Today was the third day of the 11th Annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, which is my favorite annual outdoor/festival event in the Bay Area. I started going a few years ago and have been hooked since, and have gone every year except two years ago when there was that massive storm. That was the year I missed Steve Martin.
It's all got the biggies: Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss, Willie Nelson, Gillian Welch, Joan Baez, Booker T, Elvis Costello. Over the years, I've seen the Indigo Girls, Rosanne Cash, John Prine, Lyle Lovett (and his Large Band), Iron & Wine (spectacular), Louden Wainwright III (whipped out the uke just as I called it), and a few others. I saw a little Elvis Costello one year as I was passing by. This year, I hit the Low Anthem and Bela Fleck (playing with Edgar Meyer, a great Bela complement). So, the music is top notch. I mean, it's great.
One of the coolest things about it is, it's free. Yes, free. It's subsidized by local venture capitalist Warren Hellman - he pays for all of it. Eighty bands over six stages over three days. I know the stamina required for a three-day thing; I experienced it during a multi-day New Member Orientation I did for my company in Reno - Day 1 was easy, Day 2 still fine, but by wake up on Day 3, you're ready to do something else. The Three Day Novel was the same. But this event - every year it grows. This year, the Friday "afternoon" warm up started at noon; there were an estimated 750,000 people who attend over the weekend. Woodstock, we remember, had only about 500,000 (as best as we can estimate; no one really knew how to count it because nothing like it had happened before). But the city knows what to do. As Warren himself said in an interview last year for the SF Weekly, the city, deep down, digs this sort of thing:
The city I think started out by thinking, "This is a lot of work for us, even though Warren's paying us a pretty good fee, it's a pain in the butt, and why the hell" — you know.... But the city has become just wonderful. And I think they love the festival — they realize what's obvious to you and me, and maybe not obvious to a bureaucrat. You know, when every hotel room in the city is already gone and has been gone for a month — the restaurants, all the services, the pot suppliers — everything is sold out. I think the city discovered in the last several years they really love that. So the city has been great. And to be fair to us, or to brag, or to be arrogant, or whatever, we've pretty much delivered what we said we would, that it would be a great event for the ... well, I guess, let me be expansive: for the world.
It's true: part of the fun of going to the festival is that everyone else is going to the festival. You get on the bus and you see people with backpacks and coolers and camping chairs, and we all know where we're headed. I was sitting next to this young (25 years old, as I later found out) black girl who was incredibly talkative. She was the most talkative person I ever remember sitting next to (a stranger, I mean). She immediately asked me, "Are you going to the festival?" I was. "I'm not - wish I were, though..." and she started to tell me everything, seemingly, that popped into her mind. The school she used to go to was over there, you could see it on the hill; these people were the school's rivals. She mumbled a lot so I wasn't too sure, often, of WHAT she was talking about; at some point, she was explaining to me the family dynamic in Sailor Moon's world.
When other people got on, she talked to them. Were they going to the festival? They were. Oh, she was jealous. These were older white people and they seemed a little threatened. They had to stand as the bus had filled up and the one lady turned her back a bit, giving the black girl a partial cold shoulder.
"I guess they don't want to talk," she said, in the same loud voice that everyone could hear, including the people who just snubbed her. "I am just curious, I just want to talk to people, I don't know why they don't want to talk." She went on in this vein for a while; I peppered my nods with various "I guess so's" and "I guess nots." She didn't seem to care whether I responded one way or another; she was actually kind of amazing, but it was a relief to get off.
The festival is spread over over up to six stages, so people enter the park different ways, depending on where they want to go. I personally was heading over to the Star Stage to catch the opening act of the Low Anthem, from 11:45am - 12:30pm, and so I was able to, for the first time, get there when it wasn't impressively packed. There were people to follow, guards to point you in the right direction, but no hoards at all. When I arrived, after trudging up and down some wide dirt paths that would only get dustier as the day wore on, I was surprised how close I was to the stage; usually, you can hear but not see, but this was right there. I put down my blanket and nestled in. I was in the space between the shade and sun - the sort of dappled mottled tree-provided half-sun I can tolerate much better than full sun. .
