By Jim Henshaw
I’ve come to call the last day of the week “Satur-dusty,” a combination of Saturday and the name of my dog. That’s because after putting up with my chaotic work schedule for a week, I make time for her and we go somewhere to hike or swim or do stuff dogs like to do.
Yesterday we set out for one destination and ended up 30 miles away in another after I’d picked up a couple of hitchhikers. I don’t usually stop for those holding out their thumbs. But these guys had a sign. One whose message I understood because I’d been there.
They were trying to make a nearby music festival. One with big names that don’t usually show up in our neck of the woods.
I grew up in Regina, addicted to Rock ‘n Roll. But we were a small town, well out of the way and the bands I most wanted to hear live never materialized. I can’t count the times I spent an entire day driving or hitching in one direction to Winnipeg or the other to Calgary to see some band.
And too many times I’d arrive, parched and sunburnt, to find a hand lettered “Sold Out” sign in the box office window. It was a long and often hungry trip home, looking to that endless prairie sky for a sign to save me the repeated agony.
But when something matters that much to you, you put up with the pain and the disappointment and pretty much anything else to make it happen.
And sometimes the rewards were so very rewarding. Seeing Janis Joplin play one of her final gigs. Having “The Who” or “The Band” take your head and toss it so far outside the concert venue you knew you’d never be the same if and when you ever found it again.
I used to endlessly strategize ways of getting bands to come to me. I wrote letters, I cajoled local DJ’s, I even tried booking them myself. But finding the money to fund a rock concert was even harder than financing a Canadian film, and the bands’ agents had inevitably neither heard of Regina nor knew anybody else in their business who had.
Would I had had the imagination of the 1000 “Foo Fighters” fans in Cesena, Italy who took to Youtube this week to beg Dave Grohl and his band to play a gig in their home town.
What follows is inspired.
…And it worked…
…Coming at you Cesena! Way to go!
Enjoy Your Satur-dusty.
First published on The Legion of Decency.
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