Folks

AIN'T NO CURE VOL. 2 (A Slump Buster Series)

Last year I went to Calgary Folk Fest and wrote a piece for each day I attended and tried to ascribe a bunch of meaning and a lot of special feelings onto some vaguely related things and I got to feel special about myself. People seemed to like them, and I got a positive comment from an author I admire. I was starting to feel like I might have something to offer. I don’t like feeling good about myself like that. I think it’s bad when I feel good about myself because feeling too good makes me feel like I should be noticed. When I think I should be noticed it’s because I’m sure I’m different in some kind of special way. But I’m not different, I’m the same as everyone else. Obviously, everyone is. I don’t want to write any of this down but I do because I must. To know for sure that I think I’m special. To admit it. And to be disgusted with myself that I can’t just allow my ego to wither enough to accept that I am plain.

This year I went again to Calgary Folk Fest, us three as a family. It was beautiful, it was great. Two of our best friends came with us, them being my cousin Fred and his wife Stella. Does that make Stella my cousin as well? Cousin once removed? Do I refer to Fred as my friend and my cousin, my cousinfriend? Both identifiers feel necessary. Once when we were little kids, Fred’s dad said to three of us, “boy it sure must be nice to be such good friends with your cousins.” And this third cousin of ours responded before Fred and I, “we’re cousins, we can’t be friends.” I think about that a lot. Anyways, it was beautiful, it was great. But I did not feel any grand interconnected feelings this time around - not really. And that’s ok, because though these festivals are made to feel big and grandiose and also special, they are not. They are also plain. Thousands of people gathering, a spectacle of singing and instrumentation - stories sung and experience told. Being together. That is what is supposed to happen. It is plain. It is beautiful.

I heard true folk music. I heard fake folk music. I heard people sitting behind me playing videos on their phones with the volume turned on while the rest of us tried to pay attention to something for once. These people are always among us. It’s not always a phone, but it’s always something. These people should be taken onstage by festival volunteers between songs and executed as the musicians tune their instruments. Left to hang for the duration of the performance and then cut down to make way for the next crop of morons who inevitably missed the previous round of executions because they just had to see what the next digital ghoul was going to offer to fill the gaping hole in their soul for the low low price of a perpetual subscription to eternal seven second dopamine injections into their optic nerves. Watch their grey bloated bodies swing from the stage rigging and taunt the rest of us to try not to engage in the beauty before us now. Kill ‘em all, then play a fuckin’ train song next.

I realized that I’m not sure what true Alberta folk music sounds like. How embarrassing, to live in one place your whole life and be unable to identify the sounds of your homeland. Not quite sure if this is more embarrassing for me or my province, though. Of course I know what passes for genuine Albertan music these days, and it’s the same original dogshit that you can hear impotently oozing out of FM stations all over this continent. I’m not sure we ever really had our own thing. Maybe we’ve just always copped our sound from the places around us, clumsily trying to clunk out the same chords we see that other guy playing on the otherside of the campfire. If we have any kind of style of our own though, I do know the lineage. And it can be traced like this: Wilf Carter→Ian Tyson→Corb Lund→Skinny Dyck.

Skinny is one of the guys I saw, and he’s how I realized I didn’t know what our folk music would be. He felt as close to the real deal since my little sister could say, “hey I worked with that guy at my first job after university.” That’s a good start, Wilf Carter and Ian Tyson weren’t even born here. Skinny’s that guy who looks like everyone I’ve ever met and liked but also kind of hated because I just knew he had it figured it out better than I did. That guy who can play the hot shit out of a Telecaster and also can play pedal steel and can grow a better moustache. He’s got all the right retro clothes, and you can’t smell the bullshit on him so you’re sure he didn’t buy them at one of those godawfully expensive vintage boutiques that sell pearl snap Western shirts and trucker hats with oil company patches on them. He probably found them in his dad’s garage in mildewy cardboard boxes underneath empty tins of rolling tobacco and greasy socket sets. He’s from here and he played the real shit, and I hope that I’m playing the real shit too.

