The Night of the Fredericton Dead, or How I Came to Leave My Cable and Embrace the Music

Fredericton is the City of the Dead. Just walk around the downtown core on just about any Friday or Saturday night and the absence of party with shock you. It’s because the population is dead. When you move to Fredericton welcoming committees come to your door, not with boxes of cool stuff, but with toe tags and coupons for cemetery plots. But it’s kind of nice. It makes for peace and quiet. Tranquil nights of motionless existence. You get used to it. Each day, the boredom with any thing relates to conscious living grows like a giant maggot in some deep cavern where we store our interest in life.

You become one of the Fredericton Dead. Happily buried in a chair in front of 99 station cable crunching chips and sucking beer. It’s a good way to express your non-beingness.

But then, for one week every September, the solitude is broken and the streets of Fredericton’s downtown core raise the Fredericton Dead with saxophones, guitars, pianos, mouth organs, trumpets, drums, spoons, electric keyboards, and voices in every shape of blues and jazz, and then some.

The music and the mystical presence of tents and stands draws the Fredericton Dead into the open and into the streets and into the sheer joy of music for the sake of music.

They call it the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival. It’s been waking the Fredericton Dead for fifteen years now, and drawing jazz and blues fans from as far away as Asia.

It started with Elvis himself rising from the beyond and calling to the Fredericton Dead to gather and enjoy.

They wondered away from Elvis, roaming the streets, looking for music, amazed at existence beyond cable.

They wandered into tents churning out jazz and blues and crashed into stands selling sausages and fries.

Even the bands playing rock drew the Dead to their tent steps.

The Dead were awake and beginning to feel the jive and the jitter. The crowds of cable-soul-less gathered and stared. Did they want to eat the musicians? Taste them for high speed bandwidth and channel selection?

The crowds of the Dead grew and converged on the rock group. Perhaps they wanted sausage.

A Fire Dancer from the depths of blues called the Dead to her.

The Dead are drawn to light.

A strange man from a strange place set up a strange stage on the sidewalk right where the unsuspecting Dead were struggling with decisions like: Should I walk left? Should I walk right?

The Dead decided to stay … and worship the strange man from a strange place.

Lord Beaverbrook (left, just above the glare of light) looked on with approval and may even have shaken a foot to a lively guitar riff.

A giant can of beer tried to take over the city, but was hastily pierced and its contents consumed by the Thirsty Dead.

And then, of course, they set fire to the city and put lights in the trees.

Next: The Return of the Fredericton Dead