46 Fall 2011 | Yukon, North of Ordinary A program from the Farrago

Photo: Courtesy John Steins
A program from the Farrago Music Festival, which enjoyed a six-year run in Faro starting in 1975.
46 46 Fall
Fall 2011 2011 | | Yukon,
Yukon, North of
North of Ordinary
Ordinary
Photo: Courtesy Tim Kinvig
Faro A Go-Go
Remembering The Yukon's Forgotten Music Fest
II by Wayne Potoroka II
In October, the BreakOut West Western Canadian Music Awards take place in
Whitehorse and will recognize the Yukon’s emergence as fertile musical terrain as
much as the achievements of Western Canadian musicians.
But the territory’s modern-day relationship with music would be radically different
if not for a mining company and an overachieving festival in an unlikely place.
T
im Kinvig bypasses the lineup at the Whitehorse Tim
Hortons and beelines to the table sans coffee, eager
to share his backpack-ful of Farrago Music Festival
memorabilia.
“I went through some of my boxes that I haven’t looked in
for years,” says the 65-year-old, wearing bookish glasses and a
well-kept white beard.
He lays out a photocopied stack of programs from the
Yukon’s first-ever music festival, crowded with the bearded and
blissed-out faces of ’70s folk music: Valdy, Mimi Farina, Stan
Rogers, John Hiatt (yes, that John Hiatt), and Ray Davies (no,
not that Ray Davies).
Kinvig reaches back into his pack and extracts his original
notes from the six Farragos he worked as a CBC Radio technician and the hand-drawn sound-gear schematics from his first,
the lines traversing the page like a bus-route map.
“I’m a packrat,” he sheepishly admits. “It’s as much of the
history as anyone has.”
On April 25, 1975, Kinvig was bunkered in the women’s
change room of the Faro, Yukon, recreation centre behind a
soundboard, a reel-to-reel-tape recorder, and nearly a mile of
mic cable. (“We need to be isolated from the main sound so we
can get a decent mix,” he explains.) In the main gymnasium,
Yukon vocalist Eva Stehelin walked on stage in a scoop-necked
shirt and long denim skirt and opened the premiere Farrago
with an a cappella version of the 1940’s classic “Nature Boy,”
choosing to sing it unaccompanied, she would later recall, just
to prove to the Outside performers who’d made the trip that
“we weren’t a bunch of hayseeds up in the North.”
“There was no big moment about it,” remembers Kinvig. “At
that time, this was really a one off. We had no idea where this
thing was going.”
At the end of the weekend as he packed up his gear, Kinvig
did what he would for any festival: wrote down his technical suggestions for next year’s event—if it was to occur. That
it should was a foregone conclusion for the locals and guests
from other communities that attended the blowout shindig.
But a more significant impact would only be felt over time, as
the Gulliver-sized festival in a Lilliputian town transformed
the Yukon music scene forever.
Yukon, North of
North of Ordinary Ordinary | | Fall
Fall 2011 2011 47
47
Yukon,
Photo: Courtesy Monina Wittfoth
Many Farrago attendees still make their home in the Yukon.
Pictured first row, from left: Monina Wittfoth, Oliver Steins,
Greg Clarke. Second row, from left: Woola (the dog), John
Tapsel, John Steins, Paula Hassard. Third row, from left:
Sally Robinson, unidentified hitchhiker, Jim Lisowski.
I
n 1968, Faro was a newly established popup company town for
the imported families working the world-class lead-zinc deposit
at nearby Cyprus Anvil mine, roughly 350 km northeast from
Whitehorse and smack dab in the middle of the sticks.
With the families stabled, the company turned its attention to
keeping them amused in their northern outpost. For a time, that
job fell to Barry Redfern, Faro’s recreation director, who’d use
whatever money he could squeeze from the Cyprus Anvil budget
to set up bonspiels and games nights—events any small-town resident is familiar with—and attract outside entertainment, including the long-running Frantic Follies in Whitehorse.
Redfern took the improbable step from homespun party producer to mounting the Yukon’s debut music festival when he
found himself seated on an airplane next to folk musician David
Essig, who was returning home from an appearance at the first
Winnipeg Folk Festival, in 1974.
By phone from his oceanside home on Protection Island, B.C.,
Essig describes that initial meeting: “I told him about Winnipeg,
and he said, ‘Do you think we could do a folk festival in Faro?’ I
said, ‘Well, sure. Why not? You’ve already got a ready-made audience and a beautiful place, and people would love to come there.’”
To which Redfern offhandedly asked the question that would
scribe Essig’s name in the annals of Yukon music history: Could
you give me a hand organizing it? “Yeah, I suppose,” Essig replied.
“This was in the days before Internet. Even fax machines weren’t
that popular,” says Essig. “We basically did everything over the
phone.”
Redfern and Essig spent the next several months arranging
performers and logistics before Redfern approached Cyprus Anvil
with his proposal to host a top-shelf festival in Faro, hoping the
pre-planning would make it hard for his employer to say no.
“It didn’t take a lot of convincing. The mine was extremely
supportive of recreation,” says Lavona Clarke, Farrago organizer
and part-time recreation worker. “What seemed odd was that it
was happening in a little place like Faro, instead of a place like
Whitehorse.”
With Cyrpus Anvil’s support, Redfern and his staff began the
epic chore of preparing for a national happening in a territory
where live music usually meant Hank Karr at the Kopper King or
small-scale hootenannies organized by the Skookum Jim Friendship Centre at the F.H. Collins High School.
