Posted by One morning I was scrolling through the Blue Book of Ennui when I happened upon a post from the Newfoundland Folk Arts Society advertising an upcoming performance by a fellow named Daniel Champagne. I had heard of neither the NFAS nor Mr. Champagne before but I decided to give my scrolling finger a rest and I clicked the video link.
Turns out Daniel Champagne is one of those young hotshot youtube guitarists that I frequently see and quickly dismiss. You know the type; some seventeen-year-old playing a note-for-note arrangement of the Mario Brothers theme on an acoustic guitar, generally heavily laden with open-tuned harmonics and plenty of percussive guitar slaps and whacks. Don’t get me wrong, by the time these online mini-sensations get all the way to my little attention span all the hacks and slackers have been long weeded out. I will readily admit they are all well-rehearsed and extremely skilled musicians, but I rarely discern much talent among them. Rarely enough to get me even to the end of whatever video is making them nearly famous.
But there was something about this Daniel Champagne guy that got me to the end of his video and then some. Sure there were lots of thwacks and finger-drumming, and even some fingernail scratching on the guitar top that felt like it was a blackboard, but in and around all the fingerstyle pyrotechnics was some creative and melodic songwriting. So I clicked another video and was surprised to hear a soulful-sounding singer-songwriter song with nary a whiff of any fretboard frenetics. And it was pretty darn good too.
That surprised me. Enough to click a couple of tickets into my online cart*. Then I promptly stopped watching Daniel Champagne videos.
When October 22nd, 2022 came around m’lady and I drove into St. John’s early and had a very pricey and fabulous dinner at the Merchant Tavern – which isn’t a tavern – for free, a leftover bonus from m’lady’s staff Christmas party ten months earlier. We were booked in to the fantastic and centrally located Alt Hotel**; again free; this time on m’lady’s hotel.com points.
Juiced up on all this goodness we strolled the quick and pleasant walk to the First Light Centre, a community centre/performance space/low-income housing unit (née “church”) that was hosting the concert. My google directions had us arrive at what proved to be the back door so we found the place completely devoid of life. This was a bit disconcerting but we soon figured things out and made our way inside, where we found a spot a dozen or so pews back from the small makeshift stage.
It was a big room with a domed roof and a three-sided balcony. Between the balcony and the floor I figure the place could hold maybe nine hundred people, though it still looked adequately full with just four hundred in attendance (Daniel later mentioned that this was his largest-ever crowd for a solo performance – including concert tours back home in Australia – which surprised me). In short order someone came out and introduced Mr. Champagne and the thirty-year-old guitar phenom stepped onstage and played his butt off.
I mean the guy hit, strummed, smacked, plunked and scraped every inch of his guitar, and that was just in the first two minutes. By the time the first song – an instrumental – was finished I wondered if his instrument was going to survive the night.
(In fact, Champagne mentioned that he gets asked all the time how many guitars he goes through in a tour. Turns out he’s been playing the same custom Australian-built instrument for, what, did he say eight years? Astonishing. I’m sure he’s the poster child for that guitar company. Remember those Samsonite ads where they would give a piece of luggage to a gorilla and have him toss it around the cage? Daniel Champagne is that to guitars.)
After a bunch of retuning he launched into his second song, which featured that soulful singer-songwriter-y singing voice I had heard in one of the videos. It was an interesting vocal style where every line started strong and clear before fading into a soulful inaudibleness, a trick that must have helped him pick up many a Shiela around a bush-telly. Line after line he did this. Like, pretty cool sound I suppose but you end up missing half the story to the mumble-fade.
Then a bunch more retuning and talking (dude did a lot of talking) and another guitar wizardry offering, then tune tune tune talk talk talk and more “I was driving down the road when you want da mawmer say dee ray a bumble…You told me I was going to rumble mumble crumble dumble stumble doo ree me moo…” I soon gave up straining to understand.
(Would it be unkind to point out that literally every second song he played was in standard tuning? Unkind, I say, for that would imply that Daniel specifically ordered the songs so that he could eat up a third of the show retuning his guitar after every song. I’ll let you decide. But he did.)
