being at the CSNY concert that was simultaneously happening out at the big hockey rink I was perhaps not in the best frame of mind going into Bonnie Raitt’s set, which seemed way too adult-contemporary for my roustabout tastes. My geography could have been partially to blame as well, as it is sometimes hard to really get into a show from a half-kilometre away from the stage. Still, it was quite easy to have a good time back there with so many beers and friends, and I did. Raitt did pull off a simply stunning solo version of John Prine’s Angel From Montgomery though; like…it was killer.
I’m amazed that this seems to stand as the only Bonnie Raitt concert I have witnessed thus far. I can’t tell you how much that surprises me. i hope it changes.
*In an extremely unfortunate move, the Ottawa Bluesfest patented the Cupsucker. As a result, any festival that attaches a piece of PVC tubing with a stopper on one end to a garbage can in an effort to reduce their environmental footprint must pay a fee to the Bluesfest. So nobody does. And so a simple idea that could have made a significant impact on festival waste worldwide doesn’t, and at no profit to the Bluesfest whatsoever as far as I can tell. What a shame.
Todd Man Out 