In the Evening
After the cannonball of MarchFourth the first day of the Vancouver Island Music Fest settled into a more measured pace. Following M4 was Red Horse, a folk trio composed of Eliza Gilkyson, John Gorka & Lucy Japlansky.
It was wise to program something more stripped down after M4 – anyone trying to top them would have come up woefully short without the help of lions, flaming hoops and Julianne Moore in a feather boa.
Red Horse’s songs were all pleasant enough, aside from Gilkyson’s “Midnight on Raton”, a talky and awkward tribute to the late, great Townes Van Zandt.
Van Zandt often passed through the town of Raton, New Mexico during his all-too-short life and it inspired him to write the very lovely “Snowing on Raton”. Listen to that instead.
After Red Horse came Corey Harris and the Rasta Blues Experience. Harris, a native of Denver, Colorado, is a skilled songwriter and one hell of a guitar player. His saxophonist, Gordon Jones, deserves to be mentioned too – his wailing sax was irresistible, drawing applause from the crowd after every solo.
Corey Harris & the Rasta Blues Experience were a hit and Harris rewarded the audience’s enthusiasm with a solo acoustic encore before leaving the stage.
By this point in the night the mercury had begun to drop. I watched a bearded kid in a tie-dyed t-shirt wrap his arms around a slim, pale girl in a red dress who was shivering from head to toe. She leaned back into him and whispered into his ear then they moved off into the crowd.
After a while you could tell that the alcohol had been flowing freely all day: not far away I saw a teenager in a newsboy cap trying to put the moves on a woman at least twice his age:
“So, like, how old are you?”
“Older than you.”
“Yeah…I think that’s cool.”
“Great”
I saw her standing by herself later on in the evening so she must have somehow found the will to resist her pubescent Romeo. I saw him afterward too and like many good men before him, young Montague was giving his libido a burial at sea, one plastic cup of beer at a time.
