When Sam Baijal accepted his Estelle Klein Lifetime Achievement Award during the Ontario Folk Music Awards at the beginning of the month, the long-time artistic director of the Hillside Festival tearfully thanked his parents for bringing him to Canada from India in 1967.
And then he thanked the Grateful Dead.
Were it not for his time as a Dead Head, Sam told me, he’d probably have stuck with studying biological sciences at university, and who knows where he’d be today?
The story goes like this: Sam took some time away from his program around the same time that he and his friends had been getting into the Dead.
He saw them something like 187 times between 1981 and ’84, an obsession that took him all across the United States and over to Europe.
“It was a very adventurous thing to be doing,” he said. “running across the landscape … for 23 weeks or whatever, to go see these guys.”
It was also the kind of lifestyle that raised eyebrows among certain segments of society.
“Some people go, ‘Why are you going to see the same band so many times?’” he said.
“I didn’t really care what anybody thought. I wasn’t doing it for any kind of reason except for the fact that I really loved it.”
The experience inspired him to follow his passion in other areas of his life from there on in.
Sam received the Estelle Klein Award on Oct. 6 for being “an advocate, supporter, and champion of the Ontario folk music community,” according to the citation, “in particular an advocate of a more diverse, more welcoming, and more inclusive folk and independent music community.”
His fans credit him with being a pioneer in creating Canadian music festival programming that is inclusive of racialized, gender-diverse, and Indigenous artists.
Sam just calls that “common sense” and “a no-brainer.”
Sam’s passion for music dates back to his earliest days in Canada when, as a six-year-old, he discovered the radio – particularly the music on the radio.
“It was like, ‘Wow,’” he said.
“I got into that right away, just listening to music of all kinds… And then, you know, as I grew up in high school and stuff, I started going to concerts, and I really liked that a lot. And music became a really big deal to me.”
When he settled back down after following the Dead around, he started booking concerts at the university and later supplemented that work by co-operating a record store with a friend.
Another friend eventually encouraged him to join the board of Hillside, where he and a partner had previously sold quiche as food vendors.
He eventually followed through on the invitation, and in 1998, he became the artistic director because “We were in a position where we couldn’t really afford to [hire] anybody,” he said.
“I said, you know, I can start the process … and then we’ll hire somebody to take it over after a while.”
Twenty-six years later, he’s still at it, and by the early 2000s, the festival was selling out.
Sam’s approach to programming has always been to look to the future, he explained.
He’s always looking at what the younger generations are likely to get excited about, and that approach allowed the festival to experience a massive rise in popularity in conjunction with the rise of the Canadian independent music scene.
“When you got into, like, the Broken Social Scenes and Arcade Fire and all these other people, you know, we just happened to be right in the middle of it,” Sam said.
“And it continued with other bands that would play early in their careers like the Arkells or the Strumbellas and July Talk. And all these people, they all played us, like, when they were just starting, you know?”
These days, he said, the biggest challenge for an artistic director like him is to keep the festival’s profile unique in a part of the province where there are multiple major events and new festivals launching all the time.
“You’re not the only game in town,” he said. “We’re not in some isolated place.”
