#6 Stories from the Edge of Music: k.d. lang pt 2
More k.d. lang + 2023 festival highlights
Here’s the sixth instalment of a weekly collection of true stories and warm-hearted memories by a publicist and concert promoter who spent more than 50 years in the music business.
Unable to sing, play an instrument or even dance, Richard Flohil is passionate about music.
Based in Toronto, now the fourth largest city in North America, he hopes you’ll find these stories worth your time — and even a $6.00 monthly subscription (or a discounted annual sub). That’ll keep the stories coming and top up his old age pension.
Today: more from the k.d. lang files.
Every record company in Toronto sent senior people to catch k.d. lang’s second week at Albert’s Hall ; without exception they called their U.S. and U.K. parent companies to tell them that they’d found a winner.
k.d. had become an “overnight star” in Canada’s most important and influential music market. It was time, now, to follow up with the major U.S. labels.
And that meant a showcase appearance at the Bottom Line, New York’s most prestigious showcase club. Problem #1: nobody involved with the artist’s career knew anyone at The Bottom Line — but a New York friend made a sales pitch on the artist’s behalf.
Problem #2: the “employer” had to jump through hoops involving a great deal of immigration paperwork to get a foreign artist into the United States. Alan Pepper, the club’s owner, said he simply couldn’t be bothered, given that this was a Monday night unpaid showcase spot involving three unknown artists, k.d. included.
Fortunately, his summer intern was a young woman from Edmonton. “Believe me,” she told her boss, “this singer is huge back home; she’s amazing.” Pepper’s response: “Alright then, you do the paper work.”
Wanagas, the band and I drove to New York in the van; Kathy, exhausted, flew down.
Also on the showcase bill was a singer-songwriter whose name has been lost to history, and a 12-piece women’s a cappella vocal group called Lighthouse, presumably unaware that there was a well-established Canadian band with the same name.
Lighthouse, who opened the show, brought their friends and families out in force and, possibly recognizing another gay woman, they stayed for k.d.’s set. It was a triumph. And Pepper insisted that she return to the venue; this time he’d do the paperwork himself.
Just before her second Bottom Line appearance, there was another example of unplanned good fortune. At home in Toronto, reading a copy of the Village Voice, New York’s alternative weekly newspaper, I recognized a byline on one of the music articles — it was by a young woman with whom I’d had the briefest of pelvic affiliations three years earlier.
I called her, she remembered me, and when I pitched the idea of a story, she was interested. I sent her a copy of k.d.’s album, assorted press clippings, and a selection of wacky publicity photographs. And two days before we all went to the Bottom Line for the second time, there was a full-page story, with a prominent picture, in the Voice…
But the show itself was one of the toughest k.d. had ever done — she was opening for NRBQ, a New York cult rock and roll band with a dedicated fan following. They were there in force, and couldn’t have been less interested in an eccentric artist in strange clothes singing what people described as “cowpunk” music.
However, the key record companies were there: CBS, Island, Warner Brothers, Virgin and more, but it took k.d. two-thirds of her hour-long set to grab her audience — and when she “got” them, she didn’t let go. When she finished, she collapsed on a beaten-up couch backstage, sweating and totally spent.
Seymour Stein, the head of Sire Records and the man responsible for Madonna’s remarkable career, went to the dingy dressing room and told her: “You are what country music could have been if Nashville hadn’t fucked it up.”
There’s really a postscript. Back in Toronto, after her second Albert’s Hall appearance she “graduated” to the Diamond, the most prestigious music club in the city at the time, and then to the Ontario Place Forum, an 8,000-seat in-the-round venue, where she sold out two shows.
Across Canada she played almost all the major folk festivals. Seymour Stein did indeed sign her to Sire; after her second Bottom Line show she went to Japan for a month to appear at Expo 86.
A few months later she won a Juno Award for Most Promising New Artist — an honour she accepted after galloping through the audience wearing a thrift-store wedding dress, symbolic of the promises made at nuptials.
“I promise always to sing for the right reasons,” she said in her acceptance speech.
And so she has.
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SUMMER FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS
• Rufus Wainwright singing “Shenandoah” as a duet with Judy Collins at Mariposa. Incidentally, he sang two songs before he told the audience that he was gay. Gee, we didn’t know that already?
• Serena Ryder at Canmore and Owen Sound’s Summerfolk. Two exquisite performances by an artist who had her audiences in the palm of her hand,
• Tanya Tucker at the Calgary Folk Festival, She had her first hit when she was 13; she’s in her mid-60s now and a consummate Nashville artist. Incidentally, her T-shirt merch reads:
TANYA
MOTHER
TUCKER
Garnetta Cromwell at the Calgary Blues Festival. That said, she should never sing “Respect” again — Aretha nailed that song and nobody could better it.
Surprises of the summer: Carsie Blanton and Terra Spencer at Mariposa
Sierra Ferrell at the Calgary Folk Festival, contemporary country mixed with bluegrass — sassy and classy
Watching Tegan and Sara fight a losing battle with hordes of flying insects at Mariposa
Meeting Feist at Mariposa — she reminded me that we’d met several years before at Hillside. She has a better memory than I do.
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FLOHIL’S RULES FOR PERFORMERS #5
Never leave your wallet in the dressing room.
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SONG LYRIC OF THE WEEK
“I’m going to drink ‘til I see double, then I’m taking one of you home” — Ray Wylie Hubbard.
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OK, everyone, that’s issue #6 of Stories from the Edge of Music. Next week: Miles Davis wants to buy my car. And if you’re having half the fun reading this stuff as I am writing it, you should consider joining the 40-odd PAID subscribers. I really need to buy glasses…
Loved part two of the kd lang story!