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For me and many of my extended crew of Ottawa music-loving chums July 13th, 2005 was far-and-away the most highly anticipated day of that summer’s Ottawa Bluesfest, for this was the day that the Big Summer Classic was scheduled to happen. A festival within a festival, BSC was a travelling cluster of some of the hottest jambands of the day that was appearing across North America that summer, and we were all super-excited that the Ottawa Bluesfest had picked it up for inclusion in their fest.
Playful prog-jammers Umphrey’s McGee had been bumped to an opening slot in favour of a second Xavier Rudd appearance at the festival, a double-booking that I suspect was inspired by the fact that Xavier had sold a mind-rattling 2,000 cd’s at the merch tent following his Bluesfest performance the previous year. I ended up cancelling a student so I could try to get down there on time and failed, arriving partway through UM’s severely truncated forty-minute set. And though the set was short on time it was tall on talent, as the well-rehearsed ensemble shredded through a handful of tunes rife with meticulous musical calisthenics and sharp turns that were relentlessly bang-on and endlessly entertaining.
After their tiny set I sauntered over to the Black Sheep stage to get ready for Keller Williams and was met with one of those magical festival moments, the type where I accidentally came face-to-face with a musical force that pummelled my senses so hard that I have a hard time remembering it.
Looking through my notes from this evening I was shocked to discover that this was in fact the first time I saw or heard of C. R. Avery (so early that I wasn’t even calling him “Cravery” yet; that would begin when I met him at the actual Black Sheep bar in Wakefield, Quebec). I’ve mistakenly labelled at least two other performance as “the first time I saw or heard of C. R. Avery…” but according to my notes this was definitely it. So early on was this exposure that I had yet to catch Cravery’s obvious Tom Waits emulation; a fact that surprises me. So does the comparisons I made that day. To wit:
“I inadvertently caught the last few songs of someone I had zero knowledge of and I instantly became a fan. C. R. Avery was jumping up and down like a sweat-drenched lunatic that just broke out of a straightjacket. He was rapping and beatboxing with three aggressive musicians behind him; it sounded like the Red Hot Chili Peppers meets Nirvana and the lyrics were awesome. Then he sat down at the piano and played a beautiful ballad all alone before leaving the stage. Just wonderful music, and the range of style between the tunes I caught couldn’t have been greater.”
With my mind still reeling at the shocking greatness of this hitherto unknown entity, jamband solo acoustic darling Keller Williams stepped onstage and began his set. Keller dangled an acoustic guitar around his neck, supplemented by an electric guitar and a bass rigged up on stands waiting to be played and a myriad of little percussive toys, and funnelled it all through one of those little revolutionary magic green looping pedals that is responsible for so many out-of-work musicians these days, not to mention the rapid dumbing-down of harmonic motion in recent live music. The end result was a one-man band that built steady, unchanging grooves over endless two-chord vamps. Being unfamiliar with KW’s music and being fairly hopelessly drunk I can’t comment specifically on his setlist, but the crowd kept moving and everybody around me seemed suitably impressed.
And then the rains came.
The rain had been threatening to fall all day, and when it finally came it came big. It wasn’t quite apocalyptical, but I did consider finding out what a cubit was.
Luckily, my beauty yellow pass allowed me to immediately hop up on the stage when the rain started and I ended up back in the trailer with Keller as he packed up his gear. I asked if I could interview him for my daily review and he said I should call his publicist, which was effectively him saying “No.” Eventually the power went out and I shined a flashlight for him while he finished packing up. Then we sat silently in the dark together for about twenty minutes and believe it or not the guy simply wouldn’t talk to me. He would chit chat a bit but anything, and I mean anything like “How was the border crossing Keller?” or “Nice guitar man, how long have you had it?” and he simply wouldn’t answer me. It’s not like he would avoid or deflect the question, he just acted like I hadn’t said anything at all. I was pretty surprised.
By this time all the festival doozers had battened down the hatches to keep the stages from floating away and it became clear that the Big Summer Classic itself had met the ultimate abbreviation. Soon Keller was gone and with nobody to not talk to I shrugged my shoulders and stepped into the pummelling rain. Riding my bike through the deluge I soon ended up down on Rideau Street at Maverick’s bar where I danced myself nearly dry along with a phalanx of soggy friends at the Grand Theft Bus/Burt Neilson Band afterparty. And while the Bus boys rocked the house, by the time they finished their set I was plenty drunk enough to bail on the Burty’s and get my moist self home.
Todd Man Out 