The Take Root Festival Story
De Smelt Assen, NL
October 7, 2006
by Johanna J. Bodde
All Pics copyright by Peter Pricken

Take Root Festival De Smelt Assen, NL Saturday October 7, 2006 ----- It's this Take Root time of the year! I was at the 2003 edition, where Theo Oldenburg (Alt.Country Cooking) and I ran around for great interviews with Grey DeLisle, Kelly Pardekooper and way past midnight Teddy Morgan. My story ended up in Belgium then, on Benny Metten's wonderful site CtrlAltCountry. My yearly request was granted again now and I'm being put on the guestlist (Thanks, Johan!!) in exchange for a story. That means taking the bus to Assen. Although bus service is lousy in these parts, I have to admit that I always enjoy this hour long scenic ride! A flock of beautiful white and beige geese has picked the canal, the road and the small strip of grass inbetween to rest their wings during their migration. Traffic in both lanes is blocked, everybody is laughing as these birds are like watchdogs, they won't move an inch. The leading goose stretches his neck and yells even louder! Until an old man on a bicycle passes by and quietly coaches them off the road... When I step off the bus downtown Assen, my friends Yvonne & Paul -who drove all the way from Haarlem- are just parking their car on the opposite side of the street. So I don't even have to search for them and we have plenty of time for coffee & conversation. The restaurant of Hotel De Jonge is a buzzing hot spot: label bosses, DJ's and music critics walk by and say hello. And we see already some artists of course, Colin Linden looks just like his album cover, so he's easy to recognize and later Krista Detor and her husband leave for De Smelt. That's what we should do too, after a short walk along the marketstalls. De Smelt still has that funny fake Mexican look, even the two (real!) birds are still there. The Main Room has one big stage now and the small Acoustic Room got lots of chairs. After some more short conversations with people from the music bizz, we decide to stay there for BORIS MCCUTCHEON & THE SALTLICKS. --- Boris is a favorite, both his albums are in my collection and I saw him already during his very first tour, playing an impressive concert at the Q-Bus in Leiden. This is already his fourth tour and he's ready to squeeze everything possible out of his 45 minutes.If Master Of Ceremonies Jan Donkers will let him... This retired DJ has probably the best taste in music imaginable, but he breaks every rule in the DJ book: he sniffs loudly into the microphone, can't find his words or notes, bumbles his sentences but he's enthusiastic, so we forgive him... for now. Boris starts out kind of quietly, while rain and thunder whip the glass dome of the Acoustic Room. He has a new Saltlick with him: Susan who plays bass and sings harmony, he calls her affectionately Cactus Girl. Jeff Berlin still plays drums and Brett Davis banjo, electric guitar and lapsteel. He enters more rocking territory with "Green Wish" and ventures into soul with "Santa Rosa Plums" and "Beautiful Prison" from his first album. "Small Town Blues" is a new song, he looks up to the dome: "Is that rain? I thought they were skateboarding up there! Are we gonna drown?" Susan shows she can play a mean acoustic bass too and she's definitely a good singing partner for Boris. Music lovers behind me call the show "exciting", the songs are all so different, they even come up with "a musical ark of Noah"! And that's before the soundscape with lapsteel, another acoustic guitar and a loop. The last song signal always comes too soon. "Shit, these are tough decisions!", then Boris chooses a sturdy "Caves Of Burgundy" to close off. --- As I decided to let the festival surprise me, I didn't even look up information about the artists. ODD from Norway is next in the Acoustic Room. Three young men try to get ready on stage, I catch a great remark about the sound: "That's the difference between shaving and cutting your head off." Now I definitely want to hear these guys! Jan Donkers convinces us that Odd is a normal first name in Norway... Well, Odd is the singer and he has two guitarists with him, one acoustic and one electric. He is probably in his early 30s, wearing jeans and a kaki t-shirt with gold print. A guy with a "high caressability factor" as my friend and I joke in Dutch and it's so great to be old enough to say this, without anybody looking funny at us! But we're here for the music and Odd can sing up a storm, he has a very impressive voice that he uses to the fullest, range, falsetto and all. The lyrics are somewhat dark: "I'm lost in