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Here was the evening of their Alaska Folk Festival debut - 15 quick-but-nerve-wracking minutes on the Centennial Hall stage in April of 1999. The sisters' first song was about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and they were thrilled with the opportunity to perform it in Alaska.
I ain't gonna buy no Exxon gas / Know that I have too much class / To buy a drop of Exxon gas
But funny time aside, no one had told them the festival was going to be broadcast on KTOO-FM. Nor did they realize the crowd was going to be so large. This was the first large festival where they'd ever performed. What if they went over the 15-minute time limit? What if they couldn't reach their microphones? What if no one laughed?
"I had mental images of the audience being full of Exxon lawyers," said Bogden, of Aurora, Colo. "The sweat was dropping off my elbows and molding in the palm of my hands in the hotel room. But as soon as the audience laughed that first time, we knew we would be home free."
Welcome to showtime - the overwhelming scene that surrounds the main stage. Imagine 20 sound, stage and monitor crew members scurrying around, arranging and rearranging 12 microphones, all pointing at you. Picture an emcee, a timer, a broadcaster and a chief engineer, all waiting for you. Look out at the 900 people in the crowd - your friends, fellow musicians, guys you cut off in traffic. Remember the radio audience - countless thousands in Southeast, many more listening to a worldwide audio stream. And don't forget the lobby: 200 more people from all corners of Alaska, Yukon Territory and the Lower 48, here in Juneau for the music. Men playing mandolin. Ladies flat-picking banjos. Pre-teens picking up fiddles. Some dude in a beard playing the spoons by the drinking fountains.
That's just on the periphery. Once you soak it in, it's between you and the red light in the front of the stage. Everyone gets 15 minutes to say what they have to say, and when there's two minutes left, the light blinks on. Go over 15 minutes, and the emcee will cut you off, you'll get a letter in the mail from the folk festival board and you're liable to have trouble getting on the schedule next year.
"You can say what you need to say in 15 minutes," Anchorage musician Joe Page said. "After that, you're just saying more of it."
"If you practice your songs ahead of time, you get a pretty good idea of how long it takes to get through a set," Bellingham musician Vic Cano said. "And the little red light up there lets you know. The only problem is when your time is up, you're warmed up and ready to play."
"I always try to do a 13-minute set, 14 max, so you're in and you're out," Chugiak musician Robin Hopper said. "The stage crew is happy, the emcees are happy and the audience doesn't know any different. There are a lot of people that have traveled a long way and a lot of people who only perform once a year, at the festival. The variety is half the attraction."
In the early days, when the folk festival was at the Alaska State Museum, there was no time limit on sets. Performers could climb on stage with a concertina and ramble on for 25 minutes. As the festival grew, it became necessary to make things equal. Fifteen minutes was not derived from the Andy Warhol phrase, "15 minutes of fame." It just seemed like a reasonable amount of time to play three songs.
"Fifteen minutes is a good amount of time, but funny songs are hard to judge," Bogden said. "I wrote a song about black pantyliners, and when we performed it for a dulcimer group, there were places where the audience fell to laughing. We had to strum it out, so they didn't miss the next two to three stanzas. We didn't know how that was going to go over in Alaska, so we rehearsed it the best we could."
Rehearsal and planning are the keys to efficiency. The sound crew requires all performers to prepare a stage diagram charting where the performers will stand and how many microphones will be needed. But small bands have a way of picking up members at the last moment and mutating into larger bands. And bigger bands typically need more time to organize on stage. Thus, less time to play.
"If it takes you a couple minutes to set up on stage, you're going to have a problem with the length of your set," KTOO program director Jeff Brown said. "If you practice your songs without the long, involved stories, then you're going to have a problem with the length of your set. If you have forgotten how to tell time, you're going to have a problem with the length of your set."
The festival used to have a problem with performers who were so enamored of the spotlight that they'd join bands and end up on stage a number of times each night. The board managed to diffuse the situation by inventing the Golden Ham Award - a stuffed ham for the performer who was on stage the most.
"It was a hotly coveted prize for awhile," former board member Bob Banghart said, "and pretty soon people realized it was not such a good thing to have."
Most artists are content with one slot and figuring out what three songs they're going to play.
"It's pretty much a rule of thumb that you don't do anything that you did the year before or the year before that," Juneau musician Buddy Tabor said.
Some musicians are products of the main stage. Fairbanks musician Trudy Heffernan first came to the festival in 1984 and was so inspired she decided to learn bass. Two or three years later, she and Jock Irons played as Beer Break, a funny animal-song band. It was the festival debut for both of them.
"We hadn't played all that much on stage," Heffernan said. "We had a Thursday night spot, and we rolled off the ferry at something like 3 a.m. Thursday morning. We were students, and we had a Toyota Treacle station wagon. Six people, our gear, our instruments. We sort of hung around town and hung out at the glacier. That night we were backstage, and we just wanted to run away. It was nerve-wracking, but exciting. And when you get offstage, and you're riding around on cloud nine, you think, 'Oh my god, I did it.'"
   
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