Truly Awe-Inspiring

August 19 2004

 

Greetings Fringe Followers,

  Well, I'm not sick anymore; far from it in fact, I feel as good as I have in months. The main reason for my euphoria will be revealed shortly, but first, let me tell you about the adventures of Jonny Quality and their pet Rapper.  After the show last Thursday Erik and I bit the bullet train ticket price (£35 each) and took the rail down to Newcastle, England, for the JonnyQuality show. We stayed with Robert, the Canadian ex-pat partner of Carole, who was one of the managers of the Prague Fringe. In fact, with Jonny Quality and a few other key familiar faces, Newcastle turned out to be something of a Prague Fringe reunion. The band was all there, having just road-tripped up from Brighton, Sean the lead guitarist and figurehead, Pete on bass and lead vocals, Nick on the turntables, and Steve on drums, the human incarnation of the Muppet "Animal".

  The band was booked to play in a bar called the Cumberland Arms, which interestingly enough is home to the national champion "Rapper" team. In Northern England, "Rappers" are folk dancers who twirl the long blades used to scrape sweat off of a work pony's back, and the pub's walls were covered with plaques for the champion Rapper team - it even featured a tasty "Rapper Ale" on tap. I felt right at home. For those just tuning in, the band Jonny Quality and I co-wrote a song called "John Deere Greene" with a funky bass-line, country twang guitar, a hiphop beat, and a whole rap story-line about a back-country romance. We had worked on our separate parts before, but Newcastle was the first time we got to perform it live together, and I dare say it rocks. I got to open for them in front of a small but avid crowd in the Cumberland Arms, pumping El Plantador (our folk jam) for the locals used to a different kind of folksy Rapper. I also got a rousing response for Pagan Party, which I introduced by saying, "Here's how we're gonna party: imagine it's 1945 and everyone's in the streets celebrating the peace!" and to my surprise it was the older folks who got up to dance to it, singing along with gusto "We goan party like we just came home from war..." and a few of them I could see were speaking from experience.

  Last Thursday was also the beginning of a self-sustaining existence for Erik and I, since we managed to sell over a dozen CDs and two T-Shirts between the two shows that day, and ever since we've been living off of the daily cash from the merchandise table. This is pretty gratifying in a city with such a high cost of living. The next morning after the Newcastle gig we piled in the Jonny Quality tour van with the band and set off to get me back to Edinburgh for my show that afternoon, supposedly a two hour drive. However, a broken window that had to be fixed, a leisurely breakfast, an empty gas tank and a traffic jam combined to sabotage our best-laid plans. We ended up stuck in traffic twenty minutes out of town as the audience stood in line waiting for me at the theatre, tickets in hand. Eventually it was obvious we had blown it, so I had to phone the box office and cancel the show, yet again, and issue everyone refunds. This was the fourth show I cancelled since starting and I vowed it would be my last.

  Jonny Quality was in town for the whole weekend and played gigs everyday. The highlight was an hour-long set Sunday on the massive outdoor Princes Street Gardens stage, with hundreds of festival folk filling the stands, and four professional video cameras filming the whole thing onto a massive screen above the stage, MTV-style. The stage sits in the bottom of a gorge overlooked by the towering ancient walls of Edinburgh castle, which was lit up by the sun-set as they played - beautiful. They called me up for "John Deere Greene" halfway through the set and we ramped it up festival-style, making the crowd go nuts.  Later that night they played their final set at the C-Venues theatre, and brought the whole audience up on stage to dance for the last song - it was a smash.

  Besides the cancelled show last Friday, I had been drawing between eighteen and twenty-five punters to each performance of The Rap Canterbury Tales, which is on everyday at 2:30 in the afternoon. Each day Erik and I get up, usually with an hour or so to spare, which we either use to flyer on the streets or have tea and breakfast, then we do the show, selling CDs and T-Shirts afterwards to pay for our daily food and beer. Then after the show we usually find a corner to set up a Rap Canterbury shrine, with posters and a small table covered with CDs. Also, we bought a portable ghetto blaster, so we pump my album on the corner and hand out flyers (Erik on his rollerblades) all afternoon to the hundreds of people out on the streets, usually by the Royal Mile. Then in the evening we go see one or two of the hundred other shows on at C-Venues, all of which are free with our company passes, and there is some excellent theatre here.

  This daily routine of flyering on the street was drawing us our twenty people per day, give or take, but with this kind of average we would barely break even on the box-office guarantee owed to C-Venues for renting their space. What we really needed was a few good reviews. Most of the other posters around the venue had been accumulating reviews and four or five star ratings over the first ten days of the festival, and ours were conspicuously bare. On the Saturday after coming back from Newcastle we heard that The Scotsman newspaper had sent a reviewer into the show, and sure enough there was a woman in the crowd taking notes the whole time, but nothing was published for days and we could only bite our nails and wait. A review from the Scotsman can make or break a show here in Edinburgh, since it's considered the most prestigious publication for its tough critics.

  The day before yesterday we had over forty people show up, which was brilliant, because we had four cancelled shows to make up for. This was mostly due to a flyering blitz the day before, where we spent quite a few hours and probably handed out close to a thousand. Then, yesterday, the bomb dropped. When we showed up for the afternoon's performance all of the staff were grinning, and the place was mobbed. The show was completely sold out - people were sitting in the aisles and standing at the back. I heard the buzz but didn't really register it until after the show when someone brought me a copy of The Scotsman, which had run an article reviewing all three of the shows on at this year's Fringe that are adapted from Chaucer. The critic had run it like a competition, first reviewing one: Three Stars, then the next: Four Stars, then finally the winner, The Rap Canterbury Tales: Five Stars.

  It's still unreal for me to read the article, which heaps praise on the show, especially since the best review I had ever gotten was three stars in Toronto.  But I've re-written a lot since then, and I now include my newest opus "The Rhyme Renaissance" in every performance, just to sum up the concept. For those unfamiliar with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I'll be clear: five stars from the Scotsman is the rating every show salivates over when preparing for their run. It's the highest possible rating from the most respected and brutally critical publication that reviews shows, and it ensures a huge spike in ticket sales.

So we spent yesterday printing out and photocopying my favourite quote from the article: "Truly awe-inspiring" along with the stars of course, and stapling it onto all of our flyers and posters. Needless to say, this changes everything about how this run is going to go. We sold out again today - sixty seats filled.

  So, this can't help but brighten things up a little, but we're determined not to rest on our laurels. In a way it's just luck, since there are certain types of people who just naturally get excited about my performance and feel nothing but delight, while others simply don't get much from it. Until yesterday I had only been reviewed by the latter sort, but fortunately the Scotsman sent someone who really got it, and who wanted to see other people get it as well. For this I am eternally grateful, since it makes our job that much more rewarding and less discouraging. Still, it would be a mistake to assume that one review will ensure a sell-out show for the next week and a half - that's right, believe it or not we only have eleven days left here. So, we're going to keep building steam and run with it. I have to admit though, it keeps me smiling to see every seat in the house filled, since everyone is a lot quicker to loosen up and have fun with the stories, not to mention the fact that I might actually manage to pay for my plane ticket.

All the best from a performer on cloud nine,

  Baba

  PS - I just got a call from Erik this minute to tell me that C-Venues is arranging extra shows for me in prime-time evening slots, due to overwhelming demand, and we have now pre-sold over half of our tickets for the rest of the run. Hmm, I think I'd better get out there and take care of business. Wish me luck.