For 28 years, I was the artistic director of Vancouver Island MusicFest in Courtenay, BC.
My favourite job in overseeing the festival was booking the music, by far. One of the things I was most proud of with our festival and my bookings was putting together quite a few once-in-a- lifetime opportunities to see musicians collaborate, often for the first time ever. You'll see some of those memories pop up here as I add more photos in upcoming weeks. But I thought I'd start with a photo I treasure, from 2010, of when we had David Lindley, Amos Garrett, and Adrian Belew all together on the Grierson Stage , which was our legendary collaboration stage, named after my dear departed friend, David Grierson.
Amos played the festival many times, and was often the leader of some of the finest musical collaborations you would ever see, right at our festival. I was very fortunate to be part of the Amos Garrett trio as well for a couple of years, playing with and for one of the worlds greatest guitar players, and a very funny friend, but more about that later.
David Lindley played the festival numerous times, and became a friend as well over the years that he played the festival and as we ran across each other in other places. I even got to play with David Lindley and Wally Ingram at RootsFest in Victoria one time. I was honoured David remembered that throughout the years when we crossed paths. Every time we got together, we'd talk about slide guitar, music history and guitar.
Adrian Belew only played our festival once, but to have him there was absolutely legendary. Like all great musicians, or just about all great musicians, Adrian turned out to be a wonderful human being. Most people that are super players don't have huge egos, probably because they realize and respect the hours of time they put into playing their instruments. They understand the humility it takes to be a great musician. It's usually the people somewhere in the middle, that have the gigantic egos and are harder to deal with.
Artists like Amos, David Lindley, Adrian Belew, Ry Cooder aren’t like that. The list could go on and on. Leo Kottke's a good example. They are some of the nicest people that you'll ever meet. I won't mention the ones that are not so nice, but they usually have more fragile egos and are certainly a lot harder to deal with.
I enjoy this photo because you can see how much they enjoy meeting each other, talking to each other. Amos and David were old acquaintances, probably old friends going all the way back to the first Maria Muldaur album. I think for Adrian Belew, that was his first chance to meet Amos. And you can see the respect for him in the photo above. There'll be lots more about Amos and David in future articles. But I just wanna say that it was such a thrill to have Adrian show up on our back door. He even went out to one of the local bars and jammed the night before the festival, which is pretty impressive for a guitar player of his stature. He was lovely to deal with. We dealt directly with him on his plans to come out to Vancouver Island. His one-of-a-kind guitar broke just before this performance with Amos and David. He could have completely freaked out and he didn't. We managed to get it fixed or at least get him through the set of music that he played with these two gentlemen. Anyway, a wonderful memory with three of the best guitarists of our time. They all still liked to have fun and treated playing with the childlike wonder that makes great musicians what they are!