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Jackie Leven · Archivdatum
OUR MAN IN MANITOBA
‘heart like a fading tattoo The young men get merry The soldiers get buried And I’m still thinking of you’ - these lines from a lovely song called ‘Another September’ by a mixed race band, including native Canadians, called Eagle and Hawk who I saw recently at a festival called Great Woods in Manitoba, Canada. I was fearful about going to this festival as I was just recovering from swine flu, and although it was gone I still felt weak and not right about such a long journey, jet lag and attendant festival rigours, such as being good on stage, being polite and watching lots of Canadian television. The doctor asked me to describe my symptoms when I had swine flu. ‘Uncontrollable convulsions followed by drenching sweat, acute nausea and vomiting’ I said. ‘He stroked his chin – ‘Hmmm – are you sure you just haven’t been listening to a lot of Justin Timberlake?’ My journey to Canada started with an early morning trip to Terminal 3, Heathrow, London. Those of you who know this location at this time of year will by now be experiencing ‘uncontrollable convulsions followed by drenching sweat’ etc....I checked in and then noticed that there was a new bar/restaurant on this side of the terminal - as opposed to airside. Airside, every food/drink outlet is a disgraceful hysterical scrum of dehumanised hideousity being served by zombie style Estonian teenagers. This new bar/restaurant was called Three Bells and it looked surprisingly quiet and cheerful. I wandered in and sat at the bar waiting to be served. Fifteen minutes passed, giving me lots of time to look at the menu which was all the usual International Traveller crap, while the staff, all young and hip, had a conference at one end of the bar which I could tell was about serving procedure. By this time the place had pretty much filled up but nobody was getting anything until the conference was over. Grumpy old man began to overtake me – why could they not have had this pep talk earlier on, before people actually wanted stuff, like service? – grumble grumble: this is what makes people passive/aggressive – all they had to do was say ‘sorry sir, won’t be a minute’, but we just didn’t exist – yet. Luckily two cockroaches appeared on the bar, a big one and a much littler one. I noticed that I had assumed that cockroaches didn’t look after their young and show them the ropes – they are just born and then it ’s ‘fuck off and sort it out yourself’ (maybe someone can enlighten me in this regard), but lo – here was an older cockroach clearly saying ‘and this here is a tomato sauce bottle: they tend not to get wiped down properly after use, just a meaningless cursory wipe, so there’s always a good chance of a big blob of red on the side – careful with this shit – it’s very acidic, NOBODY should eat it really, and if you get too much on your legs you won’t be able to run like bloody fuck if a customer sees you and gives chase – don’t worry about the staff – they can’t even see big things like customers, so you’re pretty safe, which is why we’re out here this morning’. With the cockroaches still tearing around the sauce bottles in front of me, a young bastard male sauntered over to me, completely failed to spot them and asked ‘Do you want food?’ I said yes please – he said ‘we don’t serve food at the bar – you’ll have to go and sit at a table’. ‘Well shouldn’t you have a sign that makes that clear and obvious? – I’ve been sitting here for nothing for nearly twenty minutes already and I’ve got a flight to catch’. ‘I’m telling you now sir’. ‘Well, can I have a drink please?’ ‘Are you having that with a meal, because if you are, you have to order it with your meal’. ‘No, I no longer have time for a meal’ I lied, ‘so just a sparkling mineral water with no ice please’. Gives me a look that says ‘fuckin liar’ and gets me a drink with ice which nearly kills the wee cockroach as he puts it down, not that HE notices this, then wanders away. ‘Excuse me, can I pay for this now please, so that I don’t have to get your attention again’. ‘Guy gives me a look as if I’ve just said ‘I’ll bet your mother in law’s sister is not a very nice person who eats cockroaches’ and goes to get the bill... I go over to a table and sit down, there to wait another eight minutes – finally another young geezer comes over and says ‘can you sit over there please sir, this table is for four people’. I say ‘look – I’m happy to move but I was here before all these people so can I be served next please?’ A look of serious distaste – ‘if you move I’ll be with you in a moment’. I move tables, then another young bastard comes and take s all the menus from all of the tables , replacing them with a new menu – nobody questions this, they just start to look at the new menu with rolling eye despair. He gets to my table – ‘Excuse me, why are you changing the menus?’ ‘Breakfast is over – this is the lunch menu’. I knew this already – ‘ahh! – right, but I want the all day breakfast – is that on the new menu?’ Geezer nods suspiciously. I say ‘In that case, as I’ve been here half an hour already, can I PLEASE order the all day breakfast from you right now?’ ‘I’m only changing the menus, not taking orders’. ‘Well, could you stop changing menus just for a moment and give my order to someone who DOES take orders, like maybe that guy there’ I say, pointing out the table-moving maestro. ‘I’m sure he knows you’re here already sir’ he says. ‘So is that a no, you won’t help a customer?’ ‘I HAVE helped you by giving you the new menu’. ‘But that’s not the sort of help I need – what I need is to order food as soon as possible as I’ve already been waiting a ridiculously long time and I’m running OUT of time’. Now he really pisses me off: ‘can I ask, where did you got that drink sir?’ he queries, eyeing my iced water. ‘It was on the table already – waste not want not’. He goes away and pointedly keeps on changing the menus, and at the last possible moment before disappearing to the ‘Previous Menu Station’ stops to murmur about me to maestro. Maestro doesn’t look at me, just nods at what he’s hearing, then after a minute more clicking away at the till, comes over and says ‘yes sir, can I take your order?’ All around me folks are seething because I’m BEING SERVED! Breakfast arrives and is horrible – I’ll spare you the details. I go to pay at the till: ‘everything all right sir’ asks maestro. ‘I’m an easygoing kind of a customer’ I tell him, ‘but I’m really hungry and still didn’t finish my food – I should have gone to O’ Neill’s airside’. ‘O’ Neill’s is no longer there sir’ he replies: it’s just insolence, pure and simple. ‘Well, whatever it’s called now, it’ll be better than this, unless of course it’s another branch of Three Bells’. He says nothing, I still tip £2 and he says have a nice day. I REACH MANITOBA 12 hours later, with two nerve wracking late flights via Toronto, I arrive at Winnipeg airport. A lovely fella who is about my age (close to death) called Gregg is there to greet me and drive me to Beausejour. I don’t know where the hell Beausejour is, and am afraid that Gregg is about to say ‘oh it’s only five hours drive away – it would be four hours but the freeway’s been torn up and there is a lot of elk around so we have to drive slowly’. Instead it turns out it’s only 40 minutes away and we have an affable bonding session in Gregg’s large black pick-up truck, listening to a dedicated blues station on the radio. In my day to day life I don’t care if I never hear Boz Scaggs and Foghat again as long as I live, but in the context of this journey and other bluesy songs being played, it all sounds great and I begin to worry that I’m already quarter Canadian. Beausejour turns out to be a classic north American one street town – as Gregg puts it ‘don’t sneeze or you’ll miss it’ and he laughs about how young bands that he has brought to Great Woods festival are aghast when they realise there is absolutely nothing to do in the town, there’s not even a bar as such – ‘I always suggest to them they might like to think or write songs – they’re never happy about this’...I’m staying at the Superior Inn motel which is on a crossroads at the end of town, next to a funeral parlour and crematorium called, I kid you not, Sobering. A couple of days later I’m having dinner in a Chinese restaurant in town called Lee’s (there’s also one called Fanny’s) and I get talking to an old timer at the next table. I’d seen this dusty gnarled old bloke being helped into a pick-up truck earlier that day: he was wearing special built up boots on twisted feet, an old blue boiler suit and a baseball style cap that said on it ‘Yellowknife For Bison Meat’. Another man who was probably his son displayed a huge amount of patience as the old lad slowly climbed up two different sizes of crate, put there for this purpose, and into the cab. I tell him where I’m from and he asks with interest ‘the REAL Scotland?’ I say yes and tell him where I’m staying, adding ‘next to Sobering’. He cackles with happiness when I tell him this and says ‘a man goes into Sobering and says ‘I need to bury my wife and sister. The receptionist asks ‘is that one coffin or two?’. ‘Har har har har har harrrrr!!!’ So it’s THAT kind of a town.... The first morning that I wake up in the Superior Inn (I’m here for five days) I feel extremely terrible with jet lag plus end of swine flu weakness, so I just put on the telly for a while and lie there gawping at it. ‘Martha’, the television show of Martha Stewart, the American homes/decor/food etc guru who has recently got out of prison for tax fraud is on. A Chinese woman cook is making something with couscous and sultanas while Stewart glumly looks on – her only contribution is to re-iterate parts of the points the Chinese woman is making. Chinese woman: ‘Here I’m using half a cup of plump and juicy sultanas’ – Stewart, mumbling and staring at cup ‘half a cup’.... Chinese woman: ‘I prefer to use Bosnian sultanas because of their beautiful golden colour, but any sultanas will do really’ – Stewart ‘any will do’.... Chinese woman, exasperated: ‘you need to pat some of the couscous down your cleavage and then get some hunky hockey player to lick it off before it gets too sticky’ – Stewart ‘too sticky’... Later in the morning I decide to walk into town, past Sobering, and an eau de nil coloured shack across the street with the words ‘Brokenback Sausage’ in scarlet neon. There is a wonderful smell of wildflower ditches in summer heat with crickets chirruping – dust is swirling around, raised by pick-up trucks passing by, and I’m going to the Co-op to buy some essentials like lemons, peppermint tea and elderflower cordial – instead I end up with buffalo salami and toilet rolls. At the checkout a brainless young couple being served look at me and decide I’m not from round these parts. The guy is openly hostile, giving me ‘looks’ while the girl gives me a sympathetic smile as if to say ‘you poor poor bastard’. The checkout woman has dealt with them and they are slowly packing their muffins and spare ribs in honey glaze, staring at me all the time. The checkout woman looks at my toilet rolls and says ‘you should buy the twelve pack – it’s only one dollar more!’ I say with a faux coy smile ‘I’m just not going to be here that long’. The checkout woman thinks this is pretty funny and the couple have reversed roles – the guy thinks it’s funny too –I’ve made a good joke about crapping, but the young woman gives me a look of frank disgust, as if I have betrayed a fleeting but important trust. Back at the motel I’m all aches and pains from sitting on flights for so long, so decide to have a swim and Jacuzzi. I’m wary of the Jacuzzi as I’m highly allergic to the salt in some of them – it gives me hives, a painful swelling and irritable skin condition. But I take a chance and then have a wonderful lolling swim. As I swim I notice a sign that says ‘No swimming if you have a communicable disease or open sores’: my swine flu is at an end, but my whole life is an open sore with a thin sticky plaster of ‘personality’ disguising this, but if anyone round here has noticed, they are being very polite about it. After swimming I’m absolutely shattered and fall over for about a day and a half. Gregg eventually comes to take me to the festival – I’m playing a show a day for three days. The site is dominated by immense mobile homes belonging to people who are not only here for the festival, but for up to a month on vacation. It’s a beautiful area, gently sloping around with lovely trees and a beach on the Brokenback River opposite the main stage. The river is gorgeous and clear, although with a peaty brown tinge and I long to plunge into it The festival turns out to be a lot like Larmer Tree Festival or WOMAD, in that you may not have heard of the acts before, but they are all really good and most surprising. I meet Ron Modzrejewski, who has brought me here, owns the festival and owns the land. He’s a real warm human being and quite a character – we talk about music and the business of music as it affects us in different and similar ways. I’m a great believer in these ‘sudden communities’ where you have to get to know people and work properly with them for the sake of the event, then say goodbye, often forever, but these guys, and all the other lads connected to the production end of the event, are the sort of people that I would like to be friends with for a long time. At one point Ron, talking about his life, tells me that he used to be a grain farmer but he sold the business. I ask why – he says ‘it’s a thankless task, feeding the world’. Ron, like James Shephard who runs Larmer Tree festival in England, really knows his music, and there is something truly striking about all the acts I see, including a fantastic white blues singer called Liz Mandeville. She has a ferocious black sounding voice and makes Janis Joplin sound like Pete Docherty singing ‘Greensleeves’. Ron also introduces me to two great English musicians, Ben Walters (keyboards) and Clive Ashley (saxes) and on my final day we do a haunting rendition of ‘Madame George’ by Van Morrison. It’s a happy festival in a great location – if I lived in Canada I’d come here for fun and to talk to these people again – talk to Glen MacCrae, a guitar guru about resonance, and Twyla, wife of sound man Vinnie, about stupidities of decision-making that stop bands being great and keep them being only good. I’m sorry to leave when I do. Another thing – all the musicians are genuinely friendly toward each other, both at the festival and at the motel, solicitous of each others’ efforts and concerned to establish a basic camaraderie. This is something I’ve noticed has faded at similar UK and European events for some reason – there, musicians make no or little attempt to be part of the brother and sisterhood, the clan, of players: they ignore each other at all times, and only seem to strike up ‘networking’ conversations for anticipated mutual advantage: nothing wrong with that you may feel, but there is a melancholy to it.... Before I leave though, I’m walking once more back to the motel through Beausejour and I hear a choir singing in the forecourt of the other motel in town. It’s a mixed choir and the women are in long dresses on a Sunday morning. I’ve already noticed that the town and the surrounding area has a large Ukrainian population, and my guess is that they are a Ukrainian choir. It’s most incongruous, a choir this good, facing the road and singing in a shabby motel forecourt – men-folk who are not part of the singing stand out on the street awkwardly picking at tree bark or examining flattened root beer cans that flap in gentle wind by the side of the road. It will be a long sad day when these kinds of people stop doing this kind of singing all over the world because not enough people can remember why it was important to do it, and then forget that they can’t remember – what the magnificent Canadian writer Jane Jacobs calls the beginning of the next dark age (Dark Age Ahead – Jane Jacobs). The plains in this part of the world are bigger than Europe and apart from explosions of mountain ranges from time to time, remain unbroken. My sense is of a powerful belief in the responsibility of keeping each other connected through warmth and low intensity remarks that may seem unremarkable in themselves but are intended as psychological (the logos of soul)nutrition during the ice-cold snowy winter months when mortality seizes the imagination. I started a song some years ago on the plains of Calgary, and finished it the other day in the Superior Inn motel. The last two lines are: ‘and there aint no prairie big enough to hold a man and all his lonely stuff Cadillac under lonesome pines far away from the dark power lines’