Great SF Fall Weekend (Not Too Recent But)What a lovely Columbus or Indigenous Peoples Day weekend it’s been! All week at work on Market St I’ve had to put up with low flying Blue Angels overhead—pretzel patterns and vapor trails are one thing but the deafening scream just short of a sonic boom is another. I think that SF isn’t yet another Gaza Strip but the spectacle-crazed crowd goes wild anyway. Middling America here in the Bay Area had Fleet Week and several major baseball/football games to occupy themselves this weekend but Karen and I rode bikes via Crissy Field and The Presidio to the 6th Annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.
Got there in time to hear a round robin Songwriters’ Circle with Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Guy Clarke & Verlon Thompson. Steve had the crowd all giving the finger to the diving jets and sang real good too. Billy’s thick British accent dissolved into a stirringly clear clarion to Socialist solidarity. Haven’t heard much of him recently but his mission and gift are both intact. Guy and Verlon both have distinct, classic bluegrass sounds, and Guy’s voice was familiar, though I couldn’t attach it to any song in particular.
We segued over to the main stage during the final numbers of Earl Scruggs and his band to secure prime seats for the next act, which Earl introduced. The day was entirely warm and Indian Summer gorgeous, as Earl styled it “that sweet time of the afternoon,” with slant rays of the sun gilding the stage and burnishing the claret-colored dress that Gillian Welch wore—she of the high, Joni Mitchell-style cheekbones—accompanied by David Rawlings, with ringlet curls and tight-fitting Nashville suit half brother to both Johnnys—Depp & Cash. Their playing was inspired, each intricately fingering guitar and singing into a microphone at the same sideways crooked angle that would put a back out of joint. (Who would guess that these rootsy, twanging singer-songwriters met each other while attending Boston’s Berklee School of Music?) The crowd loved their extended version of “Time the Revelator.” And for an encore they were joined by that silver-haired songbird, Emmylou Harris.
On Sunday I joined Tina & hubby from Davis to hear Iris Dement, sounding as righteous and sweet as ever though I didn’t detect any new material. We sat at the base of a multi-branching bush along one side of the Rooster stage’s natural sloping amphitheater, with a good view—through branches—of the stage. Every available space was spoken for, but the crowd agreeably made room, if you expressed a clear intention to sit compactly in any corner of a previously staked-out area. In this respect, and also because shirtless and (mostly blond) dread-locked individuals’ sat suspended from vertiginous horizontal branches overhead, the scene recalled the 1970’s. Warm light filtering through deciduous leaves the autumn wind was coolly tossing made a natural magic. Still, walking through the crowd you passed through pungent thick clouds of weed smoke. And Tina’s husband made a bike run for beer. Typical of this low-key festival of some big names, the next act was one I couldn’t place: The Coward Brothers. This turned out to be an ad hoc collaboration of that ubiquitous producer T. Bone Burnett & Elvis Costello.
posted by Paul at 12:04 PM
