Interview with Paul Henderson on the occasion of sappyfest’s 20th anniversary

By Simone Schmidt 

I first travelled to Sappyfest in a car from Toronto in 2007, with my bandmate Ian Russell, and musicians Jennifer Castle and Richard Laviolette. I had screen printed the cover of our duo’s home recorded EP for the festival. Sappy’s welcome made such an impression that I would ever after stop through Sackville on my way touring Mi’kma’ki. On good years I’d play Sappy again. In 2011, I went to Struts Gallery for February to do a residency, which opened in me a new sense of freedom as a multidisciplinary artist. In 2022 I moved to Sackville to work at Struts, under the artistic direction of Paul Henderson. On this 20th anniversary of the festival, I decided to interview my coworker and one of the founders of Sappyfest not only because he and the festival have been two of the greatest influences on my fate, but because I think his experience steering the festival from its inception, through the recession of 2008, the digital revolution and advent of streaming, offer particular insights. In the beginning, what were the social and economic conditions that influenced Sappy's artistic sensibilities and possibilities, and what invisible hands brought so many of us to town?

SS: The year was 2005, and you started Sappyfest? 

PH: 2006. 

SS: Can you tell me what's happening for you in Sackville at the time?

PH:  I had moved to Sackville in January 2004 and met Jon Claytor and Julie Doiron shortly after. Shotgun Jimmie and Frederick Squire were here. I had met them in Dawson City where they started (the band) Shotgun & Jaybird the year before. Jon and Julie wanted to restart Sappy Records with the intention of releasing a Shotgun & Jaybird EP and asked me if I wanted to be involved. I had joined the band in 2005, I think. I was also working at Struts Gallery as the Media Arts coordinator and had started OK.Quoi?! Media Arts Festival in summer 2005. I had also started booking shows in Sackville at Struts or George's Roadhouse, picking up random bands going to Pop Explosion or touring the maritimes. So winter of 2005-06, Jon Claytor suggested “we do a small little festival” at the farmhouse where he and Julie lived to celebrate the re-launch of Sappy Records. We’d have Snailhouse, Orange Glass, Purple Knight, (Mark Gaudet’s band) like some of the old Moncton era Sappy Records bands play, and Shotgun & Jaybird. I really didn't want to do it at first, because I had just moved from Dawson City and had seen my two friends who were the coordinators of the music festival there, and the intensity of their lives, and how hard it was on them on their bodies and relationships. But Jon convinced me. He was like, “It'll be really small, it'll be easy.” My one caveat was that we would do it in conjunction with OK.Quoi?! so that I could focus my stress on one particular week. 

SS: That logic is ridiculous..

PH: Shortly thereafter Julie reached out to her former bandmates in Eric's Trip, and they agreed to reunite for the show, which escalated the interest dramatically, and it couldn't happen at the farm, so then we had to move it in town. 

SS: Where was it held?

PH: It started in the parking lot beside Struts, with a little tent covering the bands, but not the audience. Late night shows were at George's Roadhouse and the Vogue Theatre. 

SS: How much were you paying bands at the time? 

PH: It was kind of the same model for the first, probably three years. $100 for bands in the region, $300 to $500 for people coming from Ontario/Quebec. There were maybe a couple thousand dollar bands. $100 for our local bands stayed through my eight years, very rarely did we go over.

SS: How much was your rent at the time?

PH: Free

SS: How much was the average rent at the time? 

PH: Probably less than 500 bucks a month. The going rate of a three bedroom Struts apartment was $450! That was low low, but it wasn't uncommon that you could find a room in a house for under $500.

 SS: How much was gas?

PH: I don’t know, I didn't drive. Under a buck, I assume. 

SS: You went to art school and you have a background in visual arts and you were also playing the drums in Shotgun & Jaybird. In the 2000’s, in terms of what was considered independent music, it seems like the overlap between the visual artists and musicians was bigger than it is now. 

