There was a rumour that Neil Young would be at Sappyfest. A surprise appearance from one of the world’s biggest rock stars in Sackville, New Brunswick even seemed possible because, from its inception, “Sappy” has rhymed with possible.

This August long weekend, the annual arts and music festival prepares to celebrate its 20^th birthday.

Back in 2012, the festival slogan indulged the Neil rumours: “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.” Sappyfest’s facilitators, a rotating cast of community members, have a playfulness that bespeaks the festival’s DIY origins. It tries to never take itself too seriously, despite having been a venue for countless seriously unforgettable experiences.

No one ever saw Neil Young at Sappy, but I’ll never forget what I first saw when I stepped off a train from Halifax, into the world of Sappyfest Five. A motley marching band was meandering down Lorne St. towards us. I was already at Sappyfest. There was no stage in sight, but the communal performance was underway. I seem to recall a horse? “Clinically Dead” was definitely in my head, a song my friend Leif had played for me en route, introducing me to Chad VanGaalen. Seeing VanGaalen on stage at that Sappyfest was the first of many goosebumping Sappy moments to come. “A silver white moon / And it still shines bright.”

Like a silver white moon, Sappyfest still shines bright as it approaches its 20th iteration. Looking forward on this occasion entails a collective exercise in looking back in this piece. There are literally hundreds of people who could help me tell you about what Sappy has been and meant—which speaks volumes about the principle of expansive, collaborative creativity that guides the festival. For the sake of scope and clarity, allow me to borrow a famous line from Percy Shelley by apologizing to the legions of “unacknowledged legislators,” for you too are essential to Sappy’s story.

Sappyfest began as an adjunct of Sappy Records, co-founded by Rick White and Julie Doiron in 1990. To this day, the festival has never accepted any major corporate sponsorship, one marker of its firm commitment to artistic self-activity.

Phil: I was a fervent teenage mail order customer of Sappy, the “label” in the early/mid 90s. I still have my scraps of notes from Julie that came with those 7 inches that I’d order. The only sticker on my guitar (to this day) is a Sappy sticker. I was a passionate follower from the other side of the continent, keeping up via zines and mail, pre-Internet.

Jon: I got involved with Sappy Records in 1995. It started as a record label for our friends who were making incredible music but didn’t have a way to get it out. We made Super 8 videos, we photocopied covers for 7-inch records, planned tours across Canada. In the Maritimes, in the 80s and 90s, you had to create your own entertainment or suffer eternal boredom. And the festival started from that same impulse. We were just pretending to make something “real” and having fun with it.

Sappyfest was established by Julie Doiron, Paul Henderson, and Jon Claytor in 2006.

Julie: We had started Sappyfest as a way to get our friends to come and play in town. Because we were living in a small town, and we wanted to have friends come and visit us. As a way of celebrating the relaunch of Sappy we thought it’d be a really fun way to get the word out. We were going to do it in our backyard at first.

Phil: When Sappyfest came along it felt like a flowering of long deserved accolades for this tiny inspiring community of punk artists toiling in remoteness for years. Seems like it quickly became a popular destination festival, which is not surprising. We live in radicalizing times and we’re shown enough examples of culture and money on the mega scale. Of course there’s a big hunger for friends playing music on the sidewalk in a small town in the middle of nowhere, sleeping in a stranger’s yard. We need 100 years of Sappyfest.

Tori: The dedication and work was immense but it always felt worth it in those early years. People came from far and wide—remember that woman who flew in from Australia to see Eric’s​​ Trip? It was like a reunion. Sappyfest was for us, by us; and I’d never experienced something like that before.

To sustain the idea and reality of Sappyfest has required equal doses of willingness and contingency. The latter extends to the existing alchemy of institutions and individuals in Sackville.

Jon: Every now and then a small town will become a perfect storm of possibility. New people arrive, locals open their hearts and just the right hall bar or theatre becomes the perfect venue for something new and needed. And that’s how Sappy was born, a collaboration between hope and place. Mel’s Diner was as much a part of the festival as the main stage tent. The town and its characters were as much creators of the festival as the organizers and artists.

Hailey: Sackville was a sanctuary for all things self-made. Maybe in part due to its size, but also because of how many artists lived there, and its location in between major cities, there were always exciting exchanges to be had and interesting people coming through. I lived there in the tail end of the golden era of punk house shows and impromptu art happenings. Sappyfest was born from this ethos.

Paul: I really just tried to follow my gut and find bands I really liked, or bands that offered something truly unique. Due to our small budget we also tried to find up and coming bands before they broke, artists that had always been ignored because they were so strange, or performers that were older and obscure. Overall we were looking for artists that would offer a unique experience for the audience, something that was different from the next name on the bill. 

