Blow Fest 1988

Freedom Festival - Kitchener, Ontario, Canada - Summer 1988

This is what we lovingly referred to as "Blow Fest" because the winds were so strong we had to have friends on stage holding down the drum equipment!! I recently found an old video tape of this live concert, and now that I'm in the process of transcoding them for internet uploadle (!!), I'm realizing that the name Blow Fest has a double meaning!!

We had obviously just released Into Thy Hands and were pretty pumped to play a big stage festival show in our home town area. Sadly, there were so many problems with the festival gear and the people running it, that this proved to not be such a great concert. Ironically, it was being filmed with multiple cameras for the local TV station in Kitchener. I don't know how I ended up with a video copy from the 3/4 inch video source, but I did!

I won't upload the whole concert, because it really isn't good, and I'm sure Mike, Al or Andy would object to me uploading anything that they'd be embarrassed to see. I'm throwing a few segments up here at the blog, so that at least, these clips are for those who really want to see them. I'll post a few of the better clips at YouTube at some point too.

Andy had a particularly bad performance. This show is a demonstration in why Andy liked to tour with his own PA system and his own people running it. He was, and is, a perfectionist. It was not uncommon for us back in those days to be still doing our soundcheck with a house full of audience members. Andy wanted everything working properly before the show would start, so if that meant he was tweaking his guitar gear 5 minutes before showtime with a full house watching him, he'd do it. As was usually the case, he would work all day on the PA setup and then while the rest of us were putting our acres of hairspray on or eating, he'd still have to setup his guitars and amps.

At Freedom Fest, we had a tiny window with which to setup after the previous act had finished. By the time we started playing, no monitor levels had been set and half of our stuff wasn't audible on stage, and there certainly was no guarantee that any of it was coming through the house PA. Mike, Al and I just played anyway whether we could hear or not, but Andy was visibly flustered by the typically half-assed crew looking after our monitors. Watching this concert in its entirety, you see a gradual disintegration in Andy's playing and attitude. He is so stressed out and angry during one guitar solo that he just gave up and threw his hands in the air. Ironically, this happened at the precise moment the front of house PA went dead!! It was one of those kinds of shows!!!

I've been through many gigs like this now that I'm a touring side-musician. I've played a number of Country Music Festivals across Canada and in the States where you walk out on stage to set up your gear, while some jerk from a radio station is on stage warming up the crowd. You never get a proper chance to make sure you can hear yourself, and often times, you're 3-4 songs in before anything is working right. Of course, the big, marquee stars don't have this problem because they have people there to make sure everything is the way they want it.

For us at Blow Fest, we had no such clout!!

I remember after this show was over, Andy was so distraught, he took off with his wife for quite some time. The rest of us wanted to hang out with the fans, but Andy was out of there.

Anyway... it's all pretty funny to me now in retrospect! I can't get over all of our hair cuts and outfits!! Andy and I were well into our Mullets and Al had some great pleated pants!!

I sure wouldn't mind being that skinny again!!

Anyway... enjoy the videos for what they're worth.

Oh, on stage and in the crowd you'll see a variety of Awakening friends. That's Harold and Dwayne holding down the kit. The guy with the mustache by the drums is Ted Acorn. And in the audience were Glennn Pellow and Steve Habermehl, who were already playing in a punk band with Mike Powell!!