After the Moisture Festival
This was the last night of the Moisture Festival. Seattle’s own. And wasn’t it wonderful. You got more for your money than anywhere else in town. Clowns, jugglers, magicians, singers, dancers, aerialists, mimes, sword swallowers, people who sawed other people in half, people who made city sounds with their mouths, someone who blew real good soap bubbles, someone who plays real good spoons, a chorus line of dancing posterior bares, a can-can troupe, a great ensemble orchestra to follow your every whim, and an emcee who sometimes wore an antenna and spoke in circles and sometimes wore sequins and played country guitar. Maybe you had to be there but damn, it was something. It’ll happen again.
It all takes place at the Hale’s Palladium on Leary Way, just outside of Fremont, on the way to Ballard. I don’t know how many people it holds. 200, maybe. It’s packed all the time and it goes on for three weeks. It’s great because it shows you the wonders to be achieved by ordinary people. This is not Ringling Brothers. This does not have a seven figure budget and corporate sponsorship. The sponsors are all local and the budget might actually be hundreds of dollars. I never asked. But I do know that the performers all do it for the love of it, and that’s deeper than any Wall Street marquee.
It’s real important to understand that we – ordinary people, all of us – we are the masters of our craft. And our craft involves laughter and awe, fumble and stutter, the daring intoxication of high wire tom foolery and the sublime floatation of dancing on feathers. And it’s we – the ordinary people, who can do it the best because we can drop that fumble and laugh, and everyone laughs with us. If you don’t see that you can do it then you won’t try. We have to try.
It all started in the rain soaked past of Seattle’s invisible music scene. Way back in those days of broken cars and low rent. The early 70s. It was a sidewalk town back then, with lots of buses and tree lined back streets. And music. Lots of music. You never would have heard about it if you weren’t there. There was no music press and you couldn’t get famous unless you left. But it was magic.
I got here in 71 and broke right into it. The last folk club closed and I started carving out a reality in the anything-goes world of the already happening night life. And the day time life too – the campus and the streets. But the rock clubs were happening at night and the music was good. Bands like Butter Fat and The Doily Brothers. Mojo Hand and Lance Romance. Anyway, in 74 along comes Rose and The Dirt Boys – they’re out of Oklahoma and they just moved right in and made themselves at home. You could do that here in those days, it was that generous. Well, one of the brains of the dirt boys was Ron Bailey, or RB as they called him. A compact little Scotts Okie with a great voice and an unstoppable mind for invention he began collecting talented friends. He became kind of a magnet around which a lot of interesting people revolved. When The Dirt Boys broke up RB went on to the Dynamic Logs – a band that was larger or smaller depending on the circumstances. And that’s when things began to get real theatrical.
Anyway, making long stories shorter… Ducaniveaux was born somewhere in there, involving strange shadowy figures in Spain and Paris and New York, and they all started going to the Country Fair. So did a lot of jugglers and magicians and dancers and singers and all the rest. The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Tom Noddy, Faith Petric. So It was a natural progression if you look at it that way. It just had to happen. And where else could it have been?
The first Moisture Festival happened in a tent in a vacant lot in Fremont. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how well they did. But the next year, at the Hale’s Palladium, I played at it and that was it, I was hooked. So, you have to go to it next year. It’ll happen again, probably in the same place around the same time of year. Check out the web site: http://www.moisturefestival.com/ It’ll lift your spirits. And that’s no mean feat.
It all takes place at the Hale’s Palladium on Leary Way, just outside of Fremont, on the way to Ballard. I don’t know how many people it holds. 200, maybe. It’s packed all the time and it goes on for three weeks. It’s great because it shows you the wonders to be achieved by ordinary people. This is not Ringling Brothers. This does not have a seven figure budget and corporate sponsorship. The sponsors are all local and the budget might actually be hundreds of dollars. I never asked. But I do know that the performers all do it for the love of it, and that’s deeper than any Wall Street marquee.
It’s real important to understand that we – ordinary people, all of us – we are the masters of our craft. And our craft involves laughter and awe, fumble and stutter, the daring intoxication of high wire tom foolery and the sublime floatation of dancing on feathers. And it’s we – the ordinary people, who can do it the best because we can drop that fumble and laugh, and everyone laughs with us. If you don’t see that you can do it then you won’t try. We have to try.
It all started in the rain soaked past of Seattle’s invisible music scene. Way back in those days of broken cars and low rent. The early 70s. It was a sidewalk town back then, with lots of buses and tree lined back streets. And music. Lots of music. You never would have heard about it if you weren’t there. There was no music press and you couldn’t get famous unless you left. But it was magic.
I got here in 71 and broke right into it. The last folk club closed and I started carving out a reality in the anything-goes world of the already happening night life. And the day time life too – the campus and the streets. But the rock clubs were happening at night and the music was good. Bands like Butter Fat and The Doily Brothers. Mojo Hand and Lance Romance. Anyway, in 74 along comes Rose and The Dirt Boys – they’re out of Oklahoma and they just moved right in and made themselves at home. You could do that here in those days, it was that generous. Well, one of the brains of the dirt boys was Ron Bailey, or RB as they called him. A compact little Scotts Okie with a great voice and an unstoppable mind for invention he began collecting talented friends. He became kind of a magnet around which a lot of interesting people revolved. When The Dirt Boys broke up RB went on to the Dynamic Logs – a band that was larger or smaller depending on the circumstances. And that’s when things began to get real theatrical.
Anyway, making long stories shorter… Ducaniveaux was born somewhere in there, involving strange shadowy figures in Spain and Paris and New York, and they all started going to the Country Fair. So did a lot of jugglers and magicians and dancers and singers and all the rest. The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Tom Noddy, Faith Petric. So It was a natural progression if you look at it that way. It just had to happen. And where else could it have been?
The first Moisture Festival happened in a tent in a vacant lot in Fremont. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know how well they did. But the next year, at the Hale’s Palladium, I played at it and that was it, I was hooked. So, you have to go to it next year. It’ll happen again, probably in the same place around the same time of year. Check out the web site: http://www.moisturefestival.com/ It’ll lift your spirits. And that’s no mean feat.
posted by Jim Page at 12:27 AM
1 Comments:
Yup, well told.
When the musicians of Du Caniveaux met the vaudeville antics of the Karamazovs, the Daring Deviante Sisters, Reverend Chumleigh, Laughing Moon Theater, Tom Noddy (me) and others some new seed was planted within that fertile mind of Ron Bailey.
When Ron later joined me on a trip to Berlin, Germany to meet my clown friend Hacki Ginda and to take part in his Comedy and Varieté Festival the idea was given a shape.
The seed sprouted and with some volunteer nurturing and ample applications of ... um ... fertilizer ... it grew.
The Seattle rains, Seattle audiences, and Hale's beer have nourished it and now the Moisture Festival thrives.
Reality is this thing that we keep inventing as we go along, huh?
Tom Noddy
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