Chris: The thing to me about Sappyfest is that it has always been a festival about heart. Good music, of course. But the atmosphere was open and earnest, artistic and free. That’s what makes it feel like coming home.

Ian: Sappy began as this really simple and wonderful combination of friends coming together to make something beautiful happen. And then every subsequent year, new friends and new beautiful things were added to that equation. A really inspiring community of artists and performers was borne out of those first years of Sappy, and it felt very special to be a part of it—and to watch it grow. New friendships were built, old ones were galvanized. All in the name of art, of living a creative life. 

Paul:  It was an incredible feeling to build a world that people wanted to be a part of.

Another word for worldbuilding is utopian, and indeed Sappyfest seems to be a textbook example of what the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch would classify as an “anticipatory utopia.” The emphasis here is on “anticipatory” given that communities are often inevitably mediated by hierarchical social structures that tend to separate us from our capacities and each other. Imperfectly and unevenly, Sappyfest’s facilitators have consciously swum against the systemic tide of racist, colonial, sexist, and homophobic divisions, in the direction of a future that will not be defined by these bad realities. Sappyfest anticipates the real possibility of a better world.

 Tori: Sappyfest wasn’t started by an organization, it was started by people. People who cooked vats of hummus, and eggs for 50, making sure everyone was fed. People who lugged stages, replaced overloaded garbage cans, stood in the tent overnight to make sure no one messed with anything. People who sold beer and band merch and stayed home with the kids so other people could go watch the roller derby/wrestling match/punk show. And it was all done in the spirit of making something fun.

Shary: This remote hyper-relational artist-run festival is like a dreamland far away from the methods and hierarchies of urban capitalist culture scenes. As someone who works across all sorts of art spaces big and small, it’s been such a delightful free-wheeling place for me to experiment.

Several participants highlighted the affirmative experience of engaging with Sappyfest.

Sue: It offers an invigorated space for me to practice turning up in the way I’d like to turn up to everything all the time: open-hearted and welcoming to whatever happens, alert always to the unexpected and the mysterious surprises that happen when a bunch of stellar humans gather. And grateful. I always head home feeling inspired and renewed and part of something that’s joyfully important.

Julie: When the Golden Bus came up, there were some shows on it. And I remember one night, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna make myself a challenge.’ I made a challenge to go home and write a song. And I wrote one of my favorite songs at night, at two in the morning. I wrote “Dreamed I Was,” which was on my last record.  

Mathias: Sappyfest III was one of the first festivals I ever played. At a time when I was just starting to form my ideas about what music could mean, and what I wanted my own creative life to look like, Sappy was a powerful crucible of art, risk, community, humour, and interdisciplinarity—not to mention an incredible amount of fun. It was literally a generative experience, in that Sappy provided the main inspiration for Ariel and I when we started Lawnya Vawnya in Newfoundland a few years later. But the downside was that, like drugs or skydiving, nothing could ever compare to that first time, and none of the other festivals we’ve played have approached the magic of the swamp (to paraphrase Shotgun Jimmie).

Lido: Sappy made me believe in my music!

Lido Pimienta made believers of many when she first played Sappyfest in 2017. She was thus an ideal choice for one of the strangest, most captivating performances in festival history: the 2020 Cube Show, where Pimienta performed a live set remotely to an audience of approximately 250 people in Sackville’s Industrial Park. Pimienta’s set, Miss Colombia Medley, was projected onto a 14-storey blueberry and cranberry freezer. There have been a range of such sublime curiosities.

Ariel: I remember seeing [name redacted] dress up as a gorilla as DJ Coconuts, playing Harry Nillson’s “Coconut” over and over again at Struts. Every time he’d pick the needle up and move it back to the beginning of the song, a new layer of absurdity folded in on itself. It went from kind of funny to truly ridiculous to transcendent.

Anna: Jon moved mountains for me to be able to install my outdoor trapeze rig in the months leading up to the festival. When we arrived in Sackville, night was falling. We needed help putting up the structure and festival goers were willing but most were well into their first drink. Nobody minded but everyone was quite surprised as they realized it was heavy work. To make matters worse, once everyone’s hands were full and had to hold their pose while we made adjustments, the mosquitos emerged.

 Jon: We didn’t want there to be a difference between audience and performer so we generally wouldn’t have a green room. Musicians and fans both stood in line together for beer and you could run into your favourite performer or biggest fan at any time. And the amazing Sappyfest audience is the biggest strength of the festival. When I was programming strange and oddball events I knew that this audience was creative, curious and up for anything. They never disappointed. And they found themselves in some pretty strange situations. 