A note here about the sun and festivals. I had my sunscreen on, sure, but I'm really pale and I can never be too cautious, and, if you can imagine, I actually left the house and forgot my hat. I went back for it, hoping I wouldn't miss the bus in those two minutes (I didn't). I mean, you HAVE to have a hat. And sunscreen. AND stay in the shade some to most of the time. It's a real factor - later in the day, I moved over to see another band, and the only space was in full sun, and I had to leave before the set was over. I could feel myself starting to become too hot, and then there was a moment when I realized I would be sorry later if I didn't leave NOW. So I did.
Anyway, San Francisco festivals are famous for threatening gloom or overcast but then turning out a lovely sunny day, or at least afternoon. We are all pretty good at reality creation in the Bay Area, so we can usually turn on some sun for the bigger occasions - it never rains on Halloween and Gay Pride is always hot and sunny. It was still cool when the band began to play. The Low Anthem is a sort of mellow, lo fi, folky modern band that gets wild and loud every so often. Wikipedia says:
The Low Anthem is an American indie folk band from Providence, Rhode Island, formed in 2006. The band consists of multi-instrumentalists Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams, and rose to prominence with the re-release of its third studio album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, in 2009.
In February 2011, the band released its fourth studio album, Smart Flesh, which was recorded in an abandoned pasta sauce factory.
I play a few of their songs on the uke; they are very haunting, and beautiful. The band came out and started with one of their sort of dark, characteristically long and minor-keyed repetitive folk semi-ballads, and I thought, wow, ballsy way to *open*, for a festival crowd, no less. They were just ultra intense and mellow for the first couple songs - very spacey, very dreamy, even for them - complete with a red and black twirling spiral special effect of some sort of their amp....I wasn't close enough to tell what it really was, but it was also trippy.
They played "This Goddam House" (which is one of my favorite songs of theirs) and, near the end, for the instrumental solos to finish up with, the lead singer got up, walked over and grabbed some weird instrument I couldn't see, and then sat back down (he sat because he also was playing instruments - they all played lots of different parts in the band). He put the things near his mouth and the mike - they were sticking up, over his cheeks, and he looked to be blowing into them or something. It was baffling, but I couldn't think about what they were because the music they were producing was so freaky and eerie. It was full of vibrato, a strangely electronic sound that also was achingly human. They had been playing a saw earlier, and that's got a weird, high, piercing, sliding sound that sounds humanish and mechanical at the same time - I'm surprised this band didn't break out a theremin. But the weird thing the singer was doing, it was unidentifiable, but absolutely incredible.
"Wow!" I had to exclaim as it was over. I was blown away. I looked around at the crowd, and the cute hip guy behind me was also enthusiastically clapping. "You know this band?" I said. Most of the people seemed to be there for the festival, not necessarily this band. "I do," he nodded. "Me too.....hey, do you know what he was playing?" I asked. "It's two cell phones," he said, rather unexpectedly. "I saw him do it in a club once - pretty amazing."
Cell phones? HOW one plays cell phones, I don't know but it was really something. Then they sort of switched into their more loud and rocking pieces, which were really loud - I had in earplugs but I could feel it in my heart, loud like THAT. I had to lay down to sort of let some of that go through the earth or I would have got anxious. But I wanted to stay to hear their best song, their hit, Charlie Darwin, which they were SURE to play. They did - they started to tone it down (Charlie is fairly mellow) - and said, "This is our last song" and then did the hit. When you are known for, for most people, basically just one hit, I guess you pretty much have to end on that. The Low Anthem played it by the book. It was actually awesome because the singer sings the whole thing in this incredibly high falsetto voice, which was especially arresting to hear live. It would have been impressive if a woman could sing that high, much less a MAN.
