I had a long talk with a festival promoter today. He really wants us on his bill, but, y'see, there's a basic problem here: he offers that we "make our money" off "exposure to a tourist audience" which is fine and cool but we ain't got nuthin' t' sell! -- after probably an hour trying to explain the anthropological imperative of the community dynamics of a grounded music divest of status strata and legality ornamentation, I'm not certain I was any closer. "ok, ok" he says, and we agree because its a charitable cause but in the next breath he asks if we'd like to play a dinner club.

What I should have said was "Only if they stop eating, paint their faces and dance a dervish around the burning buffet tables. But I didn't.No, I giggled and declined and told him my dream of a festival where there are no acts, no bands, no programs. I told him of the Latin Sector's 'happening' down at Toronto's Christie Pits where you wander this landscape labyrinth of smell, sight sound and pulse, and you dance no matter where you are. Patrons may still be 'patrons' but they participate in the mix, not peripherally, but 100%, because music is not a 'commodity', it is the bind force of social structure, it is a bridge, but only when we make it so and git up offa that thang and cross that bridge, together. We don't need listeners, we don't need sales and buyers, we need fellowship participants curious to come with us to see the other side of that bridge.

Now this is what I'm talkin' 'bout: from the recent Indyish Mess in Montreal. No fences, no pro-fessional de-markations and no like my smile, buy my CD, it's just people, just people and music and motion and happening and life live in the street. and yeah, there's a few bumps on logs sitting with beers (there are better videos, but this has best sound) but even a few of those bumps are still sliding into the vortex, wavering at the brink, wiggling in their seats, only despite them this is still what I'm talkin' about:

What is so hard to understand about this? Back when I started the Nature Theatre I was thinking of that line If there's no audience there just ain't no show and I was thinking, yeah ... if only we could absorb the audience, it would cease to be 'Show' and we'd escape the eternal wheel of The Biz. It's what we used to like so much about Eaglewood, not the shows or the 'workshops' (where nothing ever got forged, only paraded) but at infamous all-night wine-primed Campground E, that is where the festival earned its name, that is where the goddess called Music walked among the living. In a'capella choirs of 60 unwashed voices, in ad-hoc orchestrations pulled from the night-air against the rubato of the distant train whistles. In the sparks and embers of the fires that lit up the faces of people discovering that the joy of music does not, and can not, live in an iPod.

How is it that in a scant flickr of only 60 years since network radio's first light that all this could be forgotten so far that it should be an alien language, a scenario so outside it could only be sparked by an extraterrestrial band led by a angel?