Goddamn, it's Hawksley Workman!
‘It’s getting incredible to be me these days’
CHELSE MCKEE VOLUNTEER STAFF
Hawksley Workman, several months younger, at the 2006 Winnipeg Folk Festival. Yeah . . . we couldn’t get photo access to the Garrick show.
The sold-out Friday-night Garrick Centre show began a little later than the scheduled time of eight o’clock, but soon the lights went low, except for the blue lights illuminating the back curtain of the modest stage. The crowd roared in applause as two men walked single-file onto the stage. One headed to the microphone and picked up his guitar, while the other took his place at the keyboard. They were completely hidden by the shadows (the stage lights were directed to their backs) but as soon as they began playing, we knew there would be no opening band. The theatre’s remaining stage lights rose up to reveal that Hawksley Workman had arrived.
He opened the show with one of my favourite songs, “We Will Still Need a Song.” I was surprised the crowd wasn’t singing along. We all just seemed to stare in awe. After he finished the song he introduced his keyboarding companion as Mr. Lonely (a.k.a. Todd Lumley), a thin man sporting glasses and sideburns.
The concert had a surprisingly intimate vibe, considering the mass crowd. The humble Workman spent the concert alternating between his musical set and telling stories to the audience. Occasionally he’d interrupt a song to tell a story that had just come to him. During one song, he began to talk about silence.
“We don’t really like silence in our culture anymore,” he said. “We can’t tolerate it.” Appropriately, a moment of silence followed his speech before one girl began to scream out. Workman quickly resumed the song.
During another song, which he described as his only protest song, he stopped halfway through to explain that the heat of the music had made him forget the lyrics. He just laughed at himself as the audience screamed out the words. At one point during the song, he stepped away from the microphone to stand on a nearby amp and sang out to the audience.
Workman stuck to his more mellow songs for the evening but broke out into long and intense solos for every one. Every solo deviated from the song’s melody and became another mix of beat and feelings. One solo that became like a creepy overture for a supernatural horror film.
Finally the audience grew restless with the string of mellow songs and began shouting for “Striptease.” Who was I to condemn them, considering that’s one of the songs I was there to hear? One guy screamed out that it was “a good fuckin’ song!” Workman just laughed and said “yeah, it is a good fuckin’ song.”
Having caught the obvious hint from the audience, he then began to play his more energetic songs, starting with “Jealous of Your Cigarette.” Partway through the song, he spun into his guitar solo and began singing “The Wall” by Pink Floyd before heading right back into “Jealous . . .”
Finally, he began to play the familiar riff of “Striptease” and the crowd erupted once again before becoming subdued as he slowed down the fan-favourite from its quickened pace. We stood in awe again.
The night finished after a two-hour performance and two encores. After wrapping up his final song (either “Your Beauty Must Be Rubbing Off’ or “No Beginning No End” — I got lost in the double encores), he softly bowed before walking to the back curtain and quietly heading off stage. All night, I kept remembering one line from Hawksley Workman’s stage banter: “The more you live and the more you don’t die is remarkable.”
