First off, let’s get the important stuff regarding the 50th Anniversary of Comfest - 2022 - out of the way; Colin Gawel’s League Bowlers will be taking the Gazebo Stage at Goodale Park at 8:35 pm this Friday evening, right before Willie Phoenix closes the first night of Gazebo Stage FESTivities at 9:45 pm.

 Pencil Storm would further not complain if the local populace also came out to cheer on former Bowlers & Willie mainstay drummer Jim Johnson playing with Kim Crawford (a veteran of Phoenix’s Soul Underground) in their 10AHEAD band at 2 pm Saturday on the (Main) Bozo Stage.

2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Comfest – Columbus, Ohio’s COMmunity FESTival – our fair city’s largest local alternative/hippie bash, returning this June 24th, 25th & 26th after a two-year Covid-induced hiatus.    

I attended the very first Comfest in 1972 – riding COTA from my West Side home – to the original location at that (Unitarian?) church south & east up behind the old Bernie’s Bagels on High Street.  (If not for the fact that two years of Covid restrictions have made me lazy & agoraphobic I was gonna drive down to campus and take my picture on the grounds.)

I don’t remember exactly what year the festival shifted down to its from-then-on permanent home at Goodale Park, but all of My Top Five Favorite Memories of the First Fifty Years of Comfest take place at Goodale, from 1978 on.  (The Top Five will be  presented chronologically.)

1978, Aiding a Hobbled Greg Glasgow of Romantic Noise On & Offstage

In June, 1978 I was a roadie for Willie Phoenix’s first and (though Willie hates when I say this because he feels it downplays his subsequent work) BEST Columbus band, Romantic Noise.  Willie’s bass player & right-hand man in Romantic Noise was Greg Glasgow.  The day before the band was scheduled to play Comfest a forklift driver at Greg’s daytime warehouse temp job ran over Greg’s foot and broke it, resulting in Greg being on crutches for the gig.   

My assignment that day was to get Greg up & down the steps leading to the stage, help him into a chair, get him his bass and essentially do anything necessary for him to play the show.  That was painful in itself to Greg, because he was always going on about rock musicians being lazy no-counts; having roadies bring their guitars out to them instead of keeping them onstage, roadies having to bring them towels & drinks, etc.   

After helping Greg down into his seat, putting a beer and a water next to him, and handing him his bass, he told me in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS not to come out onstage to do ANYTHING for him during the set. 

Three songs in, of course, Greg dropped his pick and it bounced a couple of times, landing maybe three feet away from him.  I saw it, but didn’t make one single move to get it.  I could see the consternation on Greg’s face as he weighed having to ask me to retrieve that pick or if he could finish the set without it.  Finally he met my eyes and said quietly, “Could you get that for me, please?”  “I’d be delighted Mr. Glasgow,” I said with a straight face and walked out to hand him that one and another couple from the top of his amp.  (I don’t know WHAT good we thought they were going to do there.)

 Do I miss 1978 and Romantic Noise? You’d best believe I do.

1998, The Watershed Thunderstorm Downpour Incident

1998 was the first Comfest I attended with my then-girlfriend (later to be my lovely wife) Debbie.  As I remember it, I don’t think it had even started to cloud up yet at the beginning of Watershed’s set, but as the show went on it got darker & darker, until it went past twilight-dark to almost nighttime-dark.  I asked Debbie if she wanted to leave, but I think she knew how much I wanted to see Watershed, and I think we entertained the notion we might make it through to the end before the storm broke.

We were wrong. 

Thunder rolled, there was lightning EVERYWHERE and it started raining TORRENTS.  Ladies & gentlemen, cats & kittens, I swear to GOD I have taken SHOWERS where I haven’t gotten as wet as we did that day.

AND WATERSHED NEVER MISSED A NOTE!

They never took a break, never stopped playing.

When they didn’t stop playing we didn’t really consider leaving because we were so soaked by the initial downpour we really couldn’t have gotten ANY wetter.  I have a very specific memory during the encore of Watershed’s borrowed horn section (whom no less an authority than Michael “Biggie” McDermott informs me was The New Basics Brass Band joining Watershed for a version of The RC Mob’s “Tundra”) jumping up & down in the two or three foot deep puddles ON THE STAGE!

I have never seen a band play through a deluge like that one before or after that day.

2003, and the Best Compliment I’ve Ever Gotten On My Songwriting

I had been playing at Comfest as a performer off & on since the early 1990’s when I started my Ricki C. solo acoustic act. In 2003 I debuted a song I had just written - “Katie & The Rolling Stones” linked here - next to closing. While I was packing up my guitar after the set two really well-dressed 40-ish women walked up and one of them said, “Excuse me, but did you say YOU WROTE that song about the young girl losing her virginity while the Rolling Stones song was playing?” “Yes,” I replied proudly, “I did in fact write that song.”

The women exchanged a glance, then the second one said, “Can I ask you then, exactly WHEN in your life were you a teenage girl? You COULDN’T have conveyed that painful situation any more accurately.” “Nope, never a teenage girl; but I take really good mental notes when people tell me things,” I answered, recalling the young girl who had related the basics of the story to me 15 years earlier.

It was ABSOLUTELY the best compliment I have EVER gotten on my songwriting.