I guess I was about four or five songs in when I started seriously wishing I had watched enough videos to have gotten bored of Daniel Champagne before I had sprung for tickets; I figured it wouldn’t have taken too many vids. Heck, there was one song where the dude stood frozen in a pose with his eyes squeezed shut for a solid minute before delivering the final chord. I mean, yeesh! I couldn’t help but to roll my eyes.
But then he played a song that justified everything and brought me right back to the edge of my seat. It was another instrumental, this one written as a tribute to Champagne’s long-time guitar teacher. I believe it was in an open tuning and from the outset he pulled off a trick (literally) that had me riveted. He started with his capo on the 2nd fret and after a strummy hammer-pull and a couple of rhythmic thwacks he removed the capo – thereby sounding an open chord a full-tone below his tonic (AKA the bVII) – before slamming the capo back on at the 5th fret, causing a droney hammer-on chord up a step-and-a-half from the root (or the bIII, if you will). During the entire intro he went back and forth moving the capo between the 2nd and 5th frets and I melted inside***. The next part of the song was a really cool hammer-pull melody thing that was offset by a creative harmony-morphing bassline. I’m telling you, that one song saved the concert for me.
M’lady too. As soon as the last note was struck (after not too long of a dramatic pause this time) she uttered the only sound she made during the entire show, which was: “Cooooool…”
So despite the rest of the show bouncing between boring instrumental amazement and stale soul-stirring vocals we were both jolted into a state of pleased-to-be-there for the remaining hour, even if we were a bit slow to join the standing ovation that came after Daniel’s final bow.
By 9:30 we were back out on the streets so we decided to check out a bar a musician friend of mine told me he plays sessions at on most Saturday nights, a place called Peter Easton’s. I kept us amused during our walk by keeping up a constant impersonation of Daniel Champagne’s vocal style. Which was pretty easy; you only have to make up half the words.
Peter Easton’s was a dive on par with some of my favourite dives ever, with great staff behind a wide bar that takes up the bulk of the front half of the establishment. The back half is a cozy den with a dozen small tables, couches, lamps, bookcases lining the walls, and a small, empty stage in the corner that was being completely shunned by the half-dozen musicians taking part in the session.
For those not familiar, in Newfoundland a “session” is when a group of musicians sits around a table or two in a pub playing whatever Irish-folky-jigs and/or reels they can think of. To say it’s informal is an understatement, with players joining in and sitting out at random. The tiny smatterings of applause that sometimes follow the songs are utterly ignored by the players as they lean in to their pints and chat obliviously amongst themselves until one of them starts into another tune.
Oh, and get this: a Jack & Coke at that bar in the front room cost a measly $4.25. I’m pretty sure the first time I ever walked into a bar (when I was fourteen) a Jack & Coke cost more than that. Somehow m’lady and I still managed to spend a surprising amount of money.
By the time we somehow pulled ourselves up and out of the vortex-like couch the musicians had swelled to a dozen or more. They were still strumming and plucking away as we made our way to the door. Outside, we were just a slow weave from the Alt Hotel where I raised the curtains and sat in my swivel chair enjoying a nightcap and lording over the fearful minions below.
*Oh, how times have changed since the days of camping out for tickets! I used to do it all the time, showing up hours and hours before tickets went onsale. I believe my longest ticket line was twenty-eight hours. It’s curious that I don’t have more empathy for the people that line up outside of Best Buy and Future Shop in anticipation of Black Friday, but I don’t.
**This was our first time staying at the Alt Hotel and I hope to hell it won’t be our last. I loved everything about the place! First of all, there’s a free pool table in their lobby, and a nice one at that. The staff is super-duper-friendly and our room was delicious. I so, so loved the touch-sensitive buttons built into the wall that controlled everything from the lighting and heating to the automatic roll-down blackout curtains, almost as much as I loved the swivel chair with the attached swivelling side table. All taken together it made me feel I was in some swank ’60’s Hollywood apartment, though when I sat in the swivel chair gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows and had m’lady press the button to make the curtains fall I felt 100% like a super-villain.
I’ve got to get me one of those chairs.
***The capo trick reminded me of the enigmatic first three seconds of Daredevil from The Tragically Hip’s Day for Night album. I just listened to see if a similar capo maneuver was indeed what was happening at the opening of the track but no, that’s not it. But it’s close.
Todd Man Out 