Haunted by Sound: Calgary Folk Fest and the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio

Spelled in lower case, iskwe wore angelic white garments and multicolored indigenous face paint as she belted out a haunting mélange of trip-hop-influenced electronica and original Canadian rock music. I sprawled out on the grass in front of Stage 4 at the 2019 Calgary Folk Fest, while iskwe’s music and words addressed land protection, pipelines, gender disparity and suicide prevention, bringing indigenous issues to the foreground. All around us, evergreen trees rose toward the summer skies.

A diverse live music ecosystem is not what immediately came to mind when most people thought of Alberta, especially Calgary, a decidedly hard-boozing town that transformed into a drunken zoo during the Stampede every summer—the town’s signature ten-day spectacular. Carnivore culture and the oil industry were huge parts of the town’s reputation. I was told if I hung around long enough, I’d wind up wearing a cowboy hat at some point. And like every major Canadian city, hockey flowed through Calgary’s bloodstream. All of this.

But I didn’t come for any of that. I was in town to let the music haunt me. This was only the first night of Folk Fest, as the locals called it, one of the city’s other signature events, located in Prince’s Island Park, surrounded by the majestic Bow River, technically part of Treaty 7 territory. Stage 4 was “The National Stage.”

Across the neighborhood, I had just seen iskwe’s likeness grace an entire wall inside the National Music Centre at Studio Bell, a gargantuan museum-style complex that also featured a massive collection of historic musical instruments and analog synthesizers across multiple floors. The original Rolling Stones Mobile Studio—the truck mentioned by Deep Purple in “Smoke on the Water”—was now permanently parked outside the building, wired directly into the Studio Bell recording facilities.

Folk Fest was part of a long-standing tradition on the prairies of Canada, where similar fests had thrived ever since a young hippie Trotskyite named Mitch Podolak launched the Winnipeg Folk Fest in 1974. The Calgary fest was one of many.

As iskwe wrapped up her haunting set, people continued to filter in for the opening evening of music, both on this stage and the main stage—now a permanent concrete structure with two impressive jumbotron-style screens way off to each side. All the other stages would soon erupt over the weekend. But now it was 8:30pm on a Thursday, with nothing but daylight and pastoral vibes blanketing the landscape, perfect for a duo called The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer, who came next.

Hailing from Vancouver, the greasy blues duo started during the daylight, but the sun descended behind them as their set barreled on with foot-stomping panache. By the time they concluded, a nighttime prairie sky presided over the scene, as the bright hues of the stage lights projected into the warmth of the evergreens, pines, and other deciduous trees I couldn’t identify.

As the night wore on, the foliage and the Bow River became even more majestic. Plus, I was already looking forward to the space-time shattering experience of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

The Mona Lisa of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Originally owned by the band beginning in the late 1960s, the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio was a control room built into the back of an 11-ton vehicle ten meters long. It was the first ever professional mobile recording facility. The band had it made so they could record tracks wherever they wanted, that is, wherever the cops wouldn’t bust in on them. It fit perfectly with their iconoclastic, anti-establishment lifestyle. Or so they claimed.

Other bands soon followed. Aside from Stones records like Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, many iconic rock albums were recorded with the studio, including Led Zeppelin III, Led Zeppelin IV and Neil Young’s Harvest. Bob Marley, Lou Reed and Iron Maiden all later cut legendary live albums with the same truck. In Deep Purple’s case, the truck nearly caught fire when the Montreux Casino was set ablaze during a Frank Zappa gig, all while Deep Purple waited in the wings to record their LP, Machine Head. Their tune, “Smoke on the Water,” famously described the entire incident.

The National Music Centre in Calgary acquired the mobile studio at an auction in 2001, after which it sat in storage for several years. Now it was fully restored and permanently parked in an alcove right next door to the equally historic King Eddy Saloon, with 24 microphone lines wired directly into the King Eddy stage so that any band could record a live gig. The alcove was attached to the Studio Bell complex, which likewise allowed for direct connectivity to the Studio Bell's live recording rooms. Any band, budget permitting, could now record with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, either on stage at the King Eddy, or in Studio Bell upstairs. What a scene.

In its current incarnation, the truck was a solid blue rectangular monster of a van with a small cab up front. On the side of the truck, thin rectangular windows with curved corners revealed white curtains on the inside. Various instructional plaques explained the history.