PH: That started for me in high school, in Edmonton. My highschool pals led me to art school at ACAD in Calgary. They were in a band, put out tapes, CDs, made all the cover art and posters, and that was also my introduction to all ages shows in halls and weird little spaces. It was very much the visuals going alongside bands that sparked my interest in graphic design. A few of us went to art school in Calgary and I met Chad VanGaalen, Kara Keith (Falconhawk, Earthquake Pills), and Ian Russell (Flemish Eye Records) amongst others. Falconhawk and B.A.Johnston was the first show I booked in Sackville in 2004. At ACAD there were weird punk and mod dudes and they would play shows on Thursdays at the pub night. They'd roll out a little bar into the cafeteria, there would be bands and other events. There was also sound installation and electronics and other non-musical audio stuff, noise and kinetic sculpture or people experimenting with tech and junky technology. My whole career has very much been mixing music with visual art and graphic design. I use “career” loosely, but being employed in some way or generating income for myself through that sort of triangle. The more you're involved with it, the more you see that historically there's kind of a genre of the art school band of unskilled non-musicians that are just like, “fuck it, we're just gonna do it.” That kind of low-fi unschooled spirit is everything and it may be temporary, but we're gonna put on a great performance and destroy something or whatever.

SS: Yeah. I can see it. I'm thinking about how there are people who are younger than Sappyfest who might be reading this interview, and how different the current context is now in terms of the hyper professionalization of these different disciplines - music and art - in part because of education, in part because of digitization, and in part because of personal branding. Over the eight years as director of Sappyfest was there a big shift in how music was being made or how culture was being collaborated on? 

PH: When we started in 2006, it wasn't the beginning of the internet, but it was very much the beginning of the MP3 and music streaming. MySpace was the dominant music exchange format. And that felt very new. One of the changes I distinctly remember was the advent of decent quality video and documentation of live performance online. Being able to actually see what a band was live compared to what their records sounded like. Especially for a solo performer or electronic music or something like that. It was like, okay, that's a neat sound or it's a fascinating song, but how would they manifest this in a live scenario? What was it? Southern Souls? That guy?

SS: Mitch? 

PH: Yeah. He was one of the first people doing those live sessions, which weren't necessarily demonstrative of their stage show, but still to get a sense of a person, what they might be like, that really helped evaluate a band or where to slot a band throughout the course of a festival. Can they hold a stage? Even if you've maybe never heard of them, people don't know their songs, can they still close out a night? You could take a few more risks that way and be like, I think these guys could actually do that. 

I think what we saw, technology-wise, was sort of like an era shift. And blogs, too. There were a lot more people writing about music, creating hype, and it could transfer pretty quickly. Everyone was reading the same blogs and music press at the time. It was a copycat culture, I think. So if a band got buzz in this publication, then the next one would cover them too, and that would create a critical mass that would allow a band to achieve whatever meagre fame Canada might offer at the time. 

SS: Is there any kind of music that you learned about through your work at Sappy, that you otherwise would not have known?

PH: I’d say almost all the music! It made me devour music year round. I've always liked music and especially in highschool, things clicked with independent music in a way I didn't really grow up with. But the curiosity and independent digging and following random threads, that was the job.

Indie rock was what I primarily listened to, but I was always open to weirder sounds and more noisy, kind of abstract things or odd performance or installation. I did love that Tranzac scene too. There was like this lovely gradation from like whacked out jazz and freaky noise things through to singer-songwriters and groovy R&B and almost creepy things.   

But so much of that was the community talking to me too. Because I'm not a musician, so to hear people like yourself or Ryan Driver or whoever coming up saying “You should go see these guys.” Or “ We opened for them last night and they were amazing…”. When these really skilled, amazing musicians that I respected told me about a band, it just made my ears perk up. That's how the circle fanned out in some ways. 

SS: It seems like a very obvious thing that you're saying, but it should be underscored that this is countercultural in and of itself that, you know? Someone in a curatorial position is paying more attention to what other artists are saying than what agents are trying to sell them. 

PH: I fought with agents every year because they always wanted to add on these musicians that I didn't like or respect, to the deal I was trying to make with the musician I did, and it was always hard to explain what the difference was there. Why I couldn't book so and so. Like, I just couldn't. I would feel so embarrassed to put this person on my stage. And if Sappyfest, which we had spent years developing this identity, to then turn around and put so and so on the stage… I just couldn't.  I fought. Sometimes I won, sometimes I didn't and they wouldn't book the band I wanted, but I had to stand up. Because I knew that's also how the music industry worked. Again, musicians would talk to me about that - their problems with their agents or why they only got 100 bucks to open for some blah, blah, blah.

SS: Yeah, because the music industry really can be just driven by how agents profit. I remember learning about how agents list bands by A,B,C, tiers and how a talent buyer can book an A-tier if they take two B’s or three C’s..