the sound of human traffic, it's all around" comes from the first song. He apparently promotes his new album "Not All Birds Fly With Ease", intriguing title. "Trust" is very intense and in "Agoraphobic" he goes from quiet to screaming, while "Song For Daddy" is nice and melodic. Hard to stick a label on this music, singer-songwriter is a genre these days too, isn't it? Does he sound like anybody I know? Joseph Parsons comes to mind, for the intensity and a bit for the vocal. After "Never Came" Odd closes off with a rhythmic "Madness", which has a sudden end. He takes a bow, blows a kiss and disappears. --- While bearded Canadian COLIN LINDEN turns the soundcheck of his three guitars into a funny little show, a few people -including me- decide it's picknick time. Why give up a good seat and risk our lives in the logistic nightmare of going back into the Main Room when a raisinroll and a bottle of orangejuice taste just as well? Colin, in a black suit with embroidered jacket and a black hat, is just wonderful ("It's such a thrill to be here!"), we even come to the statement that all Canadians are totally nice people! Jan announces that the "meccanobox" is installed -meaning the effect pedals- so the concert is about to start. This is acoustic countryblues, a music style that I came to love over the past years. Colin is obviously plugging his new album "Easin' Back To Tennessee", but does that in such a sweet, funny way that I would immediately buy it, but I have it already! "Nowhere To Go" is on the CD: "I wrote it quite a while back, when I was still a child..." And the T Bone Burnett song "There Would Be Hell To Pay". He tells: "When I heard it back the way he did it, I realized I did it kinda wrong, but he liked the way I did it!" Then he picks up his resonator guitar and plays with the slide, very impressive... The audience loves him and he smiles from ear to ear, taking his bows with a hand on his heart. "A True Friend Won't Let You Drown" was written about a friend who lost everything during Hurricane Katrina and found it hard to accept help, as he always took pride in taking care of himself. Wow, great... A music lover behind us sings softly along with "Trouble Soon Be Over", the Blind Willie Johnson song. Colin picks up his acoustic Gibson guitar again, gets tangled in the cords ("Doin' the dance..."), after something fast he brings us the song he wrote about a 97 year-old hero, Henry Townsend, "Tears Come Roling Down", followed by "For Now You Might As Well Enjoy The Ride". The third guitar comes into the picture, electric with slide, for a funny song: "Trouble Only Comes In Threes", which he wrote with his friend Richard Bell, who was in the hospital at the time, hooked up to machines!  Colin Linden says goodbye, urges us in hilarious gestures to buy his CD -he will autograph them- and closes off with a rousing version of The Band's "Remedy".

The festival is very succesful this year, very crowded, with more young people and ladies than usual. Some admit coming only for Ryan Adams, a woman tells us that she even plans to wait at the trainstation for the first train afterwards. Yes, I've done things like that for my favorites too in my younger days... A keyboard is being installed on stage and a poster, with KRISTA DETOR playing the grand piano with the elephant on top, her album cover of "Mudshow". There she is herself, just as pretty with her beautiful auburn curls as her pictures, wearing a long black skirt and blouse with a pinstriped blazer. Her husband David Weber plays acoustic guitar and sings harmony with her. But first we have to endure Jan Donkers again, who likes to hear himself talk. He is very curious of especially this act, bla-bla-bla. Krista makes faces behind his back, when he goes on and on, the audience starts to laugh and then he even thinks he himself is being funny!! Krista asks for another round of applause for Colin Linden, yes, she and David were sitting in the room, enjoying his concert with all of us. The first song is "Dancing In A Minefield", one of my special favorites. About "Mudshow" she explains that it's a name for a small travelling circus, David's story actually as he once was a flying trapeze artist! They make a great couple, I don't know how long they are together but they're obviously still very much in love and there's good chemistry on stage too. Krista is, beside a magnificent pianoplayer, also an entertainer, she has cool stories and jokes. About Canadians, who supposedly say hello with the hands next to their head like a moose..., then she goes on what a good country Canada actually is and that the