2005, I Kick a Bare-Breasted Hippie Girl Off The Gazebo Stage During The Whiles’ Set

In 2005 I volunteered to help The Whiles - my all-time third-favorite Columbus band after Willie Phoenix and Watershed, completing the “three-W’s” - with guitar tech and roadie duties for their Comfest set. Partway through their set a hippie girl from the Gazebo Stage audience sauntered up onstage, took off her top and started dancing around the band. This is not exactly an unheard-of incident at Comfest, but bare-breasted hippie girls Grateful-Dead-dancing around the stage is not really The Whiles cup of tea; Joe Peppercorn & the boys aspire to a slightly more cerebral state of affairs in their rock & roll than Spin Class rejects.

I politely asked the Comfest-appointed stage manager - an aging hippie who was stoned off his ass to begin with - to remove the girl from the stage and his reply was an impish laugh and “It’s Comfest, maaaan, let her be.” (Problematically, the word “man” pronounced with any more than one “a” in it brings out the worst of my Sex Pistols “God Save The Queen” hostility response.)

I pushed past him and got to the girl just as she danced over to Joe’s brother - lead guitarist Matt Peppercorn - trying to involve him in her Mata-Hari-on-acid idiot-dance and Matt neatly, pointedly & decisively turned his back on her. Confused by the rebuff she turned to find another While to dance with as I took her arm, led her down the steps of the Gazebo and deposited her back in the audience (to scattered applause from The Whiles’ wives & girlfriends).

As I returned to Guitar World the Stage Manager came over livid, spitting-mad, yelling at me, “How dare you go out on MY STAGE! I’M IN CHARGE HERE!” “You couldn’t stage-manage a cockfight, clown,” I replied, “get away from me and let me work.” Being too peace & love for any kind of physical confrontation he yelled, “You’ll NEVER work at Comfest again!” and stormed off to find some Comfest higher-up to have me tossed. He returned with a Comfest mainstay I had known for probably 20 years, who just said, “Ricki, what did you do?”

“I kicked a half-naked girl offstage who was throwing the band off because THIS guy doesn’t know how to do his job. NOBODY gets on a Ricki C. stage without permission.”

The very next year I was proven wrong in a really big way.

2006 (or so, we couldn’t come to a concensus on the year), I Have To Break Up a Fight On a Comfest Stage

I did a shift stage-managing a few years in the 2000’s and it was usually a pretty genial gig. Mostly you just had to make sure the bands didn’t go over their allotted set-times. You were also expected to direct a “crew” of volunteers who were paid by Comfest with beer tokens and generally had no clue WHAT they were doing, but could nominally be counted on to move amps & drum kits on and off the stage.

Th’ Flyin’ Saucers (whose leader Sean Groves aka Johnny Rebel passed away earlier this year) were a great noisy rockabilly-inspired band who tore it up at Comfest pretty much every year. To make a long story short, at the end of their set Johnny pulled an audience member out of the crowd to sing the last verse of the tune. (Later - after the Columbus Police got involved and an Official Report had to get made - nobody in the band could quite get it straight whether that was a Planned Exercise or a Spur Of The Moment Decision.)

Anyway, said audience-member-turned-lead-singer was raving around the stage, singing his drunken little heart out when he slipped on some spilled beer and fell backwards, hitting the Saucers’ lead guitarist full in the mouth with the microphone and knocking them both down. They got up, squared off for a second, then the guitarist took off his guitar and they started throwing punches. The rest of the band was still playing and I found myself thinking, “Wow, this is an odd way to end a Comfest show. This LOOKS real.”

Just then the two guys fell into Johnny Rebel, the band stopped dead, and I realized, “HOLY SHIT, these guys are REALLY FIGHTING!”

I went out on the stage and managed to pin down the guitar player, but the audience guy was still throwing punches, hitting me AND the guitarist so I let him up to continue fighting. By now the rest of Th’ Flyin’ Saucers had exited stage left - upright bass & all - and five or six guys from the audience were clambering onstage to help their buddy. I realize a major brawl was about to break out and my “crew” were just standing frozen, their eyes wide. I yelled at them, “Get those people OFF THE STAGE, get them off NOW!”

They managed to clear the stage and we now had enough bodies to separate the combatants. Things settled down, and the cops showed up because the guitar kid wanted to press assault charges since he was probably gonna need dental work from getting smacked in the mouth with the microphone.

In the midst of all this someone summoned the Comfest Music Director who’s in charge of all the stage managers, and of course it’s the same guy I had to answer to at The Whiles show the year before. “Ricki, Ricki, Ricki,” he moaned, “in 30 years of Comfest there has NEVER been a fight ONSTAGE until you got here.” “This wasn’t my fault,” I said, “I kept it from becoming a worse brawl or a riot,” but he wasn’t buying it.

He just walked away shaking his head to talk to the cops.

(The pay-off: Fully five or six years later I was telling this story backstage while serving as a roadie for an Erica Blinn & the Handsome Machine gig downtown at the Columbus Commons. When I got to the part about the fight the entire band cracked up laughing and Greg Wise - Erica’s lead guitarist of the time - said, “That was ME! I was that guitar player with Th’ Flyin’ Saucers.” Just another example of the small-world fraternity of rockers that is Columbus rock & roll.)

Happy 50th Birthday, Comfest. Thanks for the memories. - Ricki C. / June 21st, 2022