Just got in from a couple of days in beautiful, sophisticated, tolerant, and expensive Vancouver BC, where I attended the Vancouver Folk Music Festival this weekend. This is, I think, my fourteenth consecutive year of attending VFMF.
It's always been a great festival and there was another great line-up this year. A lot of international music including Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, who recorded the great "Meeting Across the River" a dozen years ago with Ry Cooder, a traditional Danish band you've never heard of called Zar, and old friends Dan Bern, Eliza Gilkyson, and Kelly Joe Phelps. Phelps is probably not as well known as Dan Bern or Eliza Gilkyson. He's a local NW guy: an exquisite guitarist and singer, and well worth checking out if you don't know his music.
I saw Dan do an hour long solo show this afternoon. I've been following him for ten years since I first saw him doing "Jerusalem" at VFMF a decade ago. His shows range from incandescent and brilliant to tense and irritable and I've seen him in both moods. Today was one of the latter. He apparently fucked up his knee stomping out time with a drummer last week in Ontario so this afternoon's show was performed sitting down. Dan was in a shit mood and said so. He proceeded to try out new songs "that I'm still learning" and for a few people it was too much. Some people came to hear "Marilyn" and "Tiger Wood" (Dan's ode to the size of his testicles) and when it was clear he wasn't going to play his greatest hits, they left.
For the rest of us it was a fascinating afternoon as Dan worked through a new song- a sort of post apocalyptic global warming science fiction song- and paused every minute or so to comment on some aspect of it. Best line: "I'm just trying to make it to the Mexican-Canadian border.... I'll let that sink in for a moment".
The real treasure of this year's festival though was 40-ish something Ed Hamell, who calls himself "Hamell on Trial". He came out wearing a Joe Strummer T-shirt so he had me right away anyway. But that didn't prepare me or the people I was with for the manic solo acoustic guitar and songwriting onslaught that carried the next hour.
Hamell is hilarious and hugely talented: vulgar, rude, crude, politically astute, and very brave. He warned audience members with kids to leave before he started and said "what I do's not for everybody" (He himself has a four year old son). Then he was off and running. His first song was about God visiting him and asking him to find a fan who would "shoot Pat Robertson in the fucking head". It got better....
I'm posting Hamell's website below. He's so fucking flat out vulgar that I'm referring you to the man himself. I can't add much to it. Check out his crude and brilliant satire on right-wing smear tactics, "Coulter's Snatch".
Like Hamell said, he's not for everyone. Most of you will appreciate the satire. One of you may be titillated by the title but I'm not naming names.
