Monday, October 6, 2008

Hardly Strictly

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, held the first weekend in October, in Baghdad By The Bay (the Repugs wish! They'd love to bomb it flat. Heh.) is a huge deal. I watched the PBS show (thanks, Wordsmith) about last year's festival just last night on KQED.

Here's the write-up in the EssEffChron about this past weekend's festival. Photos here.

When Elvis Costello launched "Friend of the Devil" during his performance Sunday at Lindley Meadow, the ghost of the Grateful Dead hovered over the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.

A sea of people overflowed the shady gully into John F. Kennedy Drive and sang along. The Dead memorably played that same glen with the Jefferson Starship about a million years ago - in 1975 - but there is something of the Dead in the air anytime anybody plays music for free in the park.

"This is amazing," said Emmylou Harris, closing the festival, as always, as the sun went down and the crowd thinned out. "This is like the eighth wonder of the world."

Pretty good article, but it gets a little dicey:

There certainly is nothing remotely like the sprawling free concert anywhere else in the music world. The star of the show is Golden Gate Park itself, a world-class park second to none - not Central Park, Hyde Park, nor the Bois de Boulogne. The experience of listening to music on a beautiful day like Sunday in Golden Gate Park is incomparable.

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival has also isolated and identified a segment of American music that doesn't comfortably fit under convenient umbrellas such as "acoustic music" or "Americana," a phrase of recent currency that fortunately seems to be falling by the wayside. But any festival that can encompass the frenetic Gypsy punk-rock of Gogol Bordello, the unvarnished backwoods sound of Ralph Stanley, the mordant wit of songwriter Loudon Wainwright III and the electric rock improvisations of Tea Leaf Green has staked out a territory all its own.

If this festival depended on ticket sales, the programming would be entirely different. But because of Hellman's largess, Hardly Strictly booker Dawn Holliday can build a festival around an imaginary demographic of discerning, tasteful and adventuresome music fans willing to swim in the feeder streams of mainstream American music. It is a realm where Texas troubadour Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Nashville rebel Steve Earle loom large. Only in the world of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is Emmylou Harris a queen.

Now just a goddam minute here, you elitist ying-yang! Yeah, GGP is a nice park, but the star of the show? I don't think so.

"If this festival depended on ticket sales" and "an imaginary demographic...willing to swim in the feeder streams of mainstream American music" show you where this clown's head is at. Billed as 'Senior Pop Music', he's obviously addicted to the free booze and shrimp at the 'mainstream' music companies' promotion parties, which are all about the bottom line from record sales, which rip off the artists left and right. To my understanding, the performers make their living from concert ticket sales, which they don't have to do at Hardly Strictly because they get paid to be there.

As to "an imaginary demographic...willing to swim in the feeder streams of mainstream American music", boy did he get it wrong! It's actually "a very real demographic unwilling to swim in the muck of 'mainstream' American music". Dude, mainstream American music, i.e. 'gets played on the radio and sells millions of albums even though it has absolutely no redeeming social value', TOTALLY SUCKS! The music may be a little eclectic, even arcane, but it's a lot better than the pap offered to and sucked up by the masses.

Besides, 'feeder streams' are a lot cleaner than the muddy mainstream, and it's where we go to spawn. Heh. Mr. Selvin oughta try it...

The thing that really got me, though, was "Only in the world of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is Emmylou Harris a queen". Horsepuckey, you ignorant fuck! Ms. Harris not only is perhaps the best singer in a very broad genre a little to the left of the mainstream, she has sung with nearly anybody you can think of, well, not with Celine Dion so far, although you never know, the day is young, and has a body of work second to none.

Mr. Selvin, Emmylou is THE queen.

O be still my pounding heart! Click to emmyloubiggen


I guess they're short on help at the Chron. They shouldn't have had to let a guy write about alt music whose only experience has been skewed by the view as seen through the lens of big-money commercial mainstream swill. He just doesn't get it.

Note to the Chron: Don't send this guy to cover the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee. Those folks'll cut him!

Please pardon my rant and go enjoy the article and photos anyway.

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