Graeme: For Sappy 18 I was asked to perform as a dancing tick for Fiver and the Atlantics (they usually go as Fiver, but you can see where the tic comes in). I said yes of course! They were slotted for 10 pm on Saturday night which is when an insane mini-hurricane whipped through town and right down Bridge Street. When the rain and wind hit us, I was fully dressed as a tic, which was not ideal for helping people evacuate.

The festival has had to adapt to new and challenging situations, especially in recent years, for which its history of remaining open to the unexpected has served it well. 

Ariel: In 2020, when Sappy was unable to happen in person because of the global Covid-19 pandemic (the novel coronavirus), Mathias and I set up a call centre called Sappy Support Line, and took calls from all of the sad and anxious beings who weren’t able to get their Sappy fix. We would connect callers to various artists, board members, volunteers and other frequent collaborators, who would share songs or memories. Chatting with people when they first called was an amazing way to connect to the larger Sappyfest community.

Steven: When we realized that for the second year in a row we would not be able to present a live in-person festival, we imagined some kind of cross between The Muppet Show and a durational community telethon. “Infinite Variety” programming was a wild and free celebration of human creativity, inclusive of musical acts, animations, performance art, video art, a pet show, magic, gardening tips, a cooking show, yoga, an ad-hoc panel discussion of diabetics in the arts community, a spontaneous early-morning foot race, and so much more. Our make-shift studio ebbed and flowed on the tides of chaos and calm. Faced with the restrictions of the pandemic era, I’m inspired by how this community responded: with creativity and good heart.  

Julie: Because of the really difficult times in the world, I think we need that community [of Sappyfest] more than ever right now. We need Sappy because we need to be together in the tent, feeling the love.

Secret show enthusiasts were sated in 2011, with a surprise appearance by Arcade Fire; Charles Bradley’s performance the next night remains–for many–the epitome of “feeling the love” at Sappyfest.

Jeremy: We were billed as Shark Attack! as we were not meant to be playing shows ahead of opening for U2 out there – but we all wanted to do it. I remember it was in a tent, it was loud, it was sweaty, and it was really really fun. I also remember hearing about how beyond good the Charles Bradley show was the next night — and that I wish I could have actually stayed to be there for that. 

Paul: I still think of the Charles Bradley show, who has also passed away, as the pinnacle of my Sappy programming. I think that was a religious experience for everyone who was there that night.

Sappyfest can also feel like another kind of experience: a family reunion, except imagine a perpetual “open call” for new members. The family reunion resemblance is amplified by the fact that several current volunteers and recent performers grew up in and around the festival—a testament to what two decades’ worth of Sappyfests can yield. The “Kids Corner Power Jam” that has historically kicked off the festivities is one way of signalling this lineage. Sappy kids would practice all week before rocking Bridge St., with band names like Ghost Hunters and Deadly Latte.

Sappyfest has also had to mourn the loss of dearly beloved family members like Dawn-Aeron Wason and Richard Laviolette, finding ways to lovingly honour them and preserve their memory through the annual Universal Dawn event and last year’s “All Wild Things Are Shy” show.

Chris: My wife, Dawn-Aeron, passed away in 2011. She was a writer among other things. She read at almost every Sappy and was a big supporter of writers and performers of all types. Shortly after Dawn passed, Jon Claytor asked if it would be ok to have a memorial for her at Sappyfest to be called Universal Dawn. I was deeply moved and of course said yes. The first was all of her friends reading, playing music, and telling stories. It was beautiful.

Steven: “All Wild Things Are Shy” was a presentation of Richard’s final album, which he finished in the last months of his life as the symptoms of Huntington’s increased and before he chose to receive MAiD on September 5^th, 2023. The show was an act of communal grieving, a celebration of Richard’s work and life in art and song. It was a powerful moment to collectively reflect on presence and loss. We shed, and shared, tears.

It’s easy to get buried in the past, when you try to make a good thing last. That’s a mournful line from one of Richard’s idols—Neil Young—eulogizing the 1960s in “Ambulance Blues.” But as Sappyfest turns 20, a different lesson could be drawn. While of course everything ends, good things can last (a long time).

Hailey: The whole town would be glowing with energy and anticipation before the festival, it was always so special. Years later, I have still never encountered anything that comes remotely close to that feeling.

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With contributions from: Phil Elverum, Jon Claytor, Julie Doiron, Tori Weldon, Hailey Guzik, Paul Henderson, Chris Thompson, Ian Roy, Shary Boyle, Sue Goyette, Mathias Kom, Lido Pimienta, Ariel Sharratt, Anna Ward, Graeme Patterson, Steven Lambke, and Jeremy Gara.