I heard folk music from Arkansas.

Ireland

Scotland

Cambodia

Senegal

New Brunswick

I heard good shit.

I heard bad shit.

I hummed and hawed trying to decide between two conflicting headliners at the end of Saturday night. Steve Earle with Reckless Kelly.

OR

Nick Shoulders.

The new guy who is surely gonna be one of our guys - OR - the old guy, the legend guy. The guy who has firsthand stories about Townes Van Zandt guy.

If I’m real honest I don’t actually know that much Steve Earle. He’s one of those guys that I always figured I should know more about, but I just never get drawn in. I know Guitar Town, obviously. Copperhead Road, obviously. That’s the song that I only played when I used to jam with my cousin Archie once there was a liberal offering of empties surrounding us. The one where I switched to drums and he grabbed the guitar. I know that I made a lot of assumptions about Steve Earle because of that quote of his, “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”

Now, I always liked this quote - cause it’s just kind of objectively great. I love Dylan too, but I really love the idea of holding someone captive and yelling at them from higher ground that they’re not the greatest ever, even though everyone they’ve ever met has told them that they are the greatest ever. Also because Townes is probably the greatest ever. We need people willing to shout like that. But the real reason I made a lot of assumptions about Steve Earle is because he felt the need to add that he would be wearing cowboy boots in this situation. That - to me - signals that Steve Earle is a certain kind of person. The certain kind of person who feels the need to tell you that they wear cowboy boots. We know, dude. We get it. You wear cowboy boots. We all think you’re cooler now.

You don’t need to do that, Steve. If you’re wearing cowboy boots, we’ll be able to see it for ourselves. That’s how it works. That’s how eyes and feet work. We all know what kind of shoes each other are wearing.

So we went to the new guy instead. The smaller stage. The smaller crowd.

It was the right decision.

I couldn’t see what kind of footwear Nicky Shoulders was wearing from where I stood, but dagumit, he played like he would stomp his feet the same whether they were in boots or bare as the day he was born. And that’s all I give a good goddamn about.

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So I wonder in this late blooming, magic killing, plainly straightforward way, if those of us who aren’t folk musicians can carry on our own folk tradition. If folk isn’t just the songs. Course it isn’t. It’s more than that, it’s everything. The songs, yes of course - but also, the structures and systems and muscle and bones that brought them into reality - to be translated through songs. The lives of the collective that are required to be lived first. That is what the songs are made of. We are living the folk tradition. The families we raise and friends we keep. The stories we tell each other and the clothes we wear.

Cause we can’t all sing Shady Grove or Nine Pound Hammer or Stagger Lee or Rye Whiskey.

But I can tell you what it was like at that folk festival this year. And what it was like fishing on Lake Newell with my friend from Calgary. Or going to the baseball game in town, cause that was the only thing going on in town. Or sitting in my cousin Archie’s back yard and being grateful for what we have but also wondering if it’s going to keep being this goddamn hard all the time.

It’s a conversation with Willi Carlisle beside a food truck. It’s a panicked Walleye with a hook through it’s gillplate. It’s the crack of a wooden bat and my son and my nephew forming the bonds of another set of cousins that will learn together about mandolins and drums and beer and work.

The folk tradition is putting our boy to bed too late, and digesting food that we shared with family members. Some by blood, some by marriage. All one together. I’ve seen them all bleed, as they have me.

It is the scalding hot shower to wash off the week, it is the stretching afterward when I finally feel how tense my body has been. It is the continued stretching and focused breathing in the living room I do afterwards only because it feels like the thing I must do. Nothing else matters but this.

It is the removal of our clothes. It is the fresh midnight air slipping into our bedroom. It is the heavy duvet and the kiss goodnight. It is the starting up again tomorrow and the witnessing of it all.

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