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July 9th, 2005 was a big day at the Ottawa Bluesfest. Not only was it a Saturday – which meant that the music started in the early afternoon and ran consistently on four stages until the 11pm cutoff – but the day’s lineup included the great Daniel Lanois, a man of such enormous talent that his mere appearance can make a normal festival day seem “big”.
And so after spending the sunshine hours grooving to The Apostles of Hustle (especially their killer horn section), gaping with surprised entertainment at solo looping fiddle phenom Final Fantasy, and dancing spastically (the only way I know how) with my friend’s three year old throughout the entirety of Alison Krauss and Union Station’s stellar country/bluegrassy set it was finally time for my festival day to begin in earnest and I parked myself at the main stage for Dan.
What can one say about Daniel Lanois? He is definitely a dramatically under-appreciated Canadian treasure; regardless of how much he is lauded it isn’t enough. One of the world’s greatest record producers, he is also a radically good guitar player, a sublimely unique pedal steel player, a world-class bandleader, and a songwriter of such depth and melodicism that he can capture the world with a bass line. Try to find a song with French lyrics on English radio, go ahead. Dan has two. And one of those (The Maker) has become a ubiquitous planetary hit on par with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which is quite a feat.
Oh, and he’s a swell guy too. I once met a guy on a street corner in the French Quarter, and when he found out I was Canadian he asked if I knew “Dan”. I told him I knew several Dan’s and what was his last name? Turns out this guy had become friends with Lanois and had become his in-house motorcycle tech whenever “Dan” was working at his studio in New Orleans. The guy told me lots of stories about biking around with U2 and such and showed me a photo of himself with Dan and Van* having dinner in Europe. He told me that Dan was the nicest man he knew and that he treated everyone with the same respect, from Dylan and Neil Young on down to the man who sweeps the floors. A while later I met Dan myself when he signed some things for my not-for-profit and yeah, super-nice dude, for sure.
Anyway, this show was as good as I was anticipating and twice better than that. I started off in the photo pit filling my cheap point-and-click full of pixels but soon enough I just sat right down in the pit and stared at the stage, transfixed. I was already sitting when Lanois addressed we the media with a request, “Okay, enough of the cameras in my face. For this next song can we have the photographers put their cameras away and turn off the bigscreen?” We all complied except for the Rogers crew, who kept the bigscreen on. Unforgivable.
My goodness, it was such a great concert. Mid-set the band took a break and left Dan alone with his pedal steel guitar, which he used to create the sound of glorious, shining angels weeping with joy. This would be the first time I saw Daniel Lanois perform (though not the last by far) and man-o-man, he did not disappoint.
I really should have gone home immediately following Lanois’ set but I didn’t. I decided to see if the hype about Broken Social Scene was legit and after making my way to the wrong stage and taking in a few songs courtesy of Aussie beach bum/didgeridoo hitmaker Xavier Rudd (who is mostly an amalgam of Ben Harper and Keller Williams performing beneath the hair of ’70’s David Lee Roth), I found out that they weren’t. Unless the hype was “see what thirty-seven musicians can do with an e minor single-chord vamp,” in which case they live up to the hype to a T. Geez, who was in the group back then? Final Fantasy, Feist, and probably at least one member of Eric’s Trip.
In the end I decided to beat the crowds and cut out before their final coda, all the while wishing I had departed before their initial anacrusis.
I guess you can’t win ‘em all. Daniel Lanois can, clearly, but I can’t.
*Morrison.
Todd Man Out 