Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers
Tarp runners at the Calgary Folk Festival. (Photo: CKUA)
“The people who run Calgary would give Jane Jacobs an aneurysm,” says Vancouver-based, Alberta-born music manager Campbell Ouiniette. “If you see [Calgary] from the air at night, its lights and grid make it look exactly like a massive Pac-Man game laid out flat on the dark screen of the prairie.” It’s the summer of 2003 and Ouiniette is in town for Folk Fest. From his room on the 18th floor of festival headquarters at the Westin Hotel, the acerbic, bullshitting, cross-threaded visionary spots the festival venue, Prince’s Island Park, “a small green attempt at a backhanded apology for the rest of the dystopic beige city.” Ouiniette dons a white hotel bathrobe – “Just the right balance between Rasputin-like madness and regal authority” – tips an imaginary hat to his pals in the lobby, and takes a “purposeful march” over to the park. He is the Festival Man.
I love the walk to the festival, whether from the hotel or the parking area or wherever. I like to feel the excitement building in the audience as they make their way toward the gates. They chatter to each other, carrying their blankets and camping gear and extra layers for the chill when the sun goes down. For a lot of these people, this one weekend is the highlight of their entire year, when they see old pals who moved away and maybeonly come back to town for Folk Fest, when they cut loose a little (or a lot), when they find the music they’re going to be listening to on their joe-job commutes for the rest of the year, the music that will give them the spiritual strength to get up in the dark of a Canadian morning and drag themselves into another workday that no matter how deadening, at least takes them a day closer to the next Folk Fest.
They moved in little clumps of family and friends, usually somebody reading a program as they walked, figuring out what they wanted to see this weekend, what they’d heard of, what “looks interesting.”
It did my heart good to see one clump that appeared to be three generations of counter-culture types: an elderly Beat-professor type Grampa, a couple of middle-aged Deadheads, and a teenaged punk son, all sharing a nasty-sweet-smelling joint as they meandered along. I asked them for a hit, and they shared it with me in the true spirit of Alberta horse brutality.
Geoff Berner, Festival Man (Dundurn, 2013)