070403 Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals/Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Ottawa, ON

You know what kind of freaks me out?  Okay, I’ll tell you what kind of freaks me out.  Time.  Time freaks me out.  Most particularly my perception of time.  For something so rigid and so measurable time sure does stretch and bend an awful lot.  In fact, I think time is the most pervasive illusion that we all pretend to believe in.  Clocks are essentially flying reindeer.  The days are long but the years are short.  Is there anything truer than that?

Here’s the weirdest bit: it occurs to me that the length of time I’ve been alive feels the same now as it always has.  That is to say: when I was eight years old and I reflected back on my life it felt like a long time, forever even.  I still feel the same today.  When I look back on this life of mine its entirety feels like it has taken forever; exactly as it felt forty-four years ago. 

Isn’t that weird?

Now here’s the thing: When I ponder on today’s ticket story – which was seeing Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals (and I think Blackie and the Rodeo Kings and maaayyybe but probably not k-os*) at the Ottawa Bluesfest on July 4th, 2003 – it seems like just another fun day at Ottawa’s newest awesome festival; certainly nothing really notable.  Well, okay, Ben Harper was great (of course) and I’m sure I had a pretty great time all ‘round, but it’s not like I was seeing Jimi Hendrix or The Doors or anything.

But now here’s the thing: As I sit here writing in 2022, if I had the ear of a youngster of, say, eighteen years old and told them I saw Ben Harper way back in 2003, well, that would be the same as telling an eighteen-year-old me that that I saw a concert back in…okay, math time…lessee…right around the mid-’60’s.  Jeebus!  That was back when Coltrane was still touring!  Miles Davis!  The Beatles.  The Beatles!  I can’t imagine meeting someone back then – in the days when I was just starting to play the guitar – and having them tell me that they went to a music festival nineteen years earlier and bands like The Hollies, Otis Redding, CCR, and Sid Barrett-era Pink Floyd were on the bill.  I would think the guy was a musical relic, that his memories should be preserved in gelatinous jars.

And then if he replied, “Hmmm, I don’t actually remember if I caught Moby Grape’s set or not…” I would’ve thunk him crazy.  “But I do I remember a few snippets of The Who…”, well, I would’ve thought these wonders might just have been wasted on the guy…

So when I tell this mythical hypothetical youngster that I actually do remember bits and in some cases entire swaths of the Ben Harper set he will surely look at me with those very same wondrous judgements furled into his young brow.  Of course you remember the set (they would be thinking), much like young me would be thinking if you told me you remembered bits and pieces of Janis Joplin’s set.   

“But this was like the fifth of the eight or nine times I’ve seen Ben Harper,” I would try to explain, “…going back to my first time in ’97.  I think that was the Montreal show…”

“Woah,” eighteen-year-old me would be thinking.  “That takes you back to the era of Buddy Holly and skinny Elvis.”

Which is pretty crazy when you think about it.  Or when I do, anyway.  Thinking back to my first concert, it was as far away from me now as Charlie Parker concerts were to teenaged me.  We’re talking the days of Doris Day and Count Basie.  My first concert?  Loverboy.  No Frank Sinatra, but time-wise they might as well have been.

But it sure doesn’t feel that way, you know?

I could go on about this forever (haven’t I already?) but I’ve spent enough time on this one already.  The seconds tick by and just like that there goes the day, soon to be lost to memory like it didn’t even happen.  Sometimes it feels like it’s impossible to waste so much time – if any at all – but then suddenly out of the blue it’s time to make dinner.

And here I am out of thyme.

*I’m confident enough about Blackie and the Rodeo Kings that I’m going to count it as a “yes”, but with regards to k-os; I know for sure I’ve seen him on the Bluesfest main stage but I suspect that was another time altogether.