Sometimes weird things come at you out of the blue. You scratch your head for days asking what is that about.
Last week I was at Close to the Coast at Baba’s which is sort of a local indie festival. I took the camcorder both nights and got a few songs of each band.
A lot of cool things happen. Right now I’m in a creative place. Seeing my work in print is a thrill. To see a video in the Journal Pioneer.
is a new step.
I’m writing up three blogs a day, stories, and songs every day. I work on Blog layouts which can be fun and creative. Social activism is like marketing – condense the message into a sound bite and interest people in the story.
The Guardian (Sally Cole) did a great job of covering Always on Stage today.
Most of the coverage is jazz because most of the music is jazz. We got a super write up on the Singer Songwriter series that I organized, which I’ll repeat below.
All summer I’ve performed at Charlottetown’s Always on Stage Richmond Street. Despite all the rain we’ve had, I’ve never been rained out.
Yesterday we planned to record some audio and video from my performance. Two friends came down to help. The worry was the rain. I assured them we would play until at least 1 pm and so we did.
I’ve had uncanny luck this summer. It could be raining in the morning. I’d pack the car anyways and head down around 11 AM. Just as I got to the stage, the rain would stop. I’d set-up, perform and quit 2 or 3 hours later.
Saturday I had the pleasure of playing at the Fete Nationale l’Acadie / Acadian National Holiday at Port LaJoye – known to some as Fort Amherst.
Friday night we went out for the Spectacle with Angele Arsenault and Lennie Gallant. Angele is the picture of happiness and optimism – so wonderful. Lenny had his full band and sounded great.
While Port LaJoye is an historic place, it’s not the best to draw a big crowd on the summer night. The road out is so dark and twisty!
It rained on Saturday so the Kitchen Party with Robert Arsenault was in a tent. The setting was intimate and a little like camping out when the skies opened up.
We all had a great time. I loved to hear the others play on my songs and you can hear the audience singing along in the video. It was heaven.
I’ll edit more film soon and post it.
By Stephen Pate
A decade ago I visited Panmure Island cemetery and only today can I tell you the story without breaking out into a cold sweat.
The picture in the Guardian reminded me of that visit. Back then, the road in the picture was less than a path in the woods, grown over from decades of neglect.
Panmure Island was always mysterious since it was sparsely populated. At night it gets black as coal and the ghosts are out.
Martha Graham, my mother-in-law now deceased, told me the safest way to the graveyard, which dates from the 1800’s, was along the beach. Martha baked the best apple, lemon and blueberry pies which has nothing do with this story but everything to do with why I was in Murray Harbour North that day.
Martha was born and brought up on the island and knew its stories and ghosts. In the 1980’s I satisfied my curiosity taking that beach route. The graveyard is on a point of land at the end of the island in St. Mary’s Bay. I found it easily with Martha’s instructions.
The headstones of Island sandstone were embedded in the earth, most were not vertical. Time had worn off the engravings and what you could read was pretty vague. Still it was exciting to find it. Inside the cemetery surrounded by the trees was an ethereal peace. I sat on a rock and contemplated the place and who might be buried here.
A decade later on a hot August day I drove up to the road or path and thought this might be the day to proceed directly along the road to the cemetery, even though Martha said it was not easy to find via the road. I had an SUV then but it wasn’t going anywhere.
My sons Will and James started out walking with me but they turned around when the mosquitoes started biting. I laughed them off and kept pressing forward.
The brush on the road seemed thicker and the mosquitoes were getting peskier. What’s a sub-gram insect to a human? They can’t conquer me. I pressed onward in the heat into the dampness of that swamp.
Constant swatting was having no effect. I was entering a zone of solid, flying insects. However, I was a man and no bugs would stop me.
In between flailing arms and hands, it dawned on me that I was breathing them in. They were inside my ears, nose, and mouth, down my shirt, in my eyes and on my eye lids. I panicked. I couldn’t take it anymore.
