First off, Oliver shows up.
If you don\'t know who Oliver Steck is, I\'ll tell you: He\'s an amazing and versatile multi-instrumentalist who\'s served as a side-axe to literally innumerable singer/songwriters, guitar-pickers, insane folk ensembles, theatre troupes, mariachi bands, and who-knows-what-else. He\'s been travelling North America for twelve years or so, appearing out of nowhere, busting out his accordion, his harmonica, or his trumpet to add a flourish, take a solo, or toss a musical curveball. He works on a moment\'s-notice basis, learning by ear on the fly, improvising radio-announcer banter between songs, riffing on any old chestnut that comes to mind: disco tunes, swing tunes, polkas, beer commercials, incidental music from the evening news. Also, he tapdances--poorly.
In the late 80\'s and early 90\'s, Oliver and I used to perform in Chicago coffeehouses and clubs, for nothing or for a meager tip jar, billed simply as \"Paul & Oliver.\" Our performances together have become less frequent since I moved to Urbana and he hit the road semi-permanently, which is unfortunate because it\'s such a thrill playing with him--a thrill not unlike bungee jumping: It\'s worth mentioning that in all the years I\'ve played with him, I\'ve almost never shown him a chord chart or sheet music, and we\'ve had, I think, two rehearsals, TOTAL. Still, he\'s always fallen right in with everything I\'ve ever written on the first listen. Oliver and I have almost always landed on our feet under these self-imposed geurilla-improvisational stage conditions--and whenever we didn\'t, we\'ve enjoyed it, as a more of a roller coaster ride than a train-wreck.
So, anyhow, my seven o\'clock Folk Alliance showcase in Room 3020 at the Hyatt Funeral Parlor--sorry...HOTEL--suddenly stops looking so grim. I\'m singing \"Hallelujah, I\'m a Bum!\", driving off the music industry moguls, almost on purpose, sending them running off into the hallway, to the next room, to supper--ANYWHERE to get away from that kiss of death: Political Folk Music.
Just as I\'ve cleared the room completely (except for one bewildered-looking hipster from Japan with a spiky haircut, an oxblood leather jacket, and old-school 70\'s-style running shoes), in leaps Oliver. He\'s got his accordion in a plastic sack reinforced with duct tape. He\'s wearing the service station jacket he picked up in Mississippi, when he was stranded and had to get a job working on cars. The nametag used to say BOB, but that\'s scratched out and replaced, in ball-point pen, with ABBIE. He\'s singing along and he barely knows the words. He doesn\'t know that I\'ve added some new choruses. Whether my guitar will be in tune with his accordion is anybody\'s guess. Half the songs I\'m playing, he\'s just plain never even heard before.
The act before us had been well-mannered, well-rehearsed. They made polite dinner-party-style small-talk about how they met, where they\'re from, how long they\'ve been married. They had new clothes. The guitarist had brand-new strings on his brand-new guitar. The singer had a shiny-bright up-the-middle warbling Nashville soprano--calm and lovely, radio-friendly.
Oliver and I are, by contrast, unshaven, unkempt, sloppy, frequently offensive, out-of-tune, off-the-cuff, and obviously HAVING THE BEST NIGHT OF OUR LIVES! The music business moguls don\'t want to hear it or watch us pull it off. Oliver and I could care less.
Our slot is the last one before the dinner break, so we get to blow out the candles and close the room down after the set. We make it a point to spend a short while, at least, on the 30th floor balcony, and we definitely make it a point to polish off the complimentary bottle of chardonnay that\'s on the counter and take in the city lights from 300 hundred feet up. Great view. Beautiful city. A toast to real music-making. Let\'s go join the Army.
The Flying Folk Army, that is.
My host and tour guide from the Vancouver Indy Media Center had tipped me off about the Flying Folk Army earlier this afternoon: An eight piece band of activists, she said. Guitars, fiddles, banjo, bohran. Lots of voices. They do updates of old songs from the Little Red Songbook, she said.
What a coincidence, I said, so do I. Do they do \"Pie in the Sky?\"
Oh yeah, she told me, and they\'ve written a batch of new verses to \"The Popular Wobbly,\" to the tune of \"Wild, Simply, Wild Over Me.\"
I nodded in recognition and thought, what could be more perfecto?
So, after an elevator ride crowded in with music biz idioterati and a lobby crowded with more of the same, Oliver and I grab a cab and take the short ride from the Hyatt to 339 Pender Street. That\'s the home of Mrs. T\'s, an run-down but cozy underground cabaret next to what looks to be a peep-show joint. The poster has the evening billed as a V-day Cabaret, sliding scale admission, two dollars and up. We pile in to the club with our gear, and the guy at the door asks us if we\'re on the bill. \"Not yet,\" we tell him, \"but we want to be. Who do we talk to?\"
Two minutes flat, and we\'re introduced to the em-cee committee, who are laobring over the set-list. What kind of stuff do we do? They want to know. So I tell them.