I must also mention that at some point during the show, a hawk began to circle overhead, and started to attract the festival goers attention - it was pretty dramatic. People began to point and nod and look up, shading their eyes. I think the band sensed it but thought it was cool - and then, another hawk joined the first one, and they lazily circled higher and higher while the band played on with their romantic song about "Just laying in the grass...." the singer had said, "Just like this." Meaning all of us. It was a very romantic moment with the band and the crowd, with those hawks overhead.
I mean, and that's sort of one of the reasons to go. It's a bit of a pain, these large events, but they are so fun. Full of people of all sort, mostly pretty cool. The crowd makes it fun. The walk between the stages was a show too. A young hippie was hula hooping with an ease and expertise I've never seen - she was doing over her shoulder, and with several at once, and doing ever sort of trick. I couldn't get pictures of the really unusual, impressive moments, naturally.
I also became fascinated with this one women who was all dressed up, in a black hop hat with tulle veil, purple ribbons, a purple flower at her wrist, tulle tutu/skirt, thigh-highs, and boots, with this black and silver Chinese parasol - she was dancing around with her little bubble machine gun, and having a grand old time. She was fit, tan, sexy, buff and obviously a good sport.
And this is a real reason to go out in San Francisco - the people are lots of fun. They really are. I was coming back and I saw a guy in striped pants, a plaid shirt and hat with a feather in it. He looked like an extra from Godspell. He was pulling one of those antique Red Flyer wagon - except this one was, naturally, the rare forest green version (remember those?) and it was stuffed with fascinating things: a old quilt, a jug of something, a carved wooden cabinet, and one small funny charcoal grey adolescent fowl - a duck or goose, maybe, bigger than a baby but still fluffy with downy new feathers. I mean, of course. Oh, he also had a bright green parrot on his shoulder. Why wouldn't he?
I made it to the Bela Fleck; although I missed the introduction, it was obvious I was in the right place as soon I heard his trademark virtuoso-like rapid crisp free form jazzy solos - and it was pretty easy to tell he was joined by Edgar Meyer, the great bassist (I've got him doing Bach's Cello Solos - on the double bass. Do you know how HARD that is, to get around a fretboard that big, that fast?), when we heard the banjo drop out and the bass took over with the same technically mind-blowing bass solos. Like The Low Anthem, it was also pretty groovy, and spacey, far more than they are on their album. They got kind of esoteric - really leaned toward the free-form jazz odyssey side of things; they were just into "it," and didn't really care if we were or not. But we were, of course. Everyone seemed grooved into it. The guy next to me at the Bela Fleck, shirtless, with beads and curly chest hair, was sitting in a perfect full lotus, discreetly smoking a joint. The top hat woman was shooting her bubbles and swaying. This was pretty much how things should be. It seemed a lot better than war and destruction, which had been yesterday's Inadvertent Movie Day Theme. We had also watched Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, with Demetri Martin, just a delightful, wonderful film. It made me realize how amazing Woodstock was, and now it was kind of fun to be here, the next day, at an even bigger (albeit more tame and less iconic) festival, in the best of all cities in the world - for I really do love San Francisco.
I wanted to stay for the whole set, but that was unfortunately where I got stuck in full sun, and when I felt my wellness level just starting to drop, I had to pack up and head out of there. I enjoyed a veggie corn dog, felt grateful I didn't need to use any of those formidable banks of portable toilets, and made my way through the park. I could hear distant music for a long time - or the sudden roar of the crowd - and it DOES sound like a roar, doesn't it? - and it was nice to be walking in the shade, trudging along with my fellow festival goers, some of us coming, some of us going, and it was just one of those nice moments when it's nice to be alive, and you know it is. I was grateful. Look at all us - the moms with their strollers, and the older women in their turquoise chokers and cowboy boots and flowing skirts, and the young shirtless guys with low-slung skinny pants, and the old hippies and the young hippies and the hipsters and the old bluegrass guys in their Western shirts they are wearing non-ironically - earnestly, I guess that would be. And we were all getting along quite fine, and everyone looked smashing. What a great crowd. What a great city. What a great life.
