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On August 27th, 1999 I found myself at the Ottawa Folk Festival way back when it was still a folk festival (as the curmudgeons out there might say) and when it was way out in the outskirts of the city at Britannia Beach. I was there because I had a free pass and I had a free pass because I was playing at the festival with Ottawa wunderkind Jane Radmore. And even though we only played one, single song in between two of the mainstage acts we were given passes for the entire festival.
I don’t recall if Jane and I played on this night or the next night but either way I see I’ve already verbosified all about it in my August 28th missive (news flash: I write these things in somewhat random, non-chronological order) so I shan’t repeat myself here, except to say that I always enjoyed playing with Jane; she was an excellent singer and songwriter who was wise beyond her years, she was a solid rhythm guitarist, she was very amicable to musical suggestions and comments, and she was fun to hang out with. And we ended up crafting a bunch of her songs into some pretty solid material. One of which – about a prostitute in Vancouver – we played on this day. Or the next.
It just occurs to me that I could easily leverage Jane into a segue to one of the acts I definitely did see at the festival this day: Way back when my friend Lynn Saxberg did a story on Jane for the Ottawa Citizen that took up much of the front page of the entertainment section. The article mentioned that I had been Jane’s guitar teacher and had built a band around her. Well, my future boss Arthur read that very same article and asked himself, “Why isn’t that guy teaching for me at the Ottawa Folklore Centre?” and a few weeks later I was. I ended up spending oh, I don’t know, somewhere around fifteen years teaching down in the basement of the OFC, the same place where Juno Award winner Lynn Miles used to teach.
Yes, the very same Lynn Miles who I saw at the folk fest on this night. Bam, segue -> ridden. But for a further segue, Lynn would sometimes draw on other OFC teachers for her albums, including fiddler James Stevens. I don’t recall if any of my colleagues were actually on stage with her for this set, but then it was a long time ago.
The other band on the bill was Canada’s biggest folk supergroup at the time: Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, which consists of Tom Wilson (frontman for Junkhouse and eventual frontman for LeE HARVeY OsMOND), Stephen Fearing (of Stephen Fearing), and Colin Linden (who has played with tons of folk legends from Cockburn to Dylan and well beyond). This was back when the trio+ existed solely as a tribute to the great Willie P. Bennett (1951-2008), before they started adding some of their own compositions to their sets. Back then their music was 100% Willie, which meant very little to me. If I knew Willie P. Bennett at all beck then it would’ve been just because of his role as sideman to Fred Eaglesmith, which I knew because Eaglesmith’s tour poster hung permanently on the wall of the Ottawa Folklore Centre where I (and Lynn Miles, and James Stephens) worked.
Alanis Morissette used to take lessons there too, but that was before my time. And she didn’t play at the folk festival either, so there’s no need to mention her here. Heck, back in 1999 she wasn’t even a teen pop star yet, let alone an international musical juggernaut. Why did I even bring her up?
Oh yeah: the OFC. What a cool place that was. Back in the day they used to set up a booth at the folk festival every year selling records and tapes and hiring musicians (usually teachers like me) to play. See, I brought it all back home, nice and tidy.
Todd Man Out 