Jason Tawkin, a young engineer at Studio Bell, took me inside the truck. He could not stop talking. His enthusiasm was infectious, especially when talking about current bands that used the studio. He harkened back to the good old days, when live recording ruled the day, before post-production was needed, or available, to fix everyone’s mistakes.

“I think it’s the lineage and the heritage of the truck, that makes musicians bring their A-game,” Tawkin said, as we stepped up into the studio. “If it’s the same equipment that their heroes used, they then push themselves to perform better and do better things because, really what this is about, all of this technology, is about capturing a performance that’s happening. And so much of today’s digital recording technology is about manipulating a performance after the fact to make it good. So you’d have things like autotune and quantization that try to make the performer better. Whereas this approach to technology is ‘Let’s capture what’s already happening in the room.’”

Inside the truck, the original custom Helios soundboard from the late 1960s, in all its dirty analog glory, was now fully restored, along with decades-old half-inch tape decks. Upon entering, one could almost smell the history. It had a vintage, old-cigarettes-and-booze type of aura. I couldn’t even imagine the amount of debauchery that unfolded in this truck while legendary producers manned the controls. I was now standing in front of the very same equipment that was used to record Led Zeppelin IV, Machine Head, Sticky Fingers and Iron Maiden’s Live After Death—albums I’d owned for 30 years. The ghosts haunted me in all the right ways.

As Tawkin pointed out various components of the studio, the board, the decks, the compressors, and the monitors, he continued gushing about the history, and I was not about to cut him off. When the National Music Centre first discovered the truck in the late 1990s, digital technology was the trend of the moment. Computers were just becoming fast enough to handle digital signal processing at professional levels.

“Everyone was dumping their analog equipment so that they could buy a $60,000 Pro Tools rig,” Tawkin said. “So it’s sell all the tape machines, sell the analog console, no one’s ever going to go back to this. Ten years later, there was a resurgence on all this equipment because everyone was like, ‘Oh my god.’ So two years ago, the Dark Side of the Moon console sold for 2.4 million dollars US. And that was just the console. So [the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio] has been valuated at a pretty high rate now, but when everyone asks me what’s it worth, I always say it’s priceless. I equate it to the Mona Lisa of rock and roll.”

Best of all, even though the mobile studio was no longer mobile, it was now available for the general public. It wasn’t hiding it away in a museum somewhere. It was fully restored, fully functional. Even musicians participating in Studio Bell’s artist in residence program had access to the truck.

Prairie Ghosts

Prince’s Island Park occupied a swath of land in the middle of the Bow River, just north of downtown Calgary. As I wandered around the folk fest stages on Saturday, I glanced to my left and saw towering flanks of evergreens with a few pines mixed in. Above the trees, I could see the even-more-towering skyline of downtown Calgary. Looking upward from the ground level, the whole environment resembled a multilayered cake—masses of crowds, then the trees, then the skyscrapers, then the clouds. Over toward the river, which flowed around both sides of the park, groups of Canada geese wandered around as if they owned the place. Brown squirrels scampered through the trees.

Even without the folk fest, the park was filled with twisting trails, interactive educational experiences, bicycle paths, a multicolored children’s playground and even a restaurant. I was in the city, yet somehow not in the city.

The Bow River was part of the Calgary area’s identity, going back a few thousand years. As a waterway, it seemed to encircle the festival just to let everyone know it was still there. At any moment, I could saunter out from the mass of crowds and pick a spot atop banks of jagged rock or on various benches, just to observe the river. One almost needed hiking boots to manage the terrain. The festival would come and go every year—with 1800 volunteers setting up, directing the crowds, staffing the onsite kitchen, driving their carts, or manning their posts—but the Bow River would always be there, keeping a watchful eye.

Folk festivals have evolved all over the prairies of Canada for decades. As locals explained to me backstage in Calgary, a “young hippie Trotskyite” named Mitch Podolak launched the first one, the Winnipeg Folk Fest, in 1974, by forging documents to prove funding was already secured, just so he could then secure matching provincial and/or city support.

But it went deeper than that. After transplanting from Toronto in the early ’70s, Podolak became a member of the Winnipeg branch of the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG), and wanted to create a temporary autonomous zone of folk music and socialist political activism, remnants of which emerged to this day at various festivals in Alberta and Manitoba. The massive community kitchen at Calgary Folk Fest in 2019, for example, fed the 1800 volunteers, plus the musicians and anyone else with the right pass.