\"Political folk tunes?\" they say, \"You two were sent to us by God! You\'re on at 10:35.\"
It turns out that the organizers are in need of a little help with the P. A. setup, so Oliver and I hop to the task. We\'re scrounging around for a live power outlet. Oliver\'s screwing together random pieces to jimmy up a fourth microphone stand. I\'m running speaker cable all around and enlisting members of the crowd to help me steady a speaker stand that\'s ready to topple over--Just like home, in other words. The start of the show is half-an-hour behind schedule. The place is getting jam-packed. We\'re doing a soundcheck and goading the audience at the same time. The em-cee is decked out in whiteface makeup, in some silky strapless confection, with enormously outsized fake eyelashes--RED fake eyelashes. We tell her the tech set-up is ready to roll.
The first half of the show is genuine cabaret. Outlandish outfits and crazy crowd participation numbers. Bawdy, gender-bending song-and-dance routines. A piece against gentrification in solidarity with the junkies and subsistence-income communities on Hastings Street. Heartwrenching stories of rough trade and tough living from gay youth in Lotos Land. A movingly undestated and wickedly ironic poem on the bountious luxury of having a bed WITH A PILLOW.
Next comes the Vancouver squad of the Radical Cheerleaders. They open with an adapted version of the classic \"Stomp! Smash the State\" cheer, and then segue into the quintessential Canadian \"T & A All the Way\" routine, their performance equal parts table dance bump-and-grind and pep rally rah-rah moves. Exquisite.
--And dig the rad cheerleader costumes! Nipple rings under yellow mesh top with jai-alai short shorts and kneesocks for her; Full-length authentic kimonos for him; Bustiers and schoolgirl skirts with fishnets and garters for him AND her: Political direct action has never been this kind of sexy.
The likes of which, of course, are a pretty tough act to follow; but when our turn comes, Oliver and I are pretty sure we\'ll have some material that\'s going to go over well. We bust out with a cover of the Prince Myshkins \"Golden Slippers,\" followed by my new version of \"Radical Cheerleader,\" to the tune of \"Union Maid\"--and they GET it! The whole crowd is singing \"Stuff your crotch with a tube sock, copper, I\'m running with the Bla-ack Bloc,\" right along with us. We teach them the FrankenFood Toxology, and we get four part harmonies on the \"A-men\" endings. Couples of every shape, size, and gender-pairing are waltzing--WALTZING, mind you--to \"Hallelujah, I\'m a Bum.\" And when we close with the \"Wal-Mart Anthem,\" the whole club is standing at attention with their hands over their hearts.
Folking amazing. A serious folking musical dream come true.
And then it\'s time for the Flying Folk Army. The dancefloor is immediately crammed shoulder-to-shoulder when they break into \"Roundup Ready,\" a hoe-down square-dance two-step about (you guessed it:) Monsanto. They do \"Popular Wobbly\" as a lightning-fast swing number with everybody joining in on the choruses. They\'ve updated \"Casey Jones\" to be about sexual inequalities and the division of labor--She wants to be...an engineer. Get it?
Their banjo player has a great tenor voice. The fiddlers are right on the money. The guitar player with the eye-patch is no mean picker. They do multi-part vocal harmonies with tight stops and counterpoint. They include a short piece as a string trio, with the bassist rosining up the bow and filling in as a makeshift cellist. It\'s obvious that the Flying Folk Army loves playing together, and that their audience is crazy about them--not as superstarts, either, but as a part of the fabric of the community.
This anti-superstar stance seems particularly important: Because, especially in such a big city, where addiction runs rampant and living on the margins is such tough work, live music and performance are sorely needed in order to form human interconnections and to act as an antidote to alienation. The passive consumerism of art (including that of live music) goes hand in hand with the cult of the superstar, and the two do nothing if not alienate people further and further: from their own creativity; from the conversations they could be having through an interactive performance; from their own desires, even. I\'m convinced that the V-Day Cabaret and the Flying Folk Ensemble are entirely aware of this dynamic, and that they are acting to fill exactly this needed role--as engagers, initiators, and decisively NOT star performers--so as to be a kind of social glue for the eclectic activist population of East Van.
That\'s the news from the closing night of the Folk Alliance music conference and festival in Vancouver, BC, from your roving songster and Urbana IMC\'sta! Tomorrow, I head back down across the border, where I\'ll be spending the night at the famous Green Tortoise youth hostel in Seattle, just blocks from where friends of mine were arrested during the N30 protests. I\'ll be sure to post with more news from the Northwest at that time.
Hasta maņana! |
