The Apotheosis

of

Celtic Stone

A Brief History Part 4, The Apotheosis of Celtic Stone, 1986

Natural Bridges recieved its final mixdown while the band was playing the 1985 Texas Renaissance Festival. When the two track master had been finished and sent off to the duplicators, they went down to Magnolia to wrap up the '85 Renaissance tour and prepare for the Christmas shows in Texas. The morning was drizzly and gray, and when the opening cannon went off, the moisture congealed and came down in torrents. That entire first weekend was an almost complete rain out and converted the site into a swampy morass. On the following Monday, Robyn and his eldest daughter, Angela Celeste, drove to Florida to wrap up the remaining business there and to bring the contents of the storage unit back to Texas. That afternoon, they drove through a hurricane in Louisiana. It rained all the way to Florida and back, and continued raining throughout the second weekend of the TRF...and the third...and the fourth...and the fifth. By this time the entire site was under 6" of water, attendance was down to about a tenth of normal numbers. The show was becoming an unmitigated disaster for everyone involved. The management, in an attempt to soak up the water, spread hay all over the grounds, but the hay only got soggy and rotted. All in all, one of the worst Ren Faire experiences ever.

Natural Bridges arrived just before the fifth weekend, so the band spent a lot of time going around to their friends' booths and campsites, playing the new album for them. Despite the weather, that weekend was pretty good for sales, since a lot of folks bought the new one. When the rain ended and the site began to dry out, King George called everyone together and announced that the show, originally scheduled for six weeks, would be extended to seven and that everyone's contract would likewise extend to that seventh weekend. No one was very happy about that, but TRF was almost always a great one to end the year, so most everyone complied. The sixth weekend turned out to be gorgeous! Mild temperatures, light clouds and everyone gave it their all. The band did their first ever 200 tape day that weekend. Weekend seven was almost as nice and though the overall numbers were substantially lower than expectations, the show did OK.

The lost revenue of the TRF time, made it even more important that Celtic Stone stay as busy as possible for the winter. They were able to expand their venues in Texas, staging a few concerts and playing local clubs almost every weekend. The also played Aggie-Con, a science fiction convention at Texas A&M University. It turned out that sci-fi fans loved the quirky styles of Celtic Stone almost as much as did the Renaissance-Medieval Fanasy buffs. They even got "real" jobs during the off season, which was good, because in January, Sarah and Robyn's son, Robert-John was born in Austin. Simon, at the time, lived in their garage.

The band was able to keep it together playing the club scene and concerts, and Simon spent a lot of time working on getting a touring schedule for Europe for the following summer. There were quite a few replies and some serious bookings, so they planned for being there in July and August, during the Minnesota and King Richard's time slots.

The '86 tour started off on the wrong foot. Scarborough had a couple of very wet and muddy weekends right at the beginning and then turned extremely hot and muggy for the rest of the show. Attendance was somewhat down and sales were decidedly slow. Colorado was better, and enough money was saved so that the trip to Europe would be feasible, so their attitude about it all improved. Robyn had booked a gig in New York City for them on their way to Europe and was talking with Len Rosenfeld, the well known folk artist manager from New York, who was managing Nancy Griffiths' career at the time. Len promised to catch the band's act when they were in NY.

At the end of Scarborough, Robyn and David met to discuss their future, and Robyn said that he couldn't do Ren Faires any more. The income was too insecure, he had developed tendenitis from playing so much and his beloved Martin guitar had become almost ruined from the exposure to weather and the constant fluctuations of climate and altitude. He wanted the band to move into the club and concert level, and a relationship with someone like Len Rosenfeld could do it for them. David expressed reservations about giving up the security of the Ren Faire contracts, but tentatively agreed that Rob should keep working on the alternatives.

When Colorado was over, Sarah and the kids had already gone to Chicago, so Simon and Robyn went there first, then flew to NY, meeting up with David in the city. At the Speakeasy Club, in Greenwich Village, they met Len who was very excited about the group's possibilities. They gave him a pile of promotional materials and they parted, with Robyn agreeing to meet him when he got back to NYC after six weeks in Europe. Simon and Rob flew to England, with an invitation to stay with friends of Simon's in Croydon, while David and Maria went to Norway where she had spent some time growing up. The day after they arrived was the Royal Wedding of Prince Andrew and "Fergie", and London was jammed with tourists. Simon had things to do, so Rob spent his time trying to arrange bookings and looking into potential recording contracts with British companies. Three days later, Rob and Simon boarded the North Sea Ferry and went to Holland. From there, they went by train to Copenhagen, Denmark and then to Frederickssund, where their first booking was to be. They stayed with a wonderful Danish couple, Finn and Hanna Vester and their family. After the Frederickssund Festival, they took a ferry to Sweden, to play an outdoor concert in the Kungstegarden (I think I spelled it right...anyway, it's "the King's garden" a large park in central Stockholm). Right after that show, they boarded another train for Rattvik, in northern Sweden.

