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Calgary Herald

Concert review: Eclectic lineup livens soggy Saturday at the Calgary Folk Music Festival

Article content 'It's not a folk festival until someone comes along with an electric guitar and (expletive) it all up' said Steve Earle on Saturday night at the Calgary Folk Music Festival before launching into a lively version of The Week of Living Dangerously, his scorching 1987 honky-tonk cautionary tale. Article content It was nice reminder of Earle's wild youth and his 50-year genre-fuzzy career that has always placed him on outer limits of country music. It was also, presumably, a reference to one of the most infamous folk-fest moments in music history: Bob Dylan's performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he went 'electric' and received boos and hostility from the folk purists in the crowd. Article content Article content After 46 years of adventurous music, it should be clear to anyone who has been paying attention that the Calgary Folk Fest has never been a festival for folk purists. Saturday's festivities at Prince's Island Park nevertheless offered a nice mix of what we have come to expect from a folk fest lineup: There was some straight-ahead folk from Scotland's Langan Band, some progressive politics and jazz-folk from U.S. singer-songwriter Madeleine Peyroux, some world-music from the lively Les Mamans du Congo X Rrobin and two roots-rock icons in Earle and veteran genre-hoppers Los Lobos. Article content Article content Article content Earle, who recently celebrated a half-century in the music industry, offered a good deal of nostalgia for long-term fans. He didn't leave the 1980s for his first five songs. Backed by Austin, Tx. country-rock act Reckless Kelly, Earle kicked things off with three songs from his 1986 debut Guitar Town that included the title track, the yearning Someday and haunting My Old Friend the Blues. It was followed by the singalong gem I Ain't Ever Satisfied from his 1987 sophomore record Exit 0 and the Devil's Right Hand from his 1989 breakthrough Copperhead Road. There were a few surprises. It was nice to hear his 1995 ballad Goodbye. It is one of his most beautiful and mournful melodies and the first song Earle penned when kicking a nasty drug habit. Bad Girls, a song literally released last week as a duet between Earle and Reckless Kelly, fit in nicely, as did the stinging title track and howling Fixin' To Die from 2017's So You Wanna Be An Outlaw. One of the highlights was It's About Blood, a harrowing obscurity from Earle's 2020 album Ghosts of West Virginia and the off-Broadway musical Coal Country, which is about the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster that killed 29 people. Article content Article content But, for the most part, Saturday's closing set offered a handful of crowd-pleasing favourites, including suitably charged takes on Copperhead Road, Hard-Core Troubadour, The Galway Girl and the Celtic-flavoured encore Johnny Come Lately, which Earle recorded with The Pogues in London in the 1980s (He dedicated the song to that band's late frontman Shane MacGowan, who died in 2023.) Article content Article content These days, the bearded 70-year-old Earle has a stage presence that suggests a somewhat weary elder statesmen, but having a band like Reckless Kelly behind him gave the songs an extra kick to end the evening. Article content The day was not without its speed bumps. A thunder storm and early evening downpour temporarily halted the music few minutes after the Langan Band finished their opening set, topping off a day of grey clouds on Prince's Island Park. The weather teetered on the edge of uncooperative on both Friday and Saturday afternoon during the four-day festival, with rain and unusually cold temperatures putting a damper on things and turning the park into a soggy, muddy mess. Just before Peyroux was about the hit the stage, the crowd was told that the performances would halt in hopes it would blow over. It delayed things for about an hour before the sun broke through the clouds, which may have gotten the loudest cheer from the soaked audience up until that point in the day.