Americans probably will invade it soon! "Buffalo Bill", "Steal Me A Car" ("Every American family has at least one member in jail, 'cause we have a lot of jails...") and "Abigayle's Song" ("We live in a small town, but we don't want to know who the married men are sleeping with!"), "The Hampton Sisters", all from her recent album "Mudshow". We even come to the conclusion that "awesome" is originally a Dutch word, well, from tonight on it is! The last song is a new one, with only David playing, so Krista stands up from behind her keyboard, sings and swings. The loud applause pays off, we even get an encore, another new song: "How Will I Know". Can I tell you a secret now? Way back, way before Krista's record deal here, she sent Theo Oldenburg and me already a copy of "Mudshow" and we played it on Alt.Country Cooking before anybody else did. And she sent us sweet little thank you-mails for the airplay, apologizing she couldn't download the show with her slow dial-in connection. Theo sent her his already famous List with addresses and there she found her current label. So Krista will always be one of "our" artists! --- In the meantime a huge metal pot with gladioluses is dragged on stage and the room -hotter than a sauna- is filled with people to the last inch of floor. Everybody wants to see LUKA BLOOM! His fans splutter that he's too big an artist to play in such a small room, he was one of the acts at the Pinkpop Festival not too many years ago, after all. I only know him from some live-stuff on the radio, I'm curious... He looks like a typical Irishman, with his blue eyes and reddish hair, but he says something in Dutch when he steps on stage. He lived here for a while, when he had a Dutch girlfriend. Luka tells us that he tried to make a setlist, but he had too many songs and too many things to say, so he will do as much as possible in 45 minutes. He doesn't mention titles, but the first song has the repeating line "I am not at war with anyone", he was angry and wrote it in 20 minutes after people marched to convince "those lunatics in Washington and London" not to start a war and he realized they wouldn't listen. Cool, I like him! "I know the Winter is coming, but it felt like June". Yes, between the rain and thunderstorms today. This must be "June" from his new album "Innocence". He keeps saying Dutch words with our sharp G: "I love all these words that help to clear my throat between songs!" Something about a mermaid and a "sunny sailor boy", the Luka-fans already start humming and singing along after the first three notes on the guitar. "Even the men got in touch with their inner mermaid..." He's quite an entertainer, I get the impression that he always routiniously does this kind of show, with a lot of favorite songs and a few new ones. Or new? About "City Of Chicago" he tells that he wrote it in 1984, thought it was shit, but his brother Christy Moore said: "I'll have that one, please" and played it over twenty years, until Luka himself finally recorded it last year! About the other new song "No Matter Where You Go, There You Are" he jokes that Ireland has an immigration problem now... He closes off with his famous rap "I Need Love", he learned it while living in New York. Of course he was planning to come back for an encore, he hadn't filled his 45 minutes yet and the other acoustic guitar still wasn't used, this works according to a plan. Two songs, while the enthusiastic audience claps along, "It's A Rainbow Day" and "You Couldn't Have Come At A Better Time" followed by a standing ovation. --- In a claustrophobic experience it takes us almost twenty minutes (!) to get back to the Main Room. Colin Linden is still on stage there, with a bassplayer and a drummer he turned himself into a bluesrocker and I listen to the last three songs, including "Remedy" again. On the combination of screen and speakers I notice that Teitur started his concert in the Acoustic Room, a tortured young soul with an acoustic guitar. As I didn't succeed in finding a ride back to my current hometown, I have to prepare to leave... No Ryan Adams for me! Strange, it was never a problem to get a ride to Rotterdam from various festivals, even all the way from Assen. For this relatively short distance it doesn't work out, darned! I say goodbye to my music friends and walk to the busstop, there's only a young couple waiting, they have been to the swimming pool. It's cold... Down to Earth, Johanna! ===== Written by Johanna J. Bodde, October 9th 2005, for Insurgent Country, Germany. www.insurgentcountry.net ===== Ryan Adams

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