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I tell you, there are worse ways to start a bright, sunny September morn than to pour myself a cup of strong coffee and park myself in front of a window overlooking my little arm of the North Atlantic Ocean and pontificate extensively on memories of a Blue Skies weekend that occurred more than two decades before. Heck, the only thing that could be better would be to get woken up from a short sleep in a soggy tent by a parade of screaming children and stumbling sleepy-eyed to the cook shack for an oversized self-poured bucket of proletariat joe and spending the best part of the morning sitting in a lawnchair and procrastinating one workshop after another at the bestest music festival in the land.
Much like I did on Sunday, August 6th, 2000, no doubt. But there’s no reason to leave it to conjecture, I have the program here. Now let’s see…
Well, first off the festival ran from August 5th to the 6th, which would’ve meant showing up as early as possible on the 4th to get a headstart on…well…everything. Finding a good spot to pitch the tent, finding a good spot for your cooler, finding everyone else’s good cooler spots, finding everyone else, finding the best jammers and of course finding the best campfire jams. Keeps a guy busy, I tells ya.
Well now, those two last chores would have been a cinch. For this was the year that I drove to Blue Skies with Chris Bartos, a musical hotshot if ever there was one. Chris and I both taught at the Ottawa Folklore Centre and when Chris expressed a last-minute interest in attending Blues Skies I remember with great clarity our boss Arthur picking up the phone and securing him a last-minute camping pass. I remember it so well because to do so seemed an impossibillium; Blue Skies sells out fast and hard. Sure, Arthur had been hugely connected to the festival for a long, long time but so had a whole bunch of other people. I thought it was essentially impossible to have “pull” at Blue Skies (unless you were Oskar Graf), and here I saw it happen before mine own ears.
“…Chris is the kind of person you want at Blue Skies…” is what he said into the phone, and he was right.
Chris is a great player. Guitar, mandolin, fiddle, piano, ‘cello; jazz, classical, bluegrass, metal…the guy is a local hero on every instrument and in every style, and he is one heck of an improviser. He’s a joy to listen to and great to hang out with. I’ve learned so many important things from him; he’s the guy who got me into both Bach and bluegrass for example, and started me into playing both.
Anyway, he brought with him his brand new and quite beautiful Larrivée guitar (which I believe he had just bought from the Folklore Centre the day before), a violin, and a short-necked 4-string banjo that he played the whole drive up whilst sitting in the passenger seat of my Honda Accord. It was an awesome start to an amazing weekend.
(Chris may remember the weekend starting in a less-awesome way. At some point later that day we were jamming around our campsite – I on my well-worn and heavily-abused Takamine and Chris on his brand-new Larrivée – when Chris asked if I had a lighter. It so happened that I did, so I pulled the lighter out of my pocket and…it pains me to remember this…I tossed it to him. Sure, I could have simply leaned over and handed it to him but no, I went and threw the damn thing. Chris didn’t catch it. Instead, the lighter hit the top of his new guitar [the part most laymen would think of as the “front” of the guitar] a few inches above the soundhole. Of course it left a significant and very noticeable gouge in the malleable spruce. I recall my heart sinking in an instant despite Chris’ quick smile and fast assurances that it was no problem at all.
Ouch. I hadn’t expected such a gutpunch when I set out to write this one. Ouch.}
Ahem. Getting back to the program, I’m guessing Saturday didn’t get started for Chris nor I until the noon-hour Banjos & Mandos workshop, which I suspect we may have attended. I know for a fact that I was at the 1pm Graf Guitar Reunion hosted by the man himself, world-class luthier (and landowner of the Blue Skies site*) Oskar Graf. Anyone at the fest – from mainstage performer to weekend camper – who owned an Oskar Graf guitar brought it down to the main stage and showed it off for a crowd of interested droolers. Mind you, Oskar tends to custom-make guitars specifically for particular musicians – guys like Bobby Baker and Don Ross – so this was no kindergarten show-and-tell. There was some seriously good playing of some seriously nice instruments. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure Don Ross was there playing his 7-string. Bobby Baker definitely was not (I see he was on tour promoting The Hip’s Music @ Work album in Vermont that night, and he would have had his custom Graf acoustic with him because it was specifically built for the very-rare open-C tuning, which Baker uses on their monstrous radio hit Ahead By a Century [capoed at the 2nd fret]).
That probably would have been it for me for the afternoon aside from the huge square dance that happens every afternoon at Blue Skies. Though I never take part I also never miss one as a spectator. It was extra-fun that year with Chris joining the session band onstage.
And then there was the music! Saturday night featured a vocal trio from Rochester called F’loom and an Arkansan quartet called Still on the Hill that the program described as “turbo-powered folkgrass, front porch Ozark funk”. I remember them well and sure, that’s a pretty good description. But get this:
Willie P. Bennett played too. As a matter of fact he played before Still on the Hill, if you can believe that. And in a nod to the recently-formed Blackie and the Rodeo Kings supergroup that was dedicated to playing the music of Willie P. Bennett, one of the Rodeo Kings himself Colin Linden had brought his The Colin Linden Band (which is dedicated to playing the music of Colin Linden) to the fest to close out the night! Oh, it was all so good.
Then came the campfire jams, which were undoubtedly exquisite and will have to remain unimaginable, for this tome is already overtly articulated.
With that in mind let me just say that Sunday (the proposed day in question here, ironically) was the same as Saturday, except the workshops were all different and super-cool, the mainstage performers were people like David Francey, Martha Wainwright, and Rwanda’s mighty Mighty Popo instead of people like Willie P, Still the Hill, F’loom and The Colin Linden Band. And the campfire jams were even better.
I wonder if Chris still has that guitar. And if he does, I wonder if he thinks of me every time he sees that ugly scar above the soundhole. Gawd, I hope not. I hope he thinks of Blue Skies instead.
(I just noticed that Luther Wright & The Wrongs performed on the Friday evening. Funny I had forgotten that because I remember the set so well. They were a Kingston alt-country act who had just released a song-for-song cover album called Rebuild the Wall that reimagined Pink Floyd’s epic concept album The Wall as a hillbilly hoedown. They were fantastic.)
Now would you look at that…it’s lunchtime!
*Blue Skies eventually bought the site from Oskar so the festival now owns its own land, which is pretty darn cool if you ask me.
Todd Man Out 