Aged 23, I had a similar experience with Carl Martin. Running a folk club in Hamilton Ontario at the time, I was 'connected' enough to be allowed into the performers' hotel at the Mariposa folk festival in Toronto. One of the featured bands at the festival was Martin, Bogan and Armstrong. I'd seen them play onstage in the afternoon and made a bee line for the hotel room where they were hosting an informal session. Because the band's name was a string of surnames, and since the names Bogan and Armstrong wouldn't have meant anything to me then, I failed to make the connection that Martin was in fact the Carl Martin whose 'Crow Jane' I had on a compilation LP and had been trying for months to learn. Carl Martin only had a mandolin with him for the trip to Toronto, and didn't pick up a guitar during the hotel room session which consisted mostly of popular tunes of the twenties and thirties played string band style. All three band members were great guys who didn't seem to mind my feeble attempts to play along (I cringe when I think of now)! If only I'd made the connection (instead of walking through the crossroads) I might've been able to have learned Crow Jane directly from the source singer instead of from vynil. The other "own goal" I remember from my year as a student in Canada was my obliviousness to the fact that one of my all-time heroes, Lonnie Johnson, was living in Toronto and occasionally playing with a (pretty gruesome-looking) all-white trad jazz band with matching uniforms and crew-cuts. It would have been the experience of a lifetime for me to have seen Lonnie play live, or maybe even to have met him. Ah well......!
