Posted by On August 31st, 2024 m’lady and I finished up a long day* with our first-ever visit to Bowring Park in St. John’s to attend our first-ever Brokest Fest.
I say it was our first-ever Brokest Fest because I certainly hope it won’t be our last. A looser, more casual, high-quality, and relaxed one-day local music festival would be hard to find, and if I find one I’ll be sure to tell you. It also bears mentioning that while this was our first-ever Brokest Fest, it wasn’t the first-ever Brokest Fest. I believe the free indie all-ages festival started in 2021, and while it had thus far eluded our radar it sure as shan’t any longer.
We got lost trying to find Bowring Park – the meandering streets of St. John’s remain a mystery to me – and ended up parking on a sidestreet on the fringe of the park. This caused a fair amount of unnecessary walking but it also afforded us a nice little self-guided tour of the semi-urban greenspace, and like I say it was our first time so we didn’t mind.
Plus we were way early. Though there were eight bands on the bill** we were only hankerin’ to catch the last two, and we knew we had arrived plenty early enough to see them. The amphitheatre was small and nestled into the edge of the woods but it was easy to find, right next to a picturesque pond with a cascading fountain.
The amphitheatre featured seven or eight rows of concrete benches semi-circling a good-sized covered stage that backed onto a proper concrete building with bathrooms and I believe a canteen or some such thing inside. Behind the seats was the smallest lawn section I’ve ever seen, an angled pitch of grass barely ten feet deep. That said, when we arrived nearly half of the 125 or so people in attendance were up there on the grass.
M’lady and I settled into a concrete bench three rows up dead centre just as the guy who was running the festival was introducing the next act. I immediately liked his laid-back style and his laissez-faire attitude. “Hey, someone just came up and handed me a couple of tickets to the Avalon Raceway,” he announced in a voice so deadpan you’d think he was reading the phone book. “Does anybody want them?”
“I do!” shouted a guy sitting to my left.
“Okay,” the MC replied with the fanfare of a statue. “Come up here and get them.
“We don’t do any muss or fuss around here,” the host continued, “You want something, you can have it.
“But don’t forget to buy a hot dog,” he added, pointing to a guy manning a barbecue up in the back corner of the lawn. The hot dog shoutout was the guy’s biggest pitch of the day, and he kept making it. I came to assume that the hot dog sales were the only revenue source of the free fest.
But the dude was similarly animated when he introduced the bands. The first one we heard him introduce was a trio called Potatobug, a band that hadn’t played much (or at all? Was this a reunion gig?) since being a St. John’s staple back in the 1990’s.
And no wonder…if Potatobug was anything, they were 1990’s.
After their first three songs I was convinced they were Greta Van Fleeting on Nirvana in a pretty big way – I mean those first few songs were essentially lost Nirvana B-sides – but then they played one that was unquestionably in the style of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Now don’t get me wrong, Potatobug wasn’t copying anyone’s songs or ripping off chord progressions or anything, but they were so good at sounding like their influences on a song-to-song basis that when their set ended I suggested to m’lady that the band should’ve been called Rage Against the Pearl Nirvana Peppers. In a good way.
(An interesting sidenote: the guitarist/singer of Potatobug [who was really good] is one Ritche Perez. When Ritche grew up he was best friends with comedian Mark Critch and as a result he eventually found himself portrayed on television every week on the CBC program Son of a Critch. Between songs Ritche mentioned all this and gave a shout-out to the young man that plays him on the program – Mark Rivera – who happened to be in attendance.)
Up next was Kelly McMichael (after another easygoing offhand informal introduction). I was really impressed when we saw her band open up for The Burning Hell a few years before (I was even more impressed to discover that Kelly was also playing bass for the headlining act) and I was looking forward to seeing her again.
The set was pre-promoting her soon-to-be-released album – the group’s second – and it was drop-dead amazing. If Potatobug sounded like Nirvana then I’ll say Kelly McMichael and her band sounded like Fleetwood Mac. Like, do you ever come away from an indie act thinking they sorta sounded like Fleetwood Mac? No, you don’t. Never.
But they didn’t always sound like Fleetwood Mac and even when they did it was only a little. But wow, Kelly and her fellow musicians sure must practise a lot. Tight harmonies over clever, complicated arrangements and all of it presented with a relaxed ease that exuded confidence without a trace of arrogance. Just a great pile of music and if they come anywhere near to where you’re at then you should go to see them.
After another monotone hot dog plea from the host I finally broke down and had one as we were waiting for Big Space to start (it was only $3 and quite delicious). Now, if you read these things closely then you’ve noticed that I am a pretty big fan of Big Space, Newfoundland’s hyper-talented instrumental jamrockjazz trio that somehow lands precisely midway between nero and Sisters Euclid with a slight peppering of Bill Frisell on top. And if you haven’t, well now you know.
Big Space is all of these things and more. To me they always require multiple adjectives and I wear out my thesaurus trying to describe them without repeating myself. A groove/vibe-a-thon wrapped up in machine-gun bursts of sonic brilliance, these guys consistently deliver the goods and they did again during their headlining slot at Brokest Fest.
That said, I’m not sure Big Space quite managed to hit their stride, despite performing for easily the biggest crowd I’ve seen them play to. The festival was running a little bit behind schedule so perhaps the band was feeling pressed for time. They didn’t start with an open improv – which they always do – and I doubt if they got in as much as a half-hour of music before succumbing to the crowd’s enthusiastic call for an encore, but it was all very good. Great even, but I left the show very much looking forward to seeing them in a bar again.
I also left the show already looking forward to next year’s Brokest Fest. This tiny-festival-that-runs-on-hot-dogs is certainly on my radar now. I don’t care who’s playing, I’ll be going for the whole thing next time. Especially after seeing the MC walk through the crowd handing out bags of chips during Big Space’s set. Now that got me.
Long live Brokest Fest. Buy a hot dog.
*Much, much earlier in the day m’lady and I had risen at the crack of dawn and endured the notably arduous task of hosting a yard sale before driving into Town to attend a visual extravaganza letdown called Beyond Van Gogh at the St. John’s Convention Centre (which you can read about here if you like reading overtly negative things about Beyond Van Gogh). So the day was already brimming before we even set foot in Bowring Park.
**Ian MacDonald, Andrew Waterman, Kid Gruesome, Swimming, MC Snax, and the three bands we saw: Potatobug, Kelly McMichael, and Big Space.
Todd Man Out 