On the whole, Bill Rice would rather be at the Richmond Folk Festival this weekend, and so he will be, volunteering as he has for the previous eight, escorting performers here and there and helping to make sure things run smoothly.
The alternative? Heart surgery, which he delayed until next Monday so he could fulfill his commitment to the folk festival.
That, boys and girls, is dedication.
Nah, Rice said, not really.
“It’s a totally selfish move on my part,” said Rice, who’s due at the hospital at 5:30 a.m. Monday with surgery scheduled for two hours later. “I wouldn’t want someone else having the fun I could have.”
Then Rice let loose with one of his great laughs.
We should say right off that Rice’s condition is not critical, just necessary. For years, he’s had a heart murmur that he’s barely noticed but his cardiologist has kept a listen for. Last spring, his physician said it seemed things had grown worse, and he might soon need a heart-valve replacement.
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Rice, 60, hasn’t been feeling what you would call poorly, just maybe less energetic than usual: a little more winded after mowing the grass on a hot day, a little less ready to go out after work to a concert. He also acknowledged an occasional “twinge,” as he put it. A follow-up examination in August confirmed the earlier suspicion: Rice needed surgery.
At your convenience, the doc said, but don’t wait too long.
OK, Rice said, how about mid-October, after the festival?
Deal, said his cardiologist and surgeon.
So Rice will go downtown this Friday evening for the first night of the festival and meet his assignment for the weekend: members of Stooges Brass Band of New Orleans. (He said the “saddest” part of this year’s event is that he’ll have to miss being a volunteer at the festival’s school outreach program Friday morning because he has to undergo pre-surgery tests at the hospital. He said he felt awful calling Tim Timberlake, one of the team leaders who coordinate the volunteers, to tell him he couldn’t work Friday. Of course, he did have a pretty good excuse.)
The Stooges Brass Band will play each day at the festival, so Rice will be there, too, making sure the band is properly fetched and delivered to the concert stages on time, making himself available if band members need anything, and just hanging out with them. He thinks that’s a pretty sweet arrangement, considering it allows him to say, with all truthfulness, “I’m with the band.”
“It’s such a unique opportunity,” he said. “How would I not want to do that?”
Besides the basic matter of logistics, Rice has helped performers over the years in a variety of ways: from running out to shop for a camera memory card for a Russian musical group to accompanying bluegrass and country musician Dan Tyminski to a local guitar shop to find a new instrument after his was damaged. Tyminski is perhaps best-known as the singing voice of George Clooney in the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” “We talked about old bluegrass festivals we’d both been to,” Rice said, “and he told me how his wife just loves that when Clooney starts to sing his voice comes out of Clooney’s mouth.”
Last year, he rode to the festival with headliner Rosanne Cash and her band, who were expecting maybe 1,000 people for an early afternoon show, and watched their eyes grow wide as a sea of 10,000 people came into view.
“When we rounded the corner and they could see … the people, they were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’re on!’ ” he recalled.
Then there was the time a Chicago blues musician split the seat of his pants backstage moments before going on. Rice borrowed a safety-pin from nearby emergency medical technicians and found some gaffer’s tape, and “got him fixed up.”
Sometimes, Rice said with another laugh, “You just wing it.”
“They’re concierges and transportation coordinators and just really wonderful wranglers,” said Timberlake, one of the area’s most familiar voices from his radio days and a great advocate of local music. “Billy’s one of my star players.”
“The whole volunteer component is pretty amazing that so many people put in so much time and effort to make … this thing such a great experience. It’s Richmond’s finest hour, I think.”
Rice, who grew up in Highland Springs and works as a supervisor for media services communications at the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, acknowledged the surgery piece of his story might be a little different but that plenty of volunteers make lots of sacrifices to be part of the festival. He just loves the opportunity to do something that might make outsiders “look at Richmond and say, ‘That’s a cool town!’ If I can do my little bit to help people think Richmond’s a better place to live and a better place to enjoy life, than I’m all for it.”
Rice, as you might have gathered, is a fun-loving sort who is fun to be around and firmly believes his life has been one, big, fat stroke of good luck.
“If I had a company, I would name it ‘Serendipity,’ he said. “Was it John Lennon who said, ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans’? I don’t make plans. Life has just been great to me. It’s offered up great opportunities, and I’ve just been smart enough to seize on them.”
Like those after-festival hotel music jams on Saturday nights that often go perilously close to Sunday mornings and routinely feature the most eclectic collection of musical talent you can imagine. One year he found himself watching Tuvan throat-singers making music with the brass section of a New Orleans band. You’re not likely to write that in ink on your to-do list, but such unexpected treats fit perfectly into Rice’s philosophy of life.
“I never miss an opportunity to have a good time,” he said.
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