Rattviksdansen was a sheer joy. They played with about fifteen other music and dance troops from all over Europe, Israel and the US, including Mioritsa, a gypsy dance troupe from the USSR's Moldova. They were in Rattvik for about five days and the experiences there could fill a book. It was a time of amazing contacts with Swedish history, international politics and just plain fun. After Rattviksdansen, David flew back to Norway, and Simon and Rob travelled down to the historic old city of Uppsala for a few days. Then the band regrouped in Eskilstuna for another folk festival and lots of street performances in Stockholm. Other than some less-than-happy Swedish policepersons, the Stockholmers loved the band, jamming up the streets where they played and stuffing the guitar case with Kroners...which is why the cops were mad, we were making lots of money in a socialistic country and weren't paying taxes on it. The minimum tax rate was about 50%! When the Eskilstuna show was over, we didn't have any more bookings, so everyone went their own ways. David returned to Norway, Simon went to France for a seafaring festival in Brittany, and Rob returned to Frederickssund to look at his options. David and Maria arrived there a couple of days later.

Maria left the next morning for the states, and David and Rob went to play street shows in Copenhagen. There they were interviewed by the Copenhagen daily newspaper and were featured the following day on the front page along with a Bolivian group called Los Uros, as the best street performers in Denmark that year. People came out to see them play by the droves for the entire weekend.

During one of their breaks, they were walking down the street and heard familiar Ren Faire sounds from within a crowd. There were Nimble Nick and Mistress Whimsey from Scarborough Faire, performing in Denmark. Getting together, Nick and Joanne told them about a really cheap hostel situation right there in Copenhagen, which allowed them to gracefully leave their host's home before taking on the characteristics of ripe fish, if you know what I mean. The first night at the hostel, they were entertained by a Rod Stewart concert in the stadium next door. Copenhagen was a wonderful experience, but it was time for them to move on. They went to Holland and met up with Jerry Spurlock. Jerry showed them around Amsterdam town, and arranged for them to stay in a friend's apartment, who, sadly, had to return home to Britain to attend to his mother's funeral and to "get pissed" with his dad. For about three days, David and Rob played at the Leitseplein, a town square in Amsterdam. David then flew home, and Rob went to stay for a couple of days with Simon's friend, Bernard Kleinkamp in Leiden, a record company owner who wanted to distribute Celtic Stone's product in Holland, Germany and Belgium. While in Leiden, Rob got to meet one of his guitar idols, Jan Akkerman, formerly of the band Focus.

Bernard took Rob to see one of his label's groups, a band from Bulgaria, and then took him to Rotterdam to catch the ferry to England. The trip was weirded out by a bunch of English soccer fans who started a riot on the ferry and were locked up in the common area, forcing the other passengers to spend a lot of time in the cold outside. When they got to Harwich, everyone had to stay on the ferry until the police and the army could assemble to get the soccer fans properly arrested. In the meanwhile, Rob missed his flight back to the states. Desperate, and not knowing where to turn, he called Rita and Chris Roche, the people who he had stayed with in Croydon, who, as it turned out, had just returned home from Brittany with Simon in tow. They begrudgingly agreed to let Rob stay until he could arrange another flight, which took another three days. All in all, everyone was glad to be apart from each other.

When he got to New York, Rob went to see Len, who was ecstatic about the response he had received from the promo packages. He wanted to sign the band and book a full year's touring up and down the East Coast, where the group had had very little exposure, and work on getting them a recording contract with a major label. When they got back together a couple of weeks later, Rob told David the news from New York, and was blindsided when David revealed to him that he (Dave) had already signed all the Ren Faire contracts for the next year, and that he really wasn't interested in changing course at this time.

For the second year in a row, TRF wasn't very good. There had been a collapse in the state's economy when the bottom dropped out of oil prices and unemployment was very high. Rob and Sarah had a miserable time trying to find work to keep it together, finally realizing just before Christmas that it wasn't going to happen for them. Rob's brother in California offered him a job wiring apartments, and so Rob met with David in Austin and they agreed to a more-or-less amicable separation, with David keeping the Celtic Stone names and rights to the recordings, while Rob took the bulk of the band's PA system.

Celtic Stone History, part 3

Celtic Stone History, part 2

Celtic Stone History, part 1

Back to Celtic Stone Semi-Official Home Page

Published by Celtic MP3s Music Magazine, text courtesy of © 2003 Robert Hilliard