I hope someday I'm really rich, because this is exactly the type of thing I would do with my money. May we have more of THIS!
It's all got the biggies: Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss, Willie Nelson, Gillian Welch, Joan Baez, Booker T, Elvis Costello. Over the years, I've seen the Indigo Girls, Rosanne Cash, John Prine, Lyle Lovett (and his Large Band), Iron & Wine (spectacular), Louden Wainwright III (whipped out the uke just as I called it), and a few others. I saw a little Elvis Costello one year as I was passing by. This year, I hit the Low Anthem and Bela Fleck (playing with Edgar Meyer, a great Bela complement). So, the music is top notch. I mean, it's great.
One of the coolest things about it is, it's free. Yes, free. It's subsidized by local venture capitalist Warren Hellman - he pays for all of it. Eighty bands over six stages over three days. I know the stamina required for a three-day thing; I experienced it during a multi-day New Member Orientation I did for my company in Reno - Day 1 was easy, Day 2 still fine, but by wake up on Day 3, you're ready to do something else. The Three Day Novel was the same. But this event - every year it grows. This year, the Friday "afternoon" warm up started at noon; there were an estimated 750,000 people who attend over the weekend. Woodstock, we remember, had only about 500,000 (as best as we can estimate; no one really knew how to count it because nothing like it had happened before). But the city knows what to do. As Warren himself said in an interview last year for the SF Weekly, the city, deep down, digs this sort of thing:
The city I think started out by thinking, "This is a lot of work for us, even though Warren's paying us a pretty good fee, it's a pain in the butt, and why the hell" — you know.... But the city has become just wonderful. And I think they love the festival — they realize what's obvious to you and me, and maybe not obvious to a bureaucrat. You know, when every hotel room in the city is already gone and has been gone for a month — the restaurants, all the services, the pot suppliers — everything is sold out. I think the city discovered in the last several years they really love that. So the city has been great. And to be fair to us, or to brag, or to be arrogant, or whatever, we've pretty much delivered what we said we would, that it would be a great event for the ... well, I guess, let me be expansive: for the world.
It's true: part of the fun of going to the festival is that everyone else is going to the festival. You get on the bus and you see people with backpacks and coolers and camping chairs, and we all know where we're headed. I was sitting next to this young (25 years old, as I later found out) black girl who was incredibly talkative. She was the most talkative person I ever remember sitting next to (a stranger, I mean). She immediately asked me, "Are you going to the festival?" I was. "I'm not - wish I were, though..." and she started to tell me everything, seemingly, that popped into her mind. The school she used to go to was over there, you could see it on the hill; these people were the school's rivals. She mumbled a lot so I wasn't too sure, often, of WHAT she was talking about; at some point, she was explaining to me the family dynamic in Sailor Moon's world.
When other people got on, she talked to them. Were they going to the festival? They were. Oh, she was jealous. These were older white people and they seemed a little threatened. They had to stand as the bus had filled up and the one lady turned her back a bit, giving the black girl a partial cold shoulder.
"I guess they don't want to talk," she said, in the same loud voice that everyone could hear, including the people who just snubbed her. "I am just curious, I just want to talk to people, I don't know why they don't want to talk." She went on in this vein for a while; I peppered my nods with various "I guess so's" and "I guess nots." She didn't seem to care whether I responded one way or another; she was actually kind of amazing, but it was a relief to get off.
The festival is spread over over up to six stages, so people enter the park different ways, depending on where they want to go. I personally was heading over to the Star Stage to catch the opening act of the Low Anthem, from 11:45am - 12:30pm, and so I was able to, for the first time, get there when it wasn't impressively packed. There were people to follow, guards to point you in the right direction, but no hoards at all. When I arrived, after trudging up and down some wide dirt paths that would only get dustier as the day wore on, I was surprised how close I was to the stage; usually, you can hear but not see, but this was right there. I put down my blanket and nestled in. I was in the space between the shade and sun - the sort of dappled mottled tree-provided half-sun I can tolerate much better than full sun. .
