After waiting the first three morning hours in vain for a spot to open up at the official open mic being held at “The Octagon,” I headed back to the tent to try to sleep. Holding the lantern in one hand I reached for the zipper with the other and startled a spider onto the middle of my tent door. He was only about 2 inches and more spindly than the first one I’d encountered, but he was on my door and could not be ignored. I found a clear plastic cup in the car and trapped him under it. I had nothing to put under the cup, so I had to wait until he climbed into the back. When he did, I ran into the middle of the field and threw him as far as I could. I got in the tent, zipped it up and searched for any other visitors. Finding none, but still all “crawly,” I couldn’t fall asleep and would have liked to have read my book, but I didn’t want any more chance meetings in the dark and refused to get out of the tent to retrieve it from the car.
I woke up at about 10 a.m. to find that the campground had filled in further with latecomers. The ground was wet, and the clumps of drying grass that covered the field were now sticking to everything. The sky was overcast. While I started on a breakfast bar, Peter, the Brit from Columbia , MD , started walking over from his campsite. He asked if I’d had anything to eat, and I said I was having my breakfast bar. He invited me over for breakfast with himself and his musical partner, Roger, who plays bodhran for their traditional music group.
This is Roger Collins, shop teacher and reenactor extraordinaire, practicing bodhran at his campsite.
Roger Collins and his wife Michelle (everyone calls her “Mitch”) are good people. Roger looks a bit like a slightly rounder Ramirez, as played by Sean Connery in the movie, Highlander. He has long gray hair swept back into a pony-tail and a gray, close-cropped beard, which he once singed off when he got too close to a stove while glass-blowing. He has an impish, mischievous face and slightly fuzzy ears that make him look like he should have fuzzy hoofed legs to go with them – some kind of Pan. I find out that all these characteristics suggesting long-ago eras are not far off the map. Roger feeds me bacon, scrambled eggs and toast while telling me stories about being a shop teacher who does historical re-enacting, renaissance festivals, sailing and music in his free time. Mitch is an expert in multiple martial arts, has trained Olympic horse teams and now teaches people how to ride. She also does re-enactments with her husband. The modern set-up that they have going today is not their usual fare. On most days it’s canvas tents and period dress.
“Tell her the story about almost getting arrested in Wisconsin ,” Peter yells from his neighboring campsite, where he is washing his hair with warm water from a pail on his tailgate. Chantal, the Collins’ young graphic designer friend and “adopted” daughter, giggles from her lawn chair. She’s been with them at re-enactments and knew the sort of hijinks that go on. Roger goes on to tell the story of how, at a battle re-enactment, there were not enough people there to play Native Americans. It was four against a hundred, which just would not do. So someone asked Roger if he had his Native gear with him and would he mind switching sides. He agreed and he and his wife got dolled up in their best: painted faces, bandanas and all. Mitch has a very athletic form, tall and lanky, and could easily play a male Indian. When they weren’t doing that day’s battle, the two of them were being as affectionate as husband a wife would normally be, drawing odd looks from the group. The next day, Mitch did not participate, but a male friend of theirs got dressed in her exact gear and face paint from the day before and went out again with Roger. Roger began to realize that people had thought Mitch was a man all along, especially now that a man was walking around in the same gear.
We traded stories for at least an hour, the six degrees of separation falling away the more we talked. Turns out that Brooke from Tinsmith had sold Roger his bodhran, and he had been a huge fan of her pre-Tinsmith band. I watched him practice a little with David, who was going into the semi-finals round that day and had asked Roger to drum for him. David, from New York , had a really unique voice, a sort of middle-eastern, improvisational jazz vocal. The rain was coming down pretty hard by then, and Roger gave me a lift back to the main stage area in his truck while they went to “The Octagon” to see about their round.
We’re About 9’s soggy performance Saturday afternoon. The faithful turned out despite the dampness, and it was actually fitting for their cover of Richard Shindell’s “Last Fare of the Day.”
The business of competing over (for me at least), it was time to attend some workshops and go see a full We’re About 9 performance. It was pouring down rain, and I had left the tent site without an umbrella, figuring I could find some roof to stand under. I didn’t have much luck until Katie saw me standing off to the side of the stage and tossed me a purple umbrella. Brian encouraged the small crowd to gather as close to the stage as possible because the edge of the awning covering it went out a few feet and might provide some cover. I got under it, keeping the umbrella angled over my head so that drips rolling off the roof wouldn’t run down my back. I was having a little bit of trouble with the umbrella. When Pat had to pause to tune, Katie gave me instructions from the stage and I finally found the button that held it open on its own. Duh.
Their performance was glorious. Their rendition of Richard Shindell’s new song, “Last Fare of the Day,” was so lush with harmony and imagery about cab drives in the rain that suddenly the weather was the perfect compliment.