PH: In trying to create a program, we looked for a lot of variety. And I do distinctly remember as we moved on through the festival, realizing how bro-ey it was. So we tried to find more space for feminized people, but also ...weirder stuff. Like people who didn't sing perfectly or who weren't like pretty songwriters. I'm not often a fan of the best voices or the most conventional voices, so trying to find alternatives to that. And then it's like anything, once you turn your head that way, then there's a plethora of it too and then you're just trying to find stuff that's affordable in your region, you know? You can't just go get Yoko Ono.

SS:  Can you describe a transcendent performance that you think Sappyfest enabled? 

PH:  I always come back to Charles Bradley. I think of it as the best thing I was ever a part of in terms of arts presentation. Right from the get go, hearing the record in the winter and then putting in an offer right away, and they got back to me quickly. It was the same year that we did the (secret) Arcade Fire Show, and that was on the Friday night, which was so much work and a logistical nightmare. It ended up being a great show, but it really challenged us in our capacity and challenged us about what was important and why we do things. It didn't feel 100% awesome through the whole process. It was very difficult.

Then the next night to have the opposite, a kind of seamless business relationship with their agency and management. Charles Bradley shows up and they're well taken care of, they're happy with everything. There was this crazy tension at the beginning of the show because the Menahan Street band, Charles Backing band, went out and played an instrumental track for like seven minutes. Everybody's like, getting into the mood. But then it ends and Charles doesn't come out and they start another one, and it goes for like another five, six, seven minutes and then it ends. Charles doesn't come out. I'm beside the stage looking into the green room and I could see Charles, and on his rider was a bottle of vodka. And he's sitting at the bar with his head in his hands with the bottle in front of him, and I'm freaking out. I'm like, "Is this part of the process? Is he drinking that whole bottle? Is he ever gonna go on?!” I'm terrified. And you can feel it. Maybe no one else felt it- but I really felt it sitting there watching. And then the third song, the first note, he just pops up and walks out the door and I just follow him down to the backstage of the tent to make sure that there's nothing in the way. And he's a man on a mission and then he gets out on stage and just blows the crowd away. The anticipation that that band built and when he released his voice, it was like a transformative religious experience. He put on this incredible show for over an hour where he just filled that crowd with so much love and groove and it was stunning, you know? We were way over time. We're supposed to close at midnight, and the Blues Society had sponsored that show. So I went and found Roopen Majithia (Blues Society Coordinator). He was grooving out, and I was like, “We're gonna go overtime, right?” And he just nodded, "Oh, yeah." Whatever, we're just not going to pay attention to the by-laws tonight, you know? 

SS: Yeah. 

PH: Charles went down into the crowd, just hugging every person in the audience. It was just so full of love, just incredible soul music, which is not something that was normally on the Sappy stage. And just the contrast to the night before with the most hyped band that has probably ever existed in Indie Rock Canada, who put on a good show, but how annoying and how much administration was involved, and the rider and tech .... the changeover was so long, trailers full of gear, the headache of all that. Then to just have this beautiful, smooth, great relationship, and they’re amazing. Yeah, now I kind of know what's important, you know?

SS: Yeah. Very real music. I assume you learned a lot of lessons from your time at Sappyfest. Can any of them be imparted to others?

PH: Some of the lessons I actually learned before Sappyfest at the Dawson City Music Festival. Like how to treat artists. Number one, if you brought them to this really interesting place, even if you couldn't pay them well enough, if you gave them a comfortable place to sleep, good food, and enough drinks, they would be happy and go away feeling positive and that it was something unique and different from the bigger mass market music festivals that are still dominant. That was also reinforced for me working with John Murchie at Struts in an artist-run-centre. The artist is the most important thing. We're going to do our best to support their creative process in whatever way we can. That transfers to booking sometimes, just trying to find the right slot in the right venue for people, or actually paying attention to some of their weirder backline requests. Like Charles Bradley – again, I forget how many days we worked to get them this organ from Petit Riviere. Then when the keyboard player got on stage for a soundcheck and saw that we got his keyboard, he was just like, “Wow, No one actually gets me this. All I get is like the electric version!”  And he was so blown away.

