NXNE Thursday Report #2

Pre-occupied people with their noses in NXNE pocket guides could be seen scurrying up and down Queen West by 9:30 pm on Thursday but it didn't really seem like a music festival until I walked into a jam-packed Bovine Sex Club where the black lipsticked Confessionals from Dallas were complaining about their monitor mix. There, near the front of the stage was professional music conference delegate Beatle Bob. Once the Confessionals started droning and Beatle Bob began swinging his arms and shimmying fancy, NXNE 2001 was officially on.

Over at the 360, Washington's Jack Potential were bashing blandly while badge-wearers checked their watches and looked for a nearby alternative. New York's Josh Joplin down the street at the Horseshoe would do in a pinch. His overly earnest singer/songwriterly strumming wasn't terribly exciting although Joplin's beaming Artemis label boss Danny Goldberg, who'd flown in early to catch the gig, clearly thought otherwise. He should've hung around for John Wesley Harding. The sharp-witted tunesmith took the stage to the sort of gleeful squealing and disposable camera flashes usually reserved for boy bands. If Harding knew those emerald green highlights put in by Robert Plant's Manhattan stylist would cause such a stir, he'd probably have gotten a dye job four or five albums ago.

His current Radical Gentlemen, multi-instrumentalist Robert Lloyd on mandolin and accordion along with harmony-singing bassist Chris Von Sneidern, provided incredibly tasteful accompaniment for the tunes from Harding's grandly orchestrated power-pop return, the Passions of St. Ace (Mammoth). He didn't suffer at all for the lack of horns, strings, keyboards and drums, in fact, the stripped down approach just showed off how well the snappy new songs were constructed.

On the way to see Royer's One-Man Band, I happened to bump into a frazzled looking Derek Emerson - who co-directed the forthcoming documentary on one-man bands, Let Me Be Your Man. It seems that getting Eric Royer into the country with his strange looking "guitar machine" proved to be an ordeal. After Royer drove the 14 hours from Boston, he was denied entry to Canada when customs officials in Niagara Falls saw the device he was hauling. Luckily, the determined Royer made a second crossing attempt at Buffalo which, thankfully, proved successful after a four hour delay while security guards ran checks on his homemade gizmo to ensure it wasn't some kind of cleverly disguised bomb.

A shoeless Royer, looking exhausted, lumbered onto the Healy's stage following an awesome full-band set from country sweetheart Jenny Whiteley, and proceeded to blow the roof off the joint. His pedal-pushing footwork with his guitar machine was amazing in itself but the big surprise was his banjo technique - this Beantown boy can really pick. Forty-five minutes and two encores later, people we're still hollering for more so he reluctantly got back in the driver's seat for a revved-up take of Turkey in the Straw which brought folks to their feet clapping, stomping and yes, even square dancing. Now that's gonna be hard to top.