Water, Fire, and Rhode Island’s Most Adorable Folksinger
“Waterfire?” my brother asked once, right after I moved to Providence. “Isn’t that where they put a lit match in the river, and it’s so polluted that the whole thing goes up in flames? That is SO COOL.”
“That would be cool,” I’d said at the time, “but actually it’s just this bullshit New Age art project.”
There’s a lot wrong with this, not least the fact that into our late teens neither of us could think of anything better than a post-industrial toxic sludgefire. Waterfire is neither New England’s answer to Centralia, PA, nor is it a complete waste of time. It’s really a highly successful testament to creative urban revitalization wrapped in a smelly Druid cloak of completely meaningless mysticism.
On certain warm evenings at sundown, kettle corn vendors and guys selling glowsticks and pretty much the entire population of Rhode Island gather on the banks of the Providence to watch a boat full of people with torches travel slowly – though via motor – down the waterway. As they pass each in a series of 100 braziers planted in the river, they light it, so that when they’re done 100 campfires blaze above the water.
Water and fire and kettle corn are all pretty likeable, and you have to be either really naïve or really cynical to dismiss a project that brings together an entire city for free entertainment. But the downside to Waterfire is that while they’re lighting all the braziers, they’re also piping in this recording of terrible, terrible music: Druid chants and free jazz and yogic sitar runs that I guess are meant to enhance the spirituality of the moment but mostly just crackle horribly over the mediocre sound system.
Part of the problem is the environment: It’s hard to make loud music sound good outdoors in the concrete-and-brick basin of downtown Providence. Part of the problem is the fact that it’s not live: The visual effects of a chorus, maybe a children’s chorus, maybe ON one of the boats, would take away from the corniness of the music choices. But mostly it’s the fact that—and I’m sorry but it’s physically impossible for me to discuss Providence without paraphrasing Morrissey lyrics—the music says nothing to us about our lives.
Luckily, as we were wandering around Waterfire this Saturday night, listening to the Gregorian chants bounce awkwardly off the face of the Cheesecake Factory at the Providence Place Mall, we happened to discover the cutest boy in Rhode Island. Bradford Krieger is going to be a sophomore in college this fall. He’s a folksinger who looks like a baby version of the DEA agent in Weeds and sounds like, as his MySpace pretty accurately puts it, “the delicate love story of two old women.” And he was $3 into his first-ever attempt at busking.
Here’s why Waterfire is great: Because as we were talking to Bradford Krieger about Boston and New York and his folksinger plans, these two drunk-seeming guys and a girl appeared out of nowhere and asked if they could play a song. One of them slung the guitar over his shoulder, froze utterly still, stammered for a while, and then announced he didn’t want to play after all. Then the girl said she was going to “play some Justin” (Timberlake?) and strummed a couple notes in quick arrhythmic succession, cracked a massive smile, and gave the guitar back. Then they disappeared, and Bradford Krieger sang a song about his imaginary sister. We think he’ll do pretty well in New York some day.