But first things first: “‘We gotta’ come up with a name for this
thing,’” Clarke remembers Redfern saying. “I already named our
winter carnival—the Ice Worm Squirm—so I said, ‘Ok, I’ll see
what names I can come up with.’
“I went through the dictionary and picked out five words that
had different things to do with music,” she continues. “One of
them was ‘Tintinnabulation’. We went with ‘Farrago’ [noun: a
medley or hodgepodge] because it was Faro.”
That might have been the easiest task that first year. A battalion
of volunteers still needed to be recruited and mobilized, both in
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The audience at Farrago 1976.
Photo: Courtesy Tim Kinvig
Faro and Whitehorse, where Outside performers would spend the
night with billets before travelling to the festival by plane or by
land on the North Klondike Highway, which at the time was a
non-paved strip of gravel when it was dry and mud chowder when
it was wet.
“There was some skepticism,” says Clarke, “[but] I don’t recall
anyone saying it was a silly idea or it wouldn’t go…. It was going
to be a real party with real entertainers.”
Once in Faro, the musicians enjoyed steak-and-lobster treatment thanks to a generous outlay of money from Cyprus Anvil.
The mine catered the backstage eats and ensured the final party
was well-soaked in cases of champagne—an anomaly when some
bigger festivals in the South were issuing MacDonald’s vouchers
to performers.
But the special treatment was only a small part of the event’s
allure, notes Clarke, who says many established musicians liked
the idea of coming to a town where they could rub shoulders with
the folks folk music was meant to connect with.
“More than half of these performers have never been north and
never would have been north,” says Clarke. “My children, when
they were little, thought that every kid in Canada had breakfast
with Raffi once a year.”
The festival also nurtured a burgeoning territorial music scene
by weaving the big names in amongst local acts, some new to the
Yukon, including Daniel Janke, Manfred Jannsen, Dave Haddock, Harmonica George McConkey, and John Steins.
“It kind of established the musical community in the territory,”
says Steins, now an artist living in Dawson City. “Not only did
musicians from all parts of the territory get to know each other
and interact, but … you got to, right off the bat, play at a venue
shoulder to shoulder with musical legends.”
More than anything, though, Farrago taught Yukon and Outside communities that a big festival could be held in a small town.
Organizers and volunteers spread that good word around the
Yukon, with Farrago coordinators instigating festivals in other
communities, their influence reading like an Old Testament lineage: Farrago begat Frostbite (started by Mel Orecklin, Farrago
volunteer), which begat the Dawson City Music Festival (spearheaded by Monina Wittfoth, Farrago volunteer, and John Steins,
Farrago performer).
“I think it was one of the first festivals with performers at that
level held in a small isolated community, and it convinced other
ones that they could do it, too,” says Essig. “In its prime … it was
an amazing, amazing thing. The town was brand new and the
people were all brand new. And half of the crew that went up there
fell in love with somebody at the festival. It was just an amazing
experience.”
F
arrago enjoyed six celebrated years as a premier musical
event. Redfern and subsequent artistic directors were inundated with audition tapes, phone calls, letters, and pleadings
from high-level performers desperate to play the North—Bruce
Cockburn (who later wrote “Bright Sky” about his time in Faro),
Ferron, Odetta, Tom Paxton. For a brief moment, Faro, the Yukon
town in the middle of the bush, was near the middle of Canada’s
music scene.
But the event’s future became murky thanks to an indignity not
experienced by any other folk festival: nose-diving metal prices.
Cyprus Anvil was haemorrhaging money and trimmed gristle
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Yukon, North of Ordinary | Fall 2011 49
The festival also nurtured
a burgeoning territorial
music scene by weaving the
big names in amongst local
acts, some new to the Yukon,
including Daniel Janke, Manfred Jannsen, Dave Haddock,
Harmonica George McConkey, and John Steins.
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50 Fall 2011 | Yukon, North of Ordinary
“[Farrago] started the music industry in the Yukon…. A lot of people
who are in the music industry today most probably don’t realize it.”
where it could. Farrago was an easy target
in a town facing its own mortality and
probably not much in the mood for inviting their neighbours over for a party, so
Cyrus Anvil announced it wouldn’t backstop Farrago after 1980.
Enthusiastic music supporters willing to
produce a scaled-back version of the event
kept the festival alive in 1981, but after that
year Farrago went dark and remained that
way for over a decade. In 2002, resolute
locals, some who stayed after the Cyprus
Anvil closed for good, in 1983, and some
who came later seeking a quieter life away
from the city, revived the festival with
performers who agreed to play for free. But
volunteer burnout snuffed Farrago one last
time, in 2006.
There’s not much tangible left of Farrago
aside from what Kinvig can fit in his backpack—yellowing high-school-yearbook-like
programs; ticket stubs; the odd Farrago LP
that pops up on eBay or in obscure record
shops.
But there’s one permanent legacy Kinvig
brought back from Farrago: hours of
recordings, where the hoots and hollers of
an entertainment-starved and appreciative
territory are evident on each track.
“I don’t think it’s had its due,” exclaims
Kinvig, with his repacked rucksack slung
over his shoulder. “[Farrago] started the
music industry in the Yukon…. A lot of
people who are in the music industry today
most probably don’t realize it.”
There is no saying if, or when, Farrago
might return, but there are rumblings it
will stage a comeback in 2012. Like Faro,
the company town that has survived long
past the company, Farrago, it appears,
refuses to give up. Y