… that awoke me this morning. Things aren’t looking so good for the Festival. Still, the show must go on I suppose.

And leaving the camp site I left behind the old suitcase, as I remembered when I arrived in Fredericton. Ahh well, that’s one less piece of clutter to worry about I suppose. Good job I emptied it.

The weather dramatically improved round about 14:00 and so I went for a walk along the old railway track bed along the southern shore of the Saint John River. Over there on the northern shore is the boat ramp where I had my lunch yesterday and so I took a photo of that as it looked so nice from here.

Back in town, I did a very silly thing.

When I was in Truro in 2010 I went for a wander around in a music shop and noticed a Roland Cube Amp. These little practice amps are about 15 or 20 watts and are battery-powered, running of 6xAA batteries or a 9-volt DC inverter. They cost $289 which isn’t all that much, and so I enquired if there was a bass version – one of these would really suit me back home.

I was told that there was one in the pipeline but it wasn’t available yet.

Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … here in the music shop was a Roland bass cube amp, previously $319 (inflation over 3 years of course) reduced to a mere $149 in the summer sale. Borrowing a Fender Precision bass, I had a little play.

Now we are even more crowded here in the Dodge. Heaven alone knows what it will be like by the time we get to Woodstock, where we were half a mill … "you’ve done that twice already" – ed.

After finding a library book sale and a military tattoo (spelt correctly of course, this isn’t Maine), I went to listen to the bands. But not without being caught in one of the most trememdous thunderstorms I have ever seen. The lightning was magnificent and one burst of thunder, right over our heads, had everyone on the floor, including me, and we watched the rainstorm roar up the street to engulf us.

First band up was STU Jazz. 37 of them on the stage, so we are reliably informed, and that is about 34 too many if you ask me for my opinion. Like Mark Knopfler, I don’t give a damn about any trumpet-playing bands, and these weren’t up to all that much, even if they did have a lady bassist.

And while I was busy deleting a pile of photos thinking that I can do better than that, the performance came to an abrupt halt. The hurricane was heading back and the tent was not built to withstand it, neither was the grass floor.

We all trooped over to the Blues Tent to see World Party, a British blues duo.

They weren’t all that bad at all, and in fact could belt out some really serious blues when they really wanted to, which, unfortunately, wasn’t all that often.

And to prove how small the world has become, in the audience was a guy with a Nick Lowe tee shirt and we had a lengthy discussion about Brinsley Schwartz, a concert of whom I recently played on Radio Anglais, and it turns out that he’s a wine importer and
1 – he knows the Massif Centrale
2 – one of his clients is Simon Cowe, former bassist with LIndisfarne.

Headline act was a band from Florida, JJ Grey and Mofro. again, far too many musicians on stage – get rid of the horns and the keyboards would be a good start in my opinion.

And we had to wait until the middle of their set to see the first harmonica. Why can’t we have blues bands without harmonicas?

They were under-rehearsed and over-produced but could still belt out the serious blues every so often and I wish that they would have done more about that.

But then it was time to brave the torrential rainstorm again and, with a bag of chips from the Lebanese take-away, I headed for my camp site at the Mactaquac Provincial Park through the downpour.