The term “folk music festival” didn’t mean the weekend was limited to folk music, but instead referred to the various communal elements that made everything happen. If you fed people, they would work better. And if each volunteer told a few people on the street about the festival, the word spread. I met several volunteers with decades-long tenures at Calgary Folk Fest. Even though the festival had long since evolved into a more capitalistic endeavor, the folk element remained in place. Remnants of Mitch Podolak’s revolutionary ideas, I was told, seemed to linger in the dark shadows of the evergreens, if I just knew where to look.

This was not my first Calgary Folk Fest. Memories from a previous visit in 2011 became unavoidable. That year, KD Lang swayed the crowd with a haunting version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Buffy Sainte-Marie, who’d just turned 70, also performed. After seeing those two Canadian legends, I practically went native. That same weekend, Amy Winehouse passed away in London, so everyone backstage in Calgary was talking about her amazing talents. A few different artists even dedicated tunes to her.

Now, as I navigated the 2019 Calgary crowds, the food trucks, the artisan markets, the baby strollers, the hammered cowboys backstage, or the geese, even more folk festival memories over several years and across two provinces came spiraling back to the forefront. I couldn’t help but rifle through the storehouse of my brain. It felt like time was dissolving as I recalled previous trips.

In 2010, Van Morrison showed up at the Edmonton Folk Festival, which occurred over a few August days in the natural-grass amphitheater of Gallagher Park with more than 2,000 volunteers helping to make it happen. I was told that two people had even volunteered for 30 of the 31 years of the festival’s existence.

Like its equivalent in Calgary, Gallagher Park was a natural setting with a half-urban, half-natural pastiche. Edmonton was normally buried in snow for a good part of the year—even in the summer it wasn’t a postcard picture—yet this view, from the top of the folk fest grass, was gorgeous. Greenery stretched across the entire horizon, since the park was part of Edmonton’s “ribbon of green”—the Capital City Recreation Park. Right above it all, the skyline of downtown Edmonton sprouted up in the background, along with the setting sun. I looked down on 12,000 people, all relaxed on the grass of the amphitheater while Van Morrison made his way through a transcendental 90-minute set.

Clad entirely in black, Van appeared to be a good mood. He wasn’t doing interviews but he wasn’t yelling at anybody either. He began at the piano for “Northern Muse” and moved to guitar, sax and harmonica for the rest of the show. He played a few of the classics beaten to death by cover bands, i.e., “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Gloria,” which were never, ever his best songs, but they captivated the crowd nevertheless. The show flowered more at other moments, in particular the instrumental “Celtic Excavation” segueing into Van’s opus, “Into the Mystic.” Naturally, Van tended to reinvent his songs altogether when playing them live. He wasn’t one of those insipid bores who presented them exactly as they appeared on the studio recordings.

As such, “Into the Mystic” became a profound overarching noir pointillist jazzy island-like séance featuring vocals somewhere between soul and Sufi. Naturally, he followed it with a haunting version of “The Healing Has Begun.” I came away both healed and haunted.

Levon Helm of The Band also played that year. After having suffered through throat cancer, he still pulled it off and sang a few tunes from behind the trap set. I can’t believe I saw both of those legends over the same weekend.

On the other hand, the 2012 Canmore Folk Fest was a much smaller gig with only 600 volunteers instead of 1800. It was a humble festival that unfolded in a gorgeous and peaceful Rocky Mountain setting, in a neighborhood park, surrounded by jagged peaks. The town of Canmore offered just a few blocks of retail shops and restaurants, with not much else, but I got to see Ian Tyson of Ian and Sylvia fame perform their classic, “Four Strong Winds.” It doesn’t get any more local than that. After singing the opening line, he paused and said, “Kinda rings a bell, doesn’t it?” After that one, I became a closet Canadian.

One year later I infiltrated the 2013 Winnipeg Folk Fest, by sheer coincidence the 40th anniversary of the scene Mitch Podolak originally started. Leon Redbone even drove all the way from Pennsylvania, by himself, to perform. Sadly, though, just like Levon Helm, Redbone was no longer with us.

The time between those festivals and the current one where I now roamed was not that long—not even a decade—but memories of those music-filled summer weekends folded like an accordion into the present moment, harmonizing my current experiences in Calgary. Podolak’s anti-establishment ideas seemed to permeate the whole music infrastructure of the city, including the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. Through time and space, I now felt like my job, or my entire existence, was to navigate the routes between it all. I felt like a system of synthesizer patch cords, routing outputs to inputs, the traveler as a connection machine.