The biggest lesson to pass on is that you too can just do something. You can make an event happen. You don't need to figure things out entirely before you start, but if you commit to doing something and invite people over, basically, then you can make it work, and you're gonna learn along the way, and you'll get better and you'll develop some processes, and hopefully, kind of build the infrastructure as you go. You don't have to have everything figured out from the get go. We all complain about the government or the potholes or the lack of activity or this or that, but you actually can have an impact by getting together with your friends and starting something or organizing. 

SS: I think about this a lot in light of the current political movements in the arts to boycott and divest from war profiteers, particularly those profiting from the genocide of Palestinians, as funders. Certainly, since I started playing music professionally in 2006, I’ve watched multinational corporations pretty much capture local infrastructure and for their own industry - like Live Nation buying all the local promotion companies and the local venues closing down because of big real estate.  Now we are reckoning with the dependence that a lot of our cultural institutions and infrastructure have on imperialism and exploitation of people, including through our public funding. And there are many artists and arts organizers working right now who don't remember a time before having government funding for arts events. And definitely our economic conditions are different - space is scarce, people are really buckling under the cost of living and so many are deprived of housing - so I’m not suggesting there is a clear return to how things were. But I think there's something really important about the lesson of just starting things and setting a different kind of standard around how we treat artists and each other if we want to bring forward a new world. If you don't have the funding what else can you offer? So how did you enable these things?

PH: I can remember it. I feel like it was probably on Struts porch. I seem to remember being there with a big white piece of paper and going, "How many people do you think will come?" And we were like, "Maybe a hundred" at I think it was $40 for a pass the first year – like 20 bucks a night, $40 for a pass. And figuring out that basic math. And that was our budget. We're just gonna pay these guys this and this and this, and that's how much we've got for beer and some food, and that's it. There was no grant, there was no sponsorship. But we're also not paying anybody running the festival either, right? Of our entire team I would have been the only person getting paid and I was getting paid by Struts. I don't think any sound people got paid that first year. Everything was volunteer outside of bands getting paid and there would have been a budget for food. So many people pitched in in some way: to help with a setup, or painting a banner or building weird things, making costumes. There was a group of five or six people for the first couple years that were on the sound and tech side. There were people on the food side of things for sure. As it expanded those teams got bigger, and then you kind of relied on people recruiting some of their own team members and things like that. We started to get summer employees so we could have volunteer coordinators and things like that. 

SS: And, to clarify for younger people, at the time, what were the politics around independent culture? 

PH: I would say we grew up with a kind of critical mentality around selling out - that if you went on a major label or, like, you took sponsorship you would be selling out.

I think due to our location, our size, and our programming, sponsorship was never an issue. We tried a couple years to develop a sponsorship package and reach out to business but didn't really have any luck outside local support. We got a beer sponsor - it was Moosehead. They were pretty good, actually. They probably would have given us way more if we stuck with them, but we did switch to Picaroons out of Fredericton. But never once did we have to make an ethical decision about who we would take money from. I don't know what we would have done if presented with a bank offering us thousands of dollars or something, but we didn't ask for money from anybody who we didn't feel somewhat aligned with. We didn't get very much from anyone, so it  wasn't an issue, because we were ugly and small.

I don't think the festivals were as big then. They got much bigger, like the Osheagas and Banaroos. That stuff kind of was just beginning too. But everything we heard about them, and even stuff like Pop Montreal or Halifax Pop Explosion– both really dynamic festivals booking a lot of interesting bands at the time – were so brand focussed. This showcase, and this event is sponsored by this brand and that company. So we really did want to avoid that, to offer sanctuary for the bands, too. Sappy isn't a place you have to worry about aligning your band with some corporation, you're not going to feel compromised coming to Sackville. 

SS: Yeah. That's true. Like, that anticommercialism was an ethic that was being carried by different bands in action.  And without everyone pontificating on social media, you really only could see it based on the art we made or how we decided to operate – and so Sappyfest did allow artists with those politics to participate with integrity. And that's huge. You can’t underestimate how aggressively impersonal and commodity driven the music labour context outside a Sappyfest can feel. I just remember doing the festival circuit and then remembering my first experiences with Sappy –  they are so different. It's worth a lot. 

Did you ever think that Sappy would last for 20 years?

PH: Not really… Maybe. I remember at seven feeling like I wanted to get to 10 just to make it a nice round number, and then I couldn't go on after eight.