A note here about the sun and festivals. I had my sunscreen on, sure, but I'm really pale and I can never be too cautious, and, if you can imagine, I actually left the house and forgot my hat. I went back for it, hoping I wouldn't miss the bus in those two minutes (I didn't). I mean, you HAVE to have a hat. And sunscreen. AND stay in the shade some to most of the time. It's a real factor - later in the day, I moved over to see another band, and the only space was in full sun, and I had to leave before the set was over. I could feel myself starting to become too hot, and then there was a moment when I realized I would be sorry later if I didn't leave NOW. So I did.
Anyway, San Francisco festivals are famous for threatening gloom or overcast but then turning out a lovely sunny day, or at least afternoon. We are all pretty good at reality creation in the Bay Area, so we can usually turn on some sun for the bigger occasions - it never rains on Halloween and Gay Pride is always hot and sunny. It was still cool when the band began to play. The Low Anthem is a sort of mellow, lo fi, folky modern band that gets wild and loud every so often. Wikipedia says:
The Low Anthem is an American indie folk band from Providence, Rhode Island, formed in 2006. The band consists of multi-instrumentalists Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams, and rose to prominence with the re-release of its third studio album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, in 2009.
In February 2011, the band released its fourth studio album, Smart Flesh, which was recorded in an abandoned pasta sauce factory.
I play a few of their songs on the uke; they are very haunting, and beautiful. The band came out and started with one of their sort of dark, characteristically long and minor-keyed repetitive folk semi-ballads, and I thought, wow, ballsy way to *open*, for a festival crowd, no less. They were just ultra intense and mellow for the first couple songs - very spacey, very dreamy, even for them - complete with a red and black twirling spiral special effect of some sort of their amp....I wasn't close enough to tell what it really was, but it was also trippy.
They played "This Goddam House" (which is one of my favorite songs of theirs) and, near the end, for the instrumental solos to finish up with, the lead singer got up, walked over and grabbed some weird instrument I couldn't see, and then sat back down (he sat because he also was playing instruments - they all played lots of different parts in the band). He put the things near his mouth and the mike - they were sticking up, over his cheeks, and he looked to be blowing into them or something. It was baffling, but I couldn't think about what they were because the music they were producing was so freaky and eerie. It was full of vibrato, a strangely electronic sound that also was achingly human. They had been playing a saw earlier, and that's got a weird, high, piercing, sliding sound that sounds humanish and mechanical at the same time - I'm surprised this band didn't break out a theremin. But the weird thing the singer was doing, it was unidentifiable, but absolutely incredible.
"Wow!" I had to exclaim as it was over. I was blown away. I looked around at the crowd, and the cute hip guy behind me was also enthusiastically clapping. "You know this band?" I said. Most of the people seemed to be there for the festival, not necessarily this band. "I do," he nodded. "Me too.....hey, do you know what he was playing?" I asked. "It's two cell phones," he said, rather unexpectedly. "I saw him do it in a club once - pretty amazing."
Cell phones? HOW one plays cell phones, I don't know but it was really something. Then they sort of switched into their more loud and rocking pieces, which were really loud - I had in earplugs but I could feel it in my heart, loud like THAT. I had to lay down to sort of let some of that go through the earth or I would have got anxious. But I wanted to stay to hear their best song, their hit, Charlie Darwin, which they were SURE to play. They did - they started to tone it down (Charlie is fairly mellow) - and said, "This is our last song" and then did the hit. When you are known for, for most people, basically just one hit, I guess you pretty much have to end on that. The Low Anthem played it by the book. It was actually awesome because the singer sings the whole thing in this incredibly high falsetto voice, which was especially arresting to hear live. It would have been impressive if a woman could sing that high, much less a MAN.