Turning right 90 degrees I set off in a mad dash across some fallen spruce trees. No hurdles in the Olympics could pose a more formidable obstacle in the race to the beach.
The black dead branches were like soothing balms wiping the bugs off my arms and head. Underfoot were even more dead branches that grabbed each foot and held them fast.
I can’t really run, it’s like a fast walk in three steps – one, two hop – not pretty. However, I became an Olympic athlete in an instant. An attempt to jump over a spruce tree hurdle resulted in severe pain in the groin. I landed in a clump on the other side and the damn bugs were on me again.
Pain or not, I jumped up and headed across no man’s land and bolted for the beach. I could see it through swollen eyes. Bloodied and bruised I threw myself across the last tree and onto the beach.
Throwing my sneakers off, I ran head first into St. Mary’s Bay and dunked under the cold water to elude the pursuing enemy. Coming up for air, I looked and the devils were gone.
In their place was an elderly couple walking their dog. They gave me the oddest look. I smiled wanly and searched for my shoes.
Trying to look sane I sat on the beach and sunned for a few minutes until they disappeared around a corner.
Even though I could see the cemetery, I had no heart to enter the woods again to battle the mosquitoes. Perhaps one would return another day.
Back at the truck, Will and James were doubled over in laughter. They had heard blood curdling screams from the deep woods and imagined Panmure Island’s ghosts were awake in the heat of the afternoon.
No use telling them my story so I saved it for you.
What a disappointment the Big Blast Concert Series was last night at Old Home Week. Held in the Trade Centre building, capable of holding 4,000 people, the concert with Sloan and Slowcoaster had the worst sound in my memory.
When the music started, you could tell we were in trouble. The sound was reverberating off reflective surfaces of the metal ceiling, brick walls and cement floor. With no absorbing materials it kept bouncing around until the words were unintelligible.
The attendance was surprisingly low for those two bands which have big followings in Charlottetown.
Slowcoaster, one of my favourite bands, was a mishmash of noise and occasionally intelligible words. I’ve heard them in so many venues and this was awful. If you stayed real close to the stage it was sorta almost bearable.
The hard surfaces fostered the creation of standing waves which sucked all the energy from the low and mid sounds in the music. For Sloan that took the energy out of the music. The drums and bass sounded weak and the vocals got lost in the reverb. It sounded like the singers were coming through a megaphone or long tube.
My partner who is a big Sloan fan wanted to leave mid way through their set that’s how bad it was.
The sound guys were trying hard but no one could have fixed that. The Trade Centre is just the worst possible room for acoustics. A tent would be better.
It was a pejorative to describe a web site as mere “page turning.”
Well Sony’s promotional page Bob Dylan’s new CD set Tell Tale Signs page has taken it to a new fun level.
The page has the graphics for Bob’s singles over the years. You can click an arrow and it will cycle through them.
Trying grabbing the upper outside corner and turning the page as you would a real book page. Cool.
Right up there with your own words on the video cards for Subterranean Homesick Blues.
The new CD is Bootleg # 8 and can be pre-ordered in three versions:
1. 2 CD’s with 27 songs US $19
2. 3 CD Deluxe set with 39 songs, a mini vinyl LP and a book US $129
3. Limited Edition 4 vinyl LP’s with 27 songs and a smaller book US $99
If history is anything to go by, the Deluxe and Limited Edition versions will sell out and the 2 CD regular version will suit most people.
I have many of the songs as bootlegs and they are worth listening to. It will be great to have them on official releases. The audio is always cleaned up.
For a limited time, Bob Dylan’s website is offering a free download of “Dreamin’ of You,” from Dylan’s 1997 Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out of Mind sessions.
“I think it can be easily done, just take everything down to Highway 61.”
Always on Stage: Jessica Palmer, Stephen Pate
Father Coady leads a group through the woods the Panmure Island pioneer cemetery. Guardian photo by Brian McInnis