What’s your role at Sled Island these days?
I’m the festival manager for the festival.
So what does that involve?
It’s a bit of everyone wearing a lot of hats. To be honest we’ve gotten better than ever at splitting up who does what but it’s definitely a scattered job. The bulk of it revolves around making sure the festival actually runs. So that’s talking to venues talking to the bands helping with our production staff setting some general direction to the programming but it’s kind of more about the nitty-gritty stuff — setting up load-in times and all that kind of stuff. It goes on and on. Website updates everything you can think of.
That sounds kind of overwhelming.
A little bit but we’ve got a really good team now so we actually have for the first time ever people on specific tasks that are experts at that task. It’s pretty amazing [laughs]. This year’s been a bit weird for me because a lot of the stuff I’m used to doing has already been taken care of.
It’s funny that it’s the first year you’ve had that. I guess any festival you have to find your feet.
Yeah and there’s just so much turnover because we are a small not-for-profit. This is the first year we’ve had two full-time staff so everyone’s been hired kind of seasonally or on contracts before that and it’s just hard to keep people around. We’ve been really lucky with people coming back. We’ve actually had some people who have worked very short contracts since the beginning of the festival and that kind of experience is basically the reason we’re still a festival just being able to count on those people to come in really last-minute and execute their jobs. We’re pretty blessed this year to have such an awesome team and I’m just kind of the guy that I don’t know gets to pretend like I’m taking credit for it.
How long have you been with the festival — has it been since day one?
Yeah well year one. I don’t know when the festival was actually initially conceived but the first year I came out I guess you could call it consulting — I never thought I’d be a consultant but I guess that’s the closest you could approximate what I did for the festival in year one. I came out for about a month-and-a-half before the festival just to help with some stuff that is easy to miss when you haven’t run a multi-venue festival before. Yeah I was just kind of loosely involved in year one had some discussions with Zak [Pashak] who founded the festival on big-picture ideas of what this was and what it could be and that was really inspiring and that’s what brought me out here. By year two I was living in Calgary and working on the festival. Over the years I’ve worked everywhere from a few months on the festival to year-round to taking a year totally not involved in the festival as well.
Where did your expertise come from to be brought on as a consultant?
I’d worked for a festival in Montreal called Pop Montreal and I think expertise especially eight years ago might be the wrong word. I’d had experience in dealing with disasters that come from not having expertise and that was probably useful info for a festival just getting started. I think more than anything it was just sort of Zak Pashak and I had some really good chats and I think we saw pretty eye-to-eye on the power of music and what it can do to mobilize a city and activate a city and that was inspiring. I think it had less to do with expertise and more to do with knowing I would be committed to seeing it through for the first year and helping him however I could.
Did you ever think it would ever get to this point? It must have seemed like an impossible task back then.
You know what’s nice about this year? It’s probably the first year we’ve really been able to think beyond surviving year-to-year. Which is a weird thing to say after a flood but that’s where our heads have been at. We’ve been thinking about next year already and what if this happens what if that happens. So before that I can’t say I thought Sled Island would last for eight years or 10 years or whatever I just thought it was a magical thing and I do trust in the community to support it and see it continue. But in the early years it was just an amazing thing that you wanted to stay around forever but I don’t think anyone had any clue if it actually would.
So despite the flood you’re on solid footing this year?
Yeah. Everything’s looking pretty good. It’s kind of the eerie calm before the storm right now. So it doesn’t seem like there’s any fires we can’t put out so far knock on wood. So yeah like I said we’ve got an amazing team this year I think the lineup is amazing everyone’s just been so supportive not just because of the flood but you know for the last eight years. It really is…. I know a lot of events use the term “community event” as sort of a buzzword but Sled Island really is a community event. So many people contribute to making this happen that anytime we feel overwhelmed it’s just good to step back and think “Oh yeah the guys at The Palomino they’ve got our back and if something goes wrong they’ve run shows like four or five shows a week for the last however many years.” We’ve got such a good support network in this city that it kind of seems like we survived a flood and I don’t want to tempt fate but it feels like we could survive anything.
You should probably move out of that basement office.
