Keith Bryant
Singer-songwriter John Spurling showed up to play a handful of his songs Saturday afternoon as part of the Earth Day festival at the Artist Retreat Center.
He’s been playing since he got his first guitar at 13, he said, and he’s been writing songs for about five years. He currently works at TH Rogers Lumber in Bella Vista, but his goal is to make music his full-time job.
Standing on stage with his guitar, he took a moment between each song to talk with his audience and occasionally sneak a sip of beer, which gave him the chance to explain the experiences he drew from to write each song.
“The Pep Talk,” he said, was written after working with and seeing a lot of people lose themselves to drug addiction.
“That’s probably the most depressing thing I’ve ever written,” he said.
Another song, “Missouri Beer,” earned its title from the different alcohol concentrations between beer bought in Missouri and in Oklahoma, and told the story of a time he, at 18 years of age, went out in his red Jeep Cherokee loaded with friends and cruised back roads and sipped beer.
While there was no expectation anything could go south, he said, with empty roads and low speeds, but they happened upon a few state troopers. Spurling took off.
“It ended in my incarceration,” he said. “So anyway, I wrote a song about it.”
The show, he said, proved a great experience. While he regularly plays pubs and breweries in the area, he said, he typically plays covers with a very limited selection of his own work. To play that work and engage with an audience, he said, felt great.
“I really connected with them,” he said. “I felt like they really understood the songs.”
— Keith Bryant
The Artist Retreat Center put on an Earth Day festival Saturday with music, vendors and mascots.
Sara Parnell, owner of the ARC, said she wanted to set up a local wildflower festival while flowers were blooming, and that intersected nicely with Earth Day. While the weather prevented wildflower walks she was hoping to do, she said, the day still gave an opportunity to educate people about environmental issues.
These issues, she said, are especially relevant to Bella Vistans, who live surrounded by nature. It's important, she said, to keep the environment nice and preserve what the area has.
"I think a lot of the people who live here," she said, "they want to learn to live in the woods and nature."
Ty Volz, owner of Spotlight Characters, showed up in his Captain Planet costume. The company has a variety of actors who can play characters for different events. Any actors in his company, he said, are strongly encouraged to learn their characters inside and out.
"By 2050, there's going to be more plastic in the ocean than fish," he said. "There's not enough recycling. If we grow more as a community, we can save the world together."
While he was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who recognized his character, an environmentalist superhero from the 1990s, the youngest attendees mistook him for a smurf, he said.
Playing a character, of course, doesn't mean he wasn't genuine. He said a lot of people make excuses to avoid recycling, when the process is often as simple as dropping waste in a different bin. Education on the topic, he said, is often lacking, and it's not uncommon to meet kids who don't recognize a recycling symbol.
Additionally, he said, people are using a lot of resources that really aren't necessary. There's a focus on simply obtaining more and more, he said, and culture isn't keen on suggesting people should be happy with what they have.
One pair of visitors, Bob Cowart and Yvonne Cowart, came from Springdale. They enjoyed sampling a few goods, including organic Italian soda, and seeing Smokey the bear -- though the New Mexico natives said the New Mexico-originating ursine was in the wrong state.
General News on 04/26/2017