Cowboy Junkies, Catie Curtis, Angela McCluskey, Mark Geary, The Damnwells, Mark Erelli

Allegheny Landing Park, Pittsburgh, PA....

The 7th annual WYEP Summer Music Festival. One behind-the-scenes component of this SMF was constructions taking place on the Parkway West. That's the stretch of road between down and the airport, and the construction delays caused some real headaches. 

Prior to the event my co-workers told some stories about Angela McCluskey, who had performed at the 3rd SMF in 2000 as a member of the Wild Colonials. She was a very direct person and she did not suffer fools, I was told. Someone from the station had to pick her up from the airport and bring her to her hotel the day before the festival, and everyone who might have done it backed away into the shrubbery, Homer- Simpson-like, when the subject came up. I volunteered to do it. Everyone else was afraid of her, I thought, but not me. She flew in late on Friday, June 25th, and as it turned out she was very pleasant. Even when we hit an extended traffic slowdown on the Parkway, she was a delightful conversationalist and was in a good mood. So all was well. 

The next day, the construction caused significant problems. After Jesse Malin committed to performing at our event, he got an offer to headline at Mercury Lounge in NYC that Friday and Saturday. So, his manager told me, Jesse would perform in NYC on Friday, take a flight to Pittsburgh on Saturday morning, play our event, take a flight back to NYC right after, and do the second night at Mercury Lounge. What could go wrong? Well, firstly, his flight was delayed from NY to PIT. We had to re-arrange the order of the World Cafe tapings at the Warhol Museum that were happening in conjunction with the Summer Music Festival and, eventually, we had to drop his festival performance and instead ask folk singer Mark Erelli, on the scene as a sideman to Catie Curtis, if he could do a set of his own material for the SMF.

After Malin finally arrived--and I was the one picking him up from the airport--we got caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic due to the Parkway construction. Back then, no GPS and I didn't have a cell phone. So we were just stuck. Jesse and his keyboard player were exhausted and not thrilled to be stuck in traffic. (Neither was I.) Finally, we got to the Warhol, he did his World Cafe taping and then had to be whisked back to the airport to fly back to NYC for his third gig in 26 hours.

Cowboy Junkies did a good headlining set, but I was a little annoyed when they were performing. When I got the band's rider for the show, I called their manager and mentioned to him that this wasn't a regular gig at a typical venue. We're a public radio station putting on the show and do we have to get the specific requests for champagne or whatever they require on their rider. He said, no, that's fine. You don't have to get all that stuff--except for an arrangement of fresh flowers for on the stage. Singer Margo Timmons needs that, regardless. Really, I ask. Really, he said. So while I'm hearing the 5-person band play beautiful renditions of classics like "Anniversary Song" and fine new songs like "The Stars of Our Stars" from their latest album One Soul Now, I'm just looking at the fresh-cut flowers in a cheap vase on a little table on the stage and thinking, why is this necessary? 

I also had to pick up Margo and Michael Timmons from their hotel the next morning and drive them to the airport. I had to get up super early to do a different hotel pickup, so I hadn't had much sleep and hadn't showered either. To cover my unruly hair I grabbed a hat and it turned out to be a Pittsburgh Penguins ballcap, which was a mistake. I like hockey, I enjoyed watching Penguins games (in fact, I had the hat as I had attended a Pens game on free hat night), but I was woefully unprepared to have a deep conversation about hockey with a Canadian musician. As soon as Michael saw my hat, he started in on hockey talk during the car ride to the airport and, boy, was I in over my capped head. 

I was very happy to have Mark Geary taking part. I really liked his three albums that the Irish singer-songwriter had released by that point and though he was not well-known I hoped he would find a wider audience. He had come to perform as a solo performer, but as it turned out Bruce Martin and another member of Angela McCluskey's band had worked with him before so they jumped up on stage during his set and began playing along on drums and keyboards (Geary was performing right before McCluskey, so their gear was already set up on the stage). There was a nice moment when Geary suddenly had musicians playing with him on a song he had started solo, and after the song Geary cried out excitedly into the mic, "I have a band!" in his Irish accent.

Angela McCluskey was terrific in her set as well. Her debut solo album The Things We Do was really nice and we had been playing the reggae-tinged "It's Been Done" on WYEP for a while. One of the players on her album who had come to our festival in her backup band was Richard Fortus, and I was very glad to have met him. He was in a St. Louis band called the Pale Divine which I had played on WHTG in 1991 (they only released one album, Straight to Goodbye, an ironic title given it was their sole full-length release). The Pale Divine opened for the Psychedelic Furs, and then Richard Butler tapped Fortus to be in his next band Love Spit Love. By the time of our Summer Music Festival in 2004, Fortus had been hired for two years to be guitarist in Guns N' Roses. It was then still an open question as to whether GNR would ever complete anything again or if Axl Rose would dilly-dally forever in the studio. So Fortus had time on his hands to do side-gigs like playing with Angela McCluskey. (While GNR would finally release an album in 2008, McCluskey tragically died in 2024 at age 64.)