All of Ottawa’s an open stage
The first time I played at an open stage was back in the early 1980s, which makes it pre-CD, in the Cassette Age. The stage was in Rasputin’s music club on Bronson Avenue. It was covered with a genuine cowhide, upon which famous feet had stood, and the room was swirling with creative energy, firing in all directions. My nerves that night were like the strings on my guitar, wound tight, and I was under-rehearsed, relying instead on my inner genius to suddenly emerge, turned on by the rapt gaze of the audience. I sucked, the applause was polite and tepid, but I had garnered experience, the great teacher: the performing cherry had been popped. I began to go regularly to open stages around town, suffered slings and arrows, and gradually went through the gears from not bad to OK to being given money to bang out Celtic thrash tunes to small rooms full of hosers and hosettes.
Readers who have participated in or attended Ottawa’s open stages over the last three decades will be experiencing a memory rush as they read this, as am I as I write it. Alongside those soul-swelling nights at Rasputin’s, the stages were open at Friends & Co., at the Mad Cow, Whispers, Molly McGuire’s, the Hitching Post, the New Edinburgh Pub, Jack Purcell Centre, the Somerset, the Bank Cafe and the Cajun Attic, to mention only a few of the ones I played at. You can doubtless add many others. A handful of the musicians who debuted their chords there went on to have a career making their entire living as travelling musicians. (A famous Canadian musician was once asked at a music workshop to define success in the Canadian music scene. He replied, “Not playing to drunk people.”) Some of the veteran open stagers are still, as we say, working the corners, standing before a microphone in a dark, chatty bar running through the cover repertoire, making some weekend money. A good slice of them are still turning out now and then, strapping on their well-worn axe and singing their favourites, a Dylan or two, a Neil Young for sure, a Joni or a Lennie. I wonder if the three Canadians in that short list I just recited made their start at open stages.
But the majority of singers I saw in those years have faded away to their own kitchens or campfires, or a barbecue, or left the guitar standing in a corner orphaned and unplayed.
A healthy music scene in a community is good for everyone, and the base of the pyramid, as it were, are the open stages, with the headliner at the top.
In a few years those guitars are going to be replaced, I would imagine, by ukuleles. There was one such singer and poet who I call to mind now and then who went by the name of Ian from Nepean. I think he may well have been a little left of sane at the time, but he had something. Anyone know what happened to him?
The urge to perform is like a virus; it moves in and lives in the gut of some and with the talent to feed it, and something fresh to say, they satisfy it and we pay them to do so, thereby enriching the cultural life of the city. For most, the bug settles down, and they are left with a story or two about the night they finally left the audience and got through three songs and felt the drug of applause wash through them.
The open-stage training ground is a vital part of any local music scene and it is thriving in Ottawa, perhaps more so than ever. There are future stars out there making their way up the ladder. The fact that for minimum layout on the part of the owner, and sometimes none at all, there is music all night (we are not discussing calibre here; it can be magical or excruciating, mostly passable) makes a mid-week open stage attractive to bar proprietors as well. Instead of one performer, there are as many as 10, each usually sticking to the three-song minimum, and each musician usually has one or two friends along as cheering section. Voila, a full bar, healthy beer sales (is that an oxymoron?) and perhaps an incremental step for a future headliner.
The urge to make music for ourselves and in front of others is an honourable, vital one. There are sheafs of studies and professors and popular books, several of each source just mentioned hailing from McGill University, to show that making music induces a hormone response similar to that associated with orgasm. (Hey, stop, where are you all going?) An audience member touched by the musical emanations from the stage can have the same response, and when the audience as one is singing along with the performer, as they were the other night at the Paul McCartney concert, we are talking multiple.
Clearly then, a healthy music scene in a community is good for everyone, and the base of the pyramid, as it were, are the open stages, with the headliner at the top. I still have an open stage I go to once a week — it’s up in Wakefield, and every Wednesday night there is musical theatre, and I know there are dozens of others across the city. By next week I’ll have visited a couple and I’ll file a report. I might even see you there.