The show must go on (and on, and on, and on . . .)
It will be sleepless in Stouffville as town goes for concert record
So is all of Stouffville just gonna call in sick for the last two weeks of March?
There are big dreams afoot in this bedroom community northeast of Toronto, where a group hopes to topple the Guinness world record for longest concert by multiple artists.
This would be a feat in itself, since the current record stands at a whopping 372 hours and 10 minutes, meaning that 16 days of round-the-clock live music is needed to surpass it.
Adding an extra layer of masochistic madness to the endeavour, though, is the fact that the standing record was set by the Ri Ra Irish Pub, housed in the Mandalay Bay casino complex in Las Vegas — a city with a population of more than 600,000 that welcomed more than 40 million visitors last year, according to tourism officials. Stouffville’s attempt will take place in the considerably less travelled confines of the Earl of Whitchurch Pub. It will, organizer Kevin Ker concedes, require a tad more effort to keep the place populated with the minimum10 conscious patrons required throughout the non-stop live performances to satisfy Guinness’s strict definition of a concert.
Regardless, starting March 17 — and, ideally, carrying on unabated until some time on April 2 — Stouffville is answering this unsolicited challenge.
“Las Vegas is obviously a 24-hour city and that Irish pub was in a casino, so it probably wasn’t a big issue for them to generate clientele in the restaurant during the event,” says Ker.
“We’re bringing this to Stouffville, a town with a population of 35,000 people that usually goes to sleep pretty early. So it definitely is a David-and-Goliath storyline.”
“I think it will totally succeed . . . It could be nuts.” BEN HUDSON UXBRIDGE COUNTRY SINGER-SONGWRITER
Still, one doesn’t have to be a biblical scholar to know how that particular storyline turned out.
And Ker — a musician who plays in the band Man Made Forest and whose Epidemic Music Group regularly hosts open-mic nights that have been known to run to marathon lengths in York Region establishments — exudes the confidence of someone who’s been able to rally 400 acts to his cause.
All of that accomplished, mind you, on scarcely a month’s notice since he and his co-conspirators hatched the idea of gunning for Guinness status in late January.
Radius clauses and label politics prevent him from spewing too many details about the coming lineup, but he promises “there are some bigger bands that will be showing up to this event, some reputable Canadian acts,” and harbours further hope that a “Woodstock effect” will prompt more to sign on as the mega-concert proceeds.
The original, more modest idea was to set a world record for the longest open-mic session.
But Guinness told them it sounded suspiciously like a “concert by multiple artists,” and so — by then “too invested in the idea to push it aside” — Ker et al. decided to go for the big prize.
The requirements of that prize are, as Ker puts it, “some pretty intense stuff” — including that there be no more than 30 seconds between numbers during the entire 16-day musical death march, no more than five minutes allowed for any onstage turnover between the one-hour performances and no more than one appearance by the same song in any set list within any four hours throughout the whole shebang.
Oh, and the entire odyssey must be captured on a static, uninterrupted video feed. (Ker has asked Paladin Security to set up multiple surveillance cameras in the venue to keep a time-stamped record of everything that goes on.)
Madness, then. But a “beautiful madness,” contends Heather Scala, one of a core group of around 25 people committed to making the seemingly impossible happen with the aid of many business and volunteer partners drafted from the community. “I’m sure it was no problem for them to get 10 people in their bar in Las Vegas at all times: they just had to throw open their doors,” she says.
“People are always walking around Mandalay Bay. So for Stouffville to take it, it really is going to take the effort of the entire community to make sure that it happens.
“One thing that I’ve been really cognizant of is the off-hours — between 3 a.m. and the morning commute, when the Earl has to close down their restaurant,” she says. “How are we going to create a unique experience for audience members so they’re not just sitting in a room with nothing?
“So we’re trying to reach out to people to provide catering at those times and I just want to make sure, whether people come at 11 a.m. or 11 p.m. or 5 in the morning, that there’s something special for them.”
To elevate the challenge above a quest for mere bragging rights, 16 charities — one a day — will be earmarked as beneficiaries of the $5 cover charge required to sit in on a session. So far, those include the Gord Downie Fund for Brain Cancer Research, Hospital for Sick Children, Markham Stouffville Hospital, North Toronto Cat Rescue, 360 Kids, ArtsCan Circle, the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada, Evergreen Hospice, the Family Navigation Project and Songs4Steffi.
Proceeds will be distributed evenly among all charities, but people can also visit epidemicmusicgroup.ca/ guinness-world-records to ensure their donation reaches the organization of their choice.
Uxbridge-raised country singersongwriter Ben Hudson and his band will be at the Earl on March 22 to do their part. His first impulse when told about the world record run, he admits, was “that’s chaos,” but he’s known Ker and his fellow organizers long enough to remain optimistic about the outcome.
“We got a pretty prime spot. Some of my friends who play music around the area, they joined a little later and they’re (playing) at 3 or 4 in the morning. It’s pretty crazy,” he laughs, adding with an insider’s wink that things could blow up bigger than expected if all goes as planned.
“I think it will totally succeed. I don’t think the Earl has the capacity for how many people might show up if some of the rumoured bands are actually going to show up and do a set. It could be nuts.”