Festival Man. Geoff Berner

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      EPIGRAPH

      These are the Memoirs of Campbell Ouiniette, former head of Bombsmuggler Incorporated Music, manager at one time or another of many illustrious folk, country, punk, and world music artists.

      The stack of copiously stained, longhand-scrawled legal notepads was found in October 2003, outside Pincher Creek, Alberta, by accordionist and archivist Geoff Berner, who also managed to decipher Ouiniette’s idiosyncratic handwriting.

      FESTIVAL MAN

      “Without cruelty, there is no festival.”

      — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

      I BOUGHT THIS FARMHOUSE FOR A DOLLAR. Which I actually haven’t paid yet. I shouldn’t be here. I should be headed home. But I can’t go home empty-handed, so I have decided to sit down in this empty, run-down-but-still-standing discarded house, and write a proper account of how the whole thing went down last weekend, in Calgary. I feel the need to make an accounting of myself.

      Why? Because I know that a lot of people think of me as worthless. Less than worthless; a parasite, dragging other people down, a rip-off artist.

      I know their nicknames for me, “Scam-Bull.” “Mr. ‘No Problem.’” I was given an Indian name once, a good one, which spoke of my bravery and rare insight. That name was later redacted by the name-giver to “Skid Mark.” They say I’m incompetent, a liar, an Alcoholic. One musician who I still think of as a friend will tell anybody who asks about me that I’m the kind of guy who’d sell his own grandmother and still not manage to make a profit. How do you like that? And in a certain light, maybe they’re right. But for the sake of Posterity, for the sake of my Love, at home in Vancouver, my Love whose regard for me I know has been ebbing away like a slow leak in an old truck tire, and for my daughter, too, maybe when she’s old enough, after she’s heard all the innuendo and bullshit talked about me, there needs to be a document that shows my light on things.

      I’ve always sworn I’d never write my memoirs. I’ve always thought of the written word, unaccompanied by music, as a guaranteed lie, deliberate or otherwise. So this will not be that. It’s just an account sheet summary of this past weekend, skipping over irrelevant details, focusing on the key points, and, most importantly, explaining from my point of view what was really going on, under the surface of the events themselves, especially my intentions, my goals, the reasoning behind my actions, actions which I know, on the face of things, might look a bit questionable to some people.

      The key is to keep that focus, to stick to the story, and not get distracted into digression. Above all, I have to make sure to stay solidly on track, telling the events of this past weekend. It should run no more than four or five pages, which is good because my arm is pretty badly chewed up and I’m afraid it may be starting to worsen a bit. Right arm, though, so I can still write through the pain, as I’m left-handed.

      So I’m holed up here in this house that I bought for a dollar. I just own the house, not the land around the house. You can do that around here, just by finding a number on a truckstop bulletin board and meeting a guy at a diner in town. That’s ‘‘’cause this is where the big agribusinesses have bought out all the family farms to create food factories the size of Belgium. It’s not cost-efficient to bulldoze all the little grey houses that dot the Canadian prairies. You might as well just leave them standing there, an accidental warning, like the statues on Easter Island. They’re not hooked up to the electricity grid or water anymore, but it’s summer, and there’s some buckets around, and a river not too far away that I can get to in the rental minivan that I should have returned four days ago.

      I stopped at the store on the way here, so I’ve got a bunch of good Alberta Beef jerky, a bag of tomatoes, a roll of bandage tape, and a bottle of whiskey, not for the purpose of getting drunk, mostly just for sterilizing the wounds in the arm, but also to use to wean myself off the booze a bit, which may be overdue, I guess. Don’t want to get the d.t.’s — you can die of that. I’ve seen it. And of course, I’ve got a bunch of speed, in powdered, snortable form, to keep the words coming efficiently. I have candles, too, so I can work through the night.

      THE COLLECTOR

      LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I AM.

      I’m quite a big man, if I do say so myself, about six foot two, and broad-shouldered, with a measure of heft. Not fat, but some heft. I’ve got a mighty puff of unruly, dirty-blond curly hair that kind of emanates from my head and face and makes me look even bigger. I think it’s fair to say that, for better or for worse, I take up a lot of space. Not just physically; I project. I don’t care much about clothes. I tend to wear the same green sweatpants and black hoodie everywhere I go, whether I’m in the alley behind some dank rock club, or at some idiotic music industry awards gala. I smell like drum tobacco and dope and thick cowboy coffee and eastern European delicatessen meat. And sweat, probably.

      I look big, but I rarely get into actual fistfights, and although I can’t say I’ve ever won a brawl in a bar, I’m usually able to stick to the Golden Rule of Canadian Bar Fighting and inflict roughly as much damage on my assailant as he has done unto me.

      I’m not a musician. I make music happen. Yes, I’ve played music, but only when it was the last option, in order to make the music happen. I played the bass a few times because no one else wanted to play the bass, and otherwise that band would not have happened, so I did what had to be done. I wasn’t bad. That’s the good thing about electric bass — it’s very hard to be noticed as a great bass player — people only notice the bass as the general sound of the band — but the corollary is that it’s hard to be noticed as bad. Not like what I do now. Everyone knows I’m bad. I’m a bad man, a bad drunk, a tornado of chaos, harbinger of strange music. Only some of them appreciate how important that makes me in this world.

      I STARTED OUT COLLECTING RECORDS, growing up on a horse ranch outside a mid-sized town in Alberta. First I just bought albums from Kelly’s Music World at the strip mall. Then I noticed some of the albums had catalogues in them, so I sent away for more albums. Then I started bugging my mother to drive me into Edmonton to finger through the vinyl at the record stores near the university. I started talking to the music twerps who worked there, and that’s when I got truly, absolutely hooked, saving up my chore money for the rare stuff, getting in touch with other weirdos. Still remember tearing the brown paper off the bootleg copy of the Rolling Stones’ Cocksucker Blues, thinking, this is contraband from another, more exciting universe. This is nasty. This is worth staying alive for.

      It was a completely seamless step for me, from collecting rare music to collecting rare musicians. I met Sandy Mackenzie when we were both seventeen, in a record store that isn’t there anymore, on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton. We both reached for the same 45, “Hamburger Lady,” by Throbbing Gristle (“Burned from the waist up, she’s dying”) and immediately got to talking. I told him that I’d tape the single and let him have the tape for free if he’d let me buy the only copy in the store. He said he just wanted to hear it a couple of times, ’cause he wanted his band to cover it.

      Sandy was the first person I ever met who was actually in a band. Okay, there were the horrifying sad country bands that did the shitheel circuit of rural Alberta, playing Charlie Pride and Conway Twitty covers, but that didn’t count. I was intrigued. I kidnapped him and dragged him back to the empty house some friends and I had been squatting. We listened to “Hamburger Lady” over and over again, and he told me about how he wasn’t sure, but he thought his band might СКАЧАТЬ