I must also mention that at some point during the show, a hawk began to circle overhead, and started to attract the festival goers attention - it was pretty dramatic. People began to point and nod and look up, shading their eyes. I think the band sensed it but thought it was cool - and then, another hawk joined the first one, and they lazily circled higher and higher while the band played on with their romantic song about "Just laying in the grass...." the singer had said, "Just like this." Meaning all of us. It was a very romantic moment with the band and the crowd, with those hawks overhead.
I mean, and that's sort of one of the reasons to go. It's a bit of a pain, these large events, but they are so fun. Full of people of all sort, mostly pretty cool. The crowd makes it fun. The walk between the stages was a show too. A young hippie was hula hooping with an ease and expertise I've never seen - she was doing over her shoulder, and with several at once, and doing ever sort of trick. I couldn't get pictures of the really unusual, impressive moments, naturally.
I also became fascinated with this one women who was all dressed up, in a black hop hat with tulle veil, purple ribbons, a purple flower at her wrist, tulle tutu/skirt, thigh-highs, and boots, with this black and silver Chinese parasol - she was dancing around with her little bubble machine gun, and having a grand old time. She was fit, tan, sexy, buff and obviously a good sport.
And this is a real reason to go out in San Francisco - the people are lots of fun. They really are. I was coming back and I saw a guy in striped pants, a plaid shirt and hat with a feather in it. He looked like an extra from Godspell. He was pulling one of those antique Red Flyer wagon - except this one was, naturally, the rare forest green version (remember those?) and it was stuffed with fascinating things: a old quilt, a jug of something, a carved wooden cabinet, and one small funny charcoal grey adolescent fowl - a duck or goose, maybe, bigger than a baby but still fluffy with downy new feathers. I mean, of course. Oh, he also had a bright green parrot on his shoulder. Why wouldn't he?
I made it to the Bela Fleck; although I missed the introduction, it was obvious I was in the right place as soon I heard his trademark virtuoso-like rapid crisp free form jazzy solos - and it was pretty easy to tell he was joined by Edgar Meyer, the great bassist (I've got him doing Bach's Cello Solos - on the double bass. Do you know how HARD that is, to get around a fretboard that big, that fast?), when we heard the banjo drop out and the bass took over with the same technically mind-blowing bass solos. Like The Low Anthem, it was also pretty groovy, and spacey, far more than they are on their album. They got kind of esoteric - really leaned toward the free-form jazz odyssey side of things; they were just into "it," and didn't really care if we were or not. But we were, of course. Everyone seemed grooved into it. The guy next to me at the Bela Fleck, shirtless, with beads and curly chest hair, was sitting in a perfect full lotus, discreetly smoking a joint. The top hat woman was shooting her bubbles and swaying. This was pretty much how things should be. It seemed a lot better than war and destruction, which had been yesterday's Inadvertent Movie Day Theme. We had also watched Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, with Demetri Martin, just a delightful, wonderful film. It made me realize how amazing Woodstock was, and now it was kind of fun to be here, the next day, at an even bigger (albeit more tame and less iconic) festival, in the best of all cities in the world - for I really do love San Francisco.
I wanted to stay for the whole set, but that was unfortunately where I got stuck in full sun, and when I felt my wellness level just starting to drop, I had to pack up and head out of there. I enjoyed a veggie corn dog, felt grateful I didn't need to use any of those formidable banks of portable toilets, and made my way through the park. I could hear distant music for a long time - or the sudden roar of the crowd - and it DOES sound like a roar, doesn't it? - and it was nice to be walking in the shade, trudging along with my fellow festival goers, some of us coming, some of us going, and it was just one of those nice moments when it's nice to be alive, and you know it is. I was grateful. Look at all us - the moms with their strollers, and the older women in their turquoise chokers and cowboy boots and flowing skirts, and the young shirtless guys with low-slung skinny pants, and the old hippies and the young hippies and the hipsters and the old bluegrass guys in their Western shirts they are wearing non-ironically - earnestly, I guess that would be. And we were all getting along quite fine, and everyone looked smashing. What a great crowd. What a great city. What a great life.
I hope someday I'm really rich, because this is exactly the type of thing I would do with my money. May we have more of THIS!
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