SS: What broke you? Optional question... 

PH: It was interesting, what broke me was going into that last year, probably about this time, June, early July, and not only did I feel stressed, but I felt (I thought of this term this morning) ”preTSD.” I know what's coming. I know how my body's gonna feel. I can feel the wound up stress and tension. To be honest, drinking too much, staying up way too late, and then operating, trying to operate in a highly stressful environment for 20 hours a day. Just being rung out. And I don't know if I can do it again, and then.

SS: And then…

PH: Then we lost $30,000 that year.

SS:  Through what?

PH: Just not selling enough tickets. Spending too much money! In some ways, it was our own arrogance. Like it had been building and building and getting bigger almost every year and we assumed that would continue. And so the programming that year was, somewhat on purpose, somewhat just the way it rolls, less attractive, less accessible, noisier, darker, heavier, and tickets didn't sell nearly as much. In 2011 we went from the secret show with Arcade Fire and the next year we played with the theme “everyone knows this is nowhere” and some people thought there was going to be a Neil Young secret show, which, of course, was never a possibility. If anybody looked at Neil Young’s website, he was playing on the other side of the continent. In my memory it feels like a music documentary when people only want to hear the hit song or something. It felt like we just put an incredible thing together and they were disappointed that Neil Young wasn’t playing. As artists and designers, we were always trying to up the presence, in terms of what we spent on art and atmosphere and the publication. So, we did just spend too much on cool stuff. Big black balloons. Big. Cool.

SS: Yeah. You’re kind of training the audience to show up for what is, and then at some point, you grow too big and they can't. There's just all these people who you haven't trained. 

PH: Yeah. Exactly. It's the conundrum. 

SS: But I guess, like, then the idea of courting endless growth is something that we all know is not sustainable. 

PH: Yeah, I remember the vibe really shifting with dudes at those bigger shows, too, way drunker, really bro-ey young clusters in the audience and people roaming the street that had a very frat party kind of vibe. I think that also turned off  some of our core audience for a while, too. 

So I was like, I'm done, I've had enough. But at that time, 2013. I didn't see a… not that I couldn't see a way forward, but it seemed improbable that the community could sustain it, just primarily due to the amount of pressure and labour that was involved, you know? It was really Steve Lambke taking over as Director that stabilized and extended the festival, gave it another life and some fresh air. One of the ways that Dawson City has been able to sustain itself is it always has young people come up for the summer and that replenishes the energy. Despite being a college town, Sackville has less of that influx of youth that stays to take on more responsibility, so that's been a challenge for the festival.

SS: Yeah. It’s hard to find housing and jobs for young people here.

PH: Also never financially maturing, the festival was never able to get big enough to offer a full time position or positions, there's just not enough revenue.

SS: I guess we didn't really touch on the visual art component and the aesthetics of the festival, the performances that aren't music performances. How important did that become to you in booking the festival or what hits?

PH:  It's really what gave the whole festival character and an identity and made it unique. And it was almost entirely Jon Claytor’s ideas, and his vision. Every year he would have a couple of new fabulous ideas that I would be resistant to, and I'd be like, “No, it's gonna be so difficult.” And he always convinced me.

SS: Give me an example:

PH: There was a kinetic sculpture show in the music hall where each sculpture would have a one hour slot, like it was a band on a stage. People would have to go up into that crazy, creepy music hall and then see this weird object on stage, spotlit, just doing something, you know? It's totally beautiful, amazing. There were carnival games out on Bridge Street one year that Shamus and Jon built. The Infinite Variety Talk Show with a weird late night talk show happening live at the Vogue. I mean, probably the worst, weirdest, best one was at the arena. The only time we used the Sackville Civic Centre. After midnight, after the main stage closed, we did roller derby and professional wrestlers from Moncton and Holy Fuck, and I think Adam Mowery, and Purple Knight. They all played in the arena and it was so weird. I came really quite late because I was closing down the main stage and I remember just walking in there and being like, “Oh, my God, this looks so awful…” It was such a huge space. Fluorescent lighting, and however big and full mainstage felt with a thousand people, you put those people in a space that big, it just looked like nothing, you know? It was just so bizarre, but it was kind of amazing, and then B.A Johnston's serving hot dogs out front and it was just another weird world. I never would have thought to do that. I still don't know if anybody loved being there or anything, probably not, but it was memorable.