The Baltimore Songwriter’s Association was giving a song critique where eight performers would get to have their songs discussed. I went in and got picked to play. The room’s high ceilings and wood floors gave it a delicious echo, which helped me to give one of the best renditions of “Save Berlin” I have ever done in my life. People were really taken in by it – so much that I almost found it a little uncomfortable for the first time ever. It’s a really personal song for me, and to see and hear people internalizing the story for themselves, seeing it get to them .. I know that should be the idea behind good songwriting, but it was almost a shock. They asked for more information about the story behind the song, which I gave, and they were drawn in even more. In other cases, people made commentary about not catching all the words, but not caring because the melody and performance were so beautiful and full of desperation and nostalgia that they “got it” regardless.
The suggestions were few, but they were interesting and I agreed with many of them. One was that I should try and do more to differentiate the melody from verse to verse. The woman who echoed this comment said that she’d heard me many times before and knew my voice was capable of a lot more. I appreciated the compliment and the suggestion. Another comment, which I respected, but don’t know that I could do or want to, is that I should switch the narration of “Save Berlin” back to myself. Make it a female voice: “SHE can have any place you would give HER,” and such. I think I might have to fight against that one, though I can understand why they thought that.
The finals round was drawing an early crowd to the main stage. Having competed themselves, everyone was eager to see what and who made the top ten. Brian and Pat found me and took seats next to me.
My notes from watching the top ten are simple and possibly offensive, the way anything is when you are trying to easily classify people and pick a winner. They read something like this: 1. Dog song, funny but too cutesy and cliché. What is this doing in the top 10? 2. Mexican border song. Neat voice. Interesting concept. Nothing stellar. 3. 15-year-old girl accompanied by her dad. Stiff performance, but the most interesting song so far. Could go both ways, either the judges get it or they don’t get it. All about her parents’ abusive relationship as it relates to watching the Roadrunner hurt Wiley Coyote. 4. Anti-Bush song from my round. 5. Erik Balkey. 6. Mr. Heart. I remember this was one of the mail ins. Good performance, but the song metaphor doesn’t go far enough. 7. Rap song. How did this get all the way to the Top Ten? 8. Cinderella. This was also a mail in. This is clever and well-performed. 9. Eleanor Roosevelt quote. Tough call . I don’t like the lyrics much, but her performance is great and her guitar playing is the best I’ve seen this whole festival. 10. Antje Duvekot. Southern junkie song. Good song and good performance. I like this.
The results were tabulated and we all waited to see where everyone would be ranked. The top five were as I suspected, but not completely in the order I suspected. The song I liked the most came in fourth place. The woman with the good guitar and Amy Fairchild’s “Mr. Heart” also took awards. Carmella Scott’s rap song actually came in as one of the top 5! I couldn’t believe it. And, taking both awards for Best Song and Best Overall, the 15-year-old and her dad, Chelsea and Freddy Bradburn.
I didn’t agree that she should get Best Overall. Though I liked the song and thought it honestly the Best Song, I thought her performance (physically and vocally) was incredibly stiff. A lot of people balked at it because the song was co-written with her father, and people wondered how much of the credit was truly hers. I wonder how those other competitors feel about losing to a child, or if they agreed that the song was good. I wonder if the girl is like me, and would also worry how much of the credit is truly hers. I wonder if she’s troubled by the assumptions people around her are making that she must be all-too aware of. Or is she just ecstatic, riding on the incredible wave of a double-win, a trophy with prize money, and a concert to play the following night?
I ran back into Matt Cross near the main stage. He’d had a rough time in the semi-finals, but seemed like he was in pretty good spirits. We started comparing notes on the winners, and he asked me what I thought about the rap song. I started talking about how I didn’t even know how and why it had made it through the first round. I couldn’t imagine what first round of judges, let alone two or three different panels, would advance that at this festival. In fact, it turns out she was one of the mail-in entries selected first from hundreds of entires.
“Now do you say that because you thought it sucked, or because the genre is too different from what you thought should be here?” he said with a knowing smile.
Because he had me. He totally had me in my own hypocrisy. I had seen her first thing in the day, walking around looking nervous, talking to someone about potentially singing with a CD. I wrote her off completely right there. I figured she was dead in the water. And then when she got up and performed in the Top Ten (with a guitarist accompanying her), my reaction to the rap song was completely a visceral one based on the fact that I was not expecting THAT at a traditionally folk sort of festival. Here I had been all along praying the judges would look for something beyond the typical singer-songwriter fare I was getting so tired of, and when they did just that, I didn’t appreciate it. It was not the greatest song ever, and not the greatest rap song as that genre goes, but it WAS a person who was brave enough to bring their individual spin, their personal take on the singer-songwriter tradition, into the lion ring to be potentially ripped apart by those least likely to see it’s worth.
The nighttime concerts began, and people sat on bails of hay to watch Devon Sproule and Darrell Scott. The people next to me made faces at some of Devon ‘s lyrics (“mosquitos waiting to drink our blood”), reinforcing my days’ lesson: how subjective music really is at any level of success. She’s a Rolling Stone critic’s pick, but not the pick of the people one bail over.