Last year I don’t know if you heard this but we had a fortune cookie and we opened it up and it said “The weather will co-operate with your event.” So we posted it all over Instagram and got all excited. At that time the weather forecast was great and….
So let’s talk about Napalmpom. You play guitar in the band and you guys play a lot of shows.
Yeah I really really like playing music with the other four guys in the band. Everyone kind of rails on us for playing so many shows — you know you’re going to kill your draw and all that kind of stuff — and I just think it’s kind of missing the point. You play music to have fun and to become a good band and to see where you can take this — not in a careerist respect but just like the more you play the better you get the more ideas you get the more people you meet who inspire you. So I just kind of think people have laughed at us enough already for playing so many shows that I just figure “ah let’s just keep playing them.” You know it’s like the rule of comedy it’s funny and then it stops being funny and then it starts being funny again. So we’ll just keep playing and the laughter will ebb and flow as it does.
You said that it’s not really a careerist thing. Is it just fun for you or is this something that you would pursue?
I take it extremely seriously but I have no delusions about this being a job like anything that can support me or anything more than that. It’s first and foremost something that’s really fun to do and I think we’re pretty smart people so we try to take opportunities when they’re there but they’re not about developing a career they’re really about “oh if doing this can make us get a cool show in this other city let’s try and do that. That would be fun.” So yeah I don’t know. We are just kind of having fun.
I guess you wouldn’t turn it down if it became a career.
To be honest I don’t know. I think that’s every musician’s dream to play music and have that be your sole focus. For more than anything just so I could spend days and days and days writing music and rehearsing and not having to worry about rent and not have to worry about all the other stuff but honestly that happens to .0001 per cent of bands these days. I have no expectations that we’re going to be one of those percentages so we’re just going to make as good rock ’n’ roll as we can in the meantime.
Do you do stretches before you get up onstage? I mean you bend pretty good when you’re playing guitar in the band.
I actually do. It’s kind of embarrassing. I mean adrenaline takes over when you play a rock show so you’re body does things that you don’t know it can do. When I was young it’s just kind of ingrained in me now that you know you watch Chuck Berry you watch Angus Young you watch bands growing up like Tricky Woo and these awesome stage antics and it just becomes like that’s what you’re supposed to do it’s not even a thought. When you’re young you just do it it just happens. But I learned pretty quickly when we were playing — I think we’ve played like 60 shows in the last year year and a half and you learn pretty quickly that you can’t do that without stretching because every show kind of has a four-day hangover if you don’t.
Is there anything you’re looking forward to at the festival this year anything that’s got you really excited?
I say it every year but it really is true that I stand behind every single band playing the festival big and small. Every band playing the festival has made a choice to passionately make music and take it seriously the music-making process. I think one unifying thing in our lineup is that people are coming at it from a really good place. They’re making music for the right reasons. I wish I could support them all I wish I could see every single one of them. That said I usually get to sneak away for about 20 minutes during the festival just to see a little bit of a set and I think this year it will be Rocket from the Crypt for me.
Twenty minutes? That’s all you get?
Sometimes it’s a little more. I managed to get 40 minutes at the Swans last year. But yeah generally it’s about 20 minutes and then I have to run over to another venue.
I guess we should talk about Olympic Plaza. You guys got a liquor licence for the whole plaza?
Yeah we just got notified yesterday Monday morning. So it’s the first time we’ve had that since 2011 when it was a pilot project. It makes a world of difference — not financially to be honest it’s really an atmosphere thing. For people who want to see a rock show to have to go 100 feet from the stage to have a beer it’s really just kind of alienating and then you have to make a choice of the band you don’t know that’s playing next do you take a chance and stand up front or do you beat the line at the beer garden to get a beer? It just makes it a way better atmosphere. You just take in the music as you normally would have a beer when you want. Everyone under 12 gets in for free so parents too it’s just easier for them. You don’t have to get someone to watch your kid while you sneak away to have a beer. It’s going to help so much especially for the bands to not be playing to a crowd that’s 100 feet away and feel kind of isolated. They’re going to be playing to people who are having a good time and enjoying the music responsibly.
