… that woke me up this morning. The weather seems to have cleared up a little – unless it’s run out of rain and gone back to find some more, which is most likely.
I wasn’t in a hurry to leave the stinking pit either today seeing as it’s weekend and I’m on holiday, but eventually I managed to do the photos and the notes as well as having a long chat with Cécile and her mum on Skype.
ON the way into town I stopped to fuel up and found the cheapest petrol that I’ve seen in ages – $1:26.9 at a garage owned by a Lebanese guy. Coffee at $1:25 too so I fuelled myself up with that. We also spent ages putting the world to rights too.
But now for the music.
First up in the Alexander Keith tent was Bob Marley’s old backing band, doing loads of covers of some of his best material.
Reggae is not really my scene and so I didn’t hang around too long as there was plenty of other things to be doing today, but at least I took a few photos of them. Not very many as it was impossible to fight my way through the crowds and down to the front.
However I didn’t half feel a fool. Due to a misunderstanding and a bad telephone line, I was the only person in the crowd who was carrying a harpoon.
In the Mojo Tent we had Marcia Ball, the Swamp Boogie Queen, on stage with her backing band. She was really quite good and thoroughly enjoying herself, and quite right too.
Not quite my scene either but I can appreciate good music whenever I hear it and I had no complaints about this performance, saxophones notwithstanding. I did enquire of one of the stage crew whether she had received any help in setting up her concert and giving her advice and all that kind of thing, to which he replied “not in the least – it’s all Ball’s.
This is Jessie Ashcroft on one of the outdoor stages, that restarted operations today now that the weather has improved. She was playing a Pink Floyd song, the name of which escapes me for the moment and which I’ll remember as soon as I press “send”, when I encountered her. Wat I found disappointing was that there was probably not even 40 people watching her act.
Even more disappointing was that when I asked the technician who the guitarist was, he answered “ohh, just some guy who plays with her” – he didn’t even know her name and that was dreadful because he deserved so much more that to be left in the deepest, darkest obscurity and anonymity like this.
Back in the Mojo Tent Garrett Mason (in the silly hat) and Keith Hallett (in the cap) were back on stage along with their rhythm section – Ray Jay Junior from Prince Edward Island on bass and a drummer called Chuck from Chicago.
The bassist was efficient rather than spectacular but the drummer was superb.
As for Garrett and Keith, they did live up to my expectations and moved into first place on my unofficial list of Festival winners. A fine hard-rocking boogie blues band that had the audience on its feet from start to finish.
Back at my spiritual home, the Hoodoo House, I saw the most astonishing band that I have probably ever seen in my 45 years of concert attendance – the 24th Street Wailers from Toronto.
They featured a sax player, a bassist, a female lead guitarist and a female lead singer on drums. Finding singing drummers is rare enough – finding female drummers is even rarer, but finding all of that together is astonishing.
And they weren’t bit-part players either.
Technically there wasn’t much wrong with what they were doing although it wasn’t all that technically-challenging (not that that ever bothered Status Quo and their army of supporters, I have to say), but if top rung on my ladder of Festival success was measured by energy, enthusiasm and audience interaction, they would have been down the road and out of sight long a long time before the final number
Headlining tonight was Ross Neilsen, together with a bassist and drummer whose name I didn’t catch. Sorry, guys. As a blues power trio they were thoroughly magnificent even if the sound mix was pretty awful, and I was prepared to install them at the top of my list, which I would have done with ease had they kept it up.
But then an astonishing thing happened.
They kept on inviting their mates to come up on stage and take part and we had a sax player, a keyboards player and, even worse, a mouth-organ player (and you know that that puts the kiss of death on a performance in my opinion). Of course, worse things happen at sea but it wasn’t as if these musicians added anything to the performance – in fact it quite detracted from what had been a magnificent opening set of numbers. All that was missing from the second half of the set was an invitation to next door’s cat to come up on stage.
Seriously, if Ross Neilsen and his two mates had kept up the power trio bit all the way through the performance they would have swept the board in my awards because they really were that good.
And had this motley crew of musicians been on stage from the very beginning it wouldn’t have been so bad either, but starting off as well as they did and then descending into chaos brought the curtain down on their performance as far as I was concerned.
Mind you, judging by the audience’s reaction, I’m clearly in a minority of one in this case.
I took refuge outside amongst the buskers, and spent a pleasant 20 minutes listening to this guy. He’s called Mike Peters and originally from Saint John but somehow managed to drift his way up here to Fredericton.
He was playing a set of folk-rock numbers, including Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and it beats me how it is that performers like him can’t find a regular spot at a festival like this when you consider some of the other artists who have been given stage time at the festival. There was nothing wrong with his performance and people like him deserve far more recognition than they are receiving.
So back to the camp site and it’s a clear night. So much so that I actually did a pile of washing before going to bed. That’s rather optimistic of me, I know. Cue a torrential downpour during the night.
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