The “Rolling Truck Stones Thing” now in Calgary, wired to the National Music Centre

Live Album Lament

The band I’d just seen the first night of this year’s folk fest, the Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer, had recently completed a three-day live run at the King Eddy and recorded the whole shebang with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, intending to release a live album sometime down the road. Shawn Hall, the “Harpoonist” of the band, its harmonica player, agreed to hang with me at the folk fest Saturday night. Outside the backstage area, we found a spot on some rocks by the Bow River. We could hear the music from the main stage, off in the background.

When we spoke, Hall wore a faded plaid flannel and baseball cap. He seemed to know everyone that went in and out of the backstage entrance. As we sat there on the rocks, he raved about the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

“It smells like the past,” he said. “It smells like diesel. You can almost smell old smokes in it too, which is amazing.”

He said The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer decided to make a live record because, well, it just wasn’t done very often these days.

“Canadians have stopped making live records,” he said. “It’s not romantic anymore. It’s fallen out of romance. We have no clue why, but we wanted to see if we could take a stab at that multiple-night run, that is, the mythical three-night, four-night run. And so we started doing a couple of shows like that, where you’d stay in the city for a couple of nights, and two or three nights and do shows because you got a relationship with a room, you get the ghosts out and all that. We thought, what if we did that? Do we have what it takes to cut the mustard to make a live record? And wouldn’t that be an amazing challenge?”

The challenges were on several levels, he added. When recording through the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, the band obviously shouldn’t try to sound like the Stones or Zeppelin—what’s the point in chasing ghosts—but to go through the same circuitry as did all those bands, to use the same equipment, was just mind-blowing.

Plus, making a live record wasn’t like doing any regular gig. The goal was to capture the environment in the King Eddy. Think about all those classic 1970s live records, where you can hear people in the crowd, hear mistakes, or what somebody is saying on stage. That’s what you want. The spontaneous, greasy, thrown-down, on-the-spot environment. That’s what you’re trying to capture.

I told him no one ever thinks about that anymore.

“No one thinks about that,” Hall repeated, agreeing. “And the live record as an art form is currently just not hot. It hasn’t been hot, I don’t think, for over 20 years, maybe.”

After discussing the romanticism of live records for another fifteen minutes, Hall had more friends to see, so we returned to the backstage area, where various cliques of people were starting to arrive. Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats were slotted to headline later on, in a few hours, which gave me enough time to plop myself down in a plastic chair near one of the circular tables and contemplate several years’ worth of folk fests on the prairies.

There was something different about this part of Canada, this string of music gatherings and this neck of the woods. I couldn’t nail it down. I began to imagine Podolak’s ideas pulsating like an old analog tape echo throughout the whole music infrastructure of Calgary, straight down to the way in which the Bow River kept tabs on everything and how the Rolling Stones truck was now available for any artist in residence. Somehow it was all connected. This was only a tiny microcosm of Calgary, but it was enough.

I said goodbye to all the beer-guzzling folks backstage and once again took to the crowds. Outside on the grass by the main stage, thousands were slowly filtering in. Before too much longer, the entire park was filled to see Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats tear up the main stage, starting at 10:15pm. He opened with “You Worry Me,” a twangy piece of dark poetry about trying to overcome the demons of addiction. Depending on the condition of the listener, the tune either depicted two people struggling together or the narrator addressing himself. I’ve been in that position. The tune haunted me in all the right ways. What’s more, for Rateliff’s gig, the two large screens at the sides of the stage projected crystal clear black-and-white video, adding some serious noir atmospherics to the experience.

The hauntings would continue for the rest of the weekend. The ghosts of Levon Helm, Any Winehouse, Leon Redbone and all the folks who cut LPs through the circuitry of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio were with me, stalking the landscape.

Even so, I ultimately came to understand the Bow River as that which helped harmonize everything. It was the majestic backdrop, like a baroque figured bass underlying the whole sonic matrix. The next morning, I spent almost as much time along parts of the river while listening to the music in the background. As I wandered along the rocks, sounds from various stages came in and out of my hearing range, creating a wondrous collage of music and sound, sort of like spinning the dial down the radio. John Cage would have been proud. It was as if all the sounds I ever experienced while traveling through the prairies of Canada—all the bands, all the musicians—were now being collected into my immediate consciousness, with the Bow River as the audio receiver. No matter what happened, no matter who lived or died, the river would always be there, watching over the crowds. And the squirrels. And the geese. And the ghosts.