#14 Stories from the Edge of Music: Ani DiFranco Pt. 2
How a benefit concert launched Ani to the international “folk” world. And, for something completely different, Anne Murray meets the King of Swing
In February 1997, Folk Alliance International — the largest folk organization in the world — was planning its annual convention in Toronto. It was also facing financial difficulties, and desperately needed help.
The answer, perhaps: a major benefit concert. A highly influential backroom music figure, Derek Andrews, roots music fan Randi Fratkin (who was also one of the leading kids’ dentists in Canada), and I went to work. We booked Massey Hall for the opening night of the conference, but booking the artists was much harder. Nobody was up to do a benefit concert, let alone one we’d optimistically christened “The Folk Dream Gala.”
One of us had the idea of phoning Pete Seeger — and to our surprise, he agreed without a moment’s hesitation. After that, we had to turn down all sorts of artists — and we finally settled on a line-up that sold out the 2,700 seat hall, raised $35,000 for Folk Alliance, and helped save the organization from collapse. It was certainly the first “folk” event at Massey Hall with scalpers hard at work selling tickets at exorbitant prices on the sidewalk outside.
Tom Paxton and James Keelaghan were the hosts, and the line-up consisted of Ani DiFranco, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Moxy Früvous, blues singer Alvin Youngblood Hart and the Barra MacNeils. And at the last minute, we booked Leahy, a family band from Peterborough, Ontario; their record company bribed us with the purchase of 50 top-price tickets, on condition that they would open the show. Pete Seeger headlined.
Ani was indeed the highlight of the benefit concert, but her set was interrupted by a young woman who ran from the audience and jumped onto the stage. Standing next to Ani in mid-song, she began to dance and start to shed her clothes. Watching this in horror, Derek and I were paralyzed. Obviously we couldn’t send out a couple of large (male) bouncers to get the woman offstage, in front of a full house.
The singer herself solved the problem, and persuaded her overly enthusiastic fan to leave. However, Ani was rightly dismayed and angry that the woman was found in her dressing room when she came offstage. As the organizers, Derek, Randi and I were sternly taken to task for the lack of security; Ani was not pleased, and we certainly couldn’t blame her. Today, her contract specifies additional security in front of the stage.
My friend Dale Anderson, her manager, soon parted ways with his client. As her career took off, he found it harder to juggle his day job at The Buffalo Evening News with the endless demands for Ani’s music at festivals, concert halls and clubs all over North America.
There was also a British tour — but the paperwork wasn’t done (or done properly) and the singer was turned back at London’s Heathrow airport: inadmissible to the United Kingdom. I can’t say this was the final straw, but she turned to others for management, retaining Jim Fleming as her agent.
Three or four years later, I got a phone call from Dale: would I go to New York to speak on his behalf at an arbitration hearing? He was seeking payment under the terms of the contract he and Ani had signed at the start of her career. Two days in New York? Sure, take me to the Big Apple! I knew nothing of the contract that was being disputed, but I was happy to speak about the professionalism I had experienced dealing with Dale — and, indeed, the professional way that Ani herself had behaved at the half dozen gigs that I’d been involved with since her Mariposa debut and prior to her Massey Hall appearance.
We all sat in a sterile meeting room in an anonymous Manhattan office building, all very serious. At one side of the table, Ani — with all her tattoos neatly covered by a frilly white blouse — sat with her lawyer, her new manager, and Jim Fleming. She had a brittle, fixed smile on her face; we didn’t exchange a word. Across from her sat Dale, his lawyer, myself and a fellow promoter from Texas.
Apparently, the dispute was never solved, but in her autobiography Ani says that my “evidence” — such as it was — was more supportive of her case than it was of Dale’s.
Since then, I’ve heard her play at three festivals: Falcon Ridge in upstate New York, at Mariposa again and at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. More recently, I stood throughout her sold-out Danforth Music Hall show…
Alas, we never took the opportunities to discover whether our early friendship could have been rekindled.
And I’m sad that it hasn’t.
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ANNE MURRAY MEETS THE KING OF SWING
Back in 1970 Paul Mills, the now-retired record producer and folk guitarist, was working on a CBC Radio programme involving Benny Goodman, the clarinetist known in the big-band era as the King of Swing. It was a hot August afternoon, and much of the day’s work was done.
There was time to kill before Goodman’s 10 p.m. flight back to New York. “Man,” he asked Mills, “do you know anybody with a pool? I could do with a swim…”
So Mills called Canadian superstar singer Anne Murray, with whom he had completed a project few weeks before. Could he bring Goodman over to her house for a dip in her pool? “THE Benny Goodman?” she asked. “I’d love to meet him.”
After his dip, Goodman sat in her recreation room sipping white wine. “I hear you’re in the music business. So, just what do you do?”
“I’m a singer,” she replied. “Right now I’ve got a number one hit in the U.S., Canada and Australia. It’s a song called ‘Snowbird’ — have you heard it?”
No, he said, he’d not heard it. “Put it on for me,” he asked. Goodman listened, happily tapping his fingers on the table. Then, when the string section came in on the song’s arrangement, Goodman leaned over to Mills.
“Dentist’s office music,” he said in a loud whisper.
Years later, Mills said he didn’t think Anne Murray heard the critical summation of her hit. “I hope she didn’t, anyway.
“But she does have very good hearing.”
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Chanukah is a holiday that asks us to celebrate resistance against oppressors, and I dare say that in light of the current war and the different ways in which it is being perceived, there’s a lot to unpack in that: the complexity of these concepts, the tragic overlapping of identities and realities of the oppressed and the clashing fights for the rights to exist freely and with dignity, which EVERY human being deserves.... May the world progress to a point where language can do all of our bidding, rather than violence.”
— Israeli-Canadian singer-songwriter Orit Shimoni, in a recent Facebook post.
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THE FUNNIEST SUBSTACK LINK YET
When I discovered Substack three months ago, and started Stories from the Edge of Music, I found a number of fellow newsletters that have been incredibly informative and “educational” — and, every now and then, hilariously funny.
You have to read this — a column by
about odd book titles. If you don’t laugh, please seek medical advice. And if you love books, you really ought to subscribe…
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FINALLY, THIS WEEK’S LAST WORDS
Well, not quite. If you’re a paid subscriber, there is a bit more. Another addition to the Ani DiFranco story, some thoughts about subways (the underground trains, not the sandwiches) and a seasonal video to make you smile.
All of this, of course, is to reward my noble paid subscribers, and to persuade YOU to join them!
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