Strictly Hardly Strictly Again

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is the annual free idyll in Golden Gate park with simple provisions, dozens of American music acts on five stages, and forty thousand or so similarly inclined music lovers.

Every year in San Francisco a wealthy investment bankerearns quantum credits in good karma by spending millions to put on a free music festival. Originally it was a one day event called Strictly Bluegrass, headlined by Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle. I knew about the first event in 2001 as I listen to bluegrass programs radio every weekend--but I didn't make it to that first one.
Great impressions followed it into local legend though. When it returned as a two day event the next year, I began an acquaintance which has become a tradition. Once again an obligation compelled me to miss the Saturday show headlined by Steve Earle. I set out from Berkeley after the days music had started on Sunday. Arriving mid-afternoon leaves me better-equipped to return home at 7PM, a practise I maintain. I make an effort to get moving, but travel can be perilous, and I do miss some acts, but my days of all-day anything festivals are in the past. This is so even for music as mild as bluegrass or chamber music, whatever. There's also the Louvre effect of having passed one's fill of art.

How quaint and ideal was my first Sunday bluegrass concert in Speedway Meadow. Instinctively I decided to use the N-Judah rail line to get close and walk. Waiting for a bus connection at the far end I befriended a young couple also from Berkeley as I recall. A little more acquainted with the area I advised on crossing the last leg of the trip. We took a bus to the de Young museum there a shuttle van offered to drop us at the festival. A winding tour of the park added to the Wonderland effect Golden Gate park can have on you after a rather long journey to it.
At last we were there right on a roadway overlooking the stage, a manageable crowd and a few tents. What was immediately striking was that there was no sign of commercialism anywhere--the no-name bottled water was free, no tickets meant you could approach from any direction, no logos anywhere just the cool stage signs. A bouyant feeling pervaded the smiling crowd of older bluegrass aficionados and young folks like the people I was with. They found friends and we joined them on their blankets. When it looked like nobody wanted to buy the T-shirts they gave them away along with a free poster. Early Sunday they had given away blankets with the festival logo that also hadn't sold well Saturday. It was like you finally found the legendary land of love in Golden Gate park that we heard about all those years ago. But instead of the Diggers and the Dead it was coming from a billionaire with a conscience and a desire to see as many others as possible enjoying the music he enjoyed.

Emmylou closed the show with her soulful voice and music. Just behind the stage is a small man made lake and, as the day receded under a few evocative clouds, a chevron of ducks took off to fly over the stage and the crowd. The magic is palpable and it happens the same way every year despite the ever-swelling crowd.
While my newfound friends were off to other excitements, I made my way out to a fortuitous bus and beyond. I caught buses the first few festivals but in the intervening years I switched to walking out through the darkened park with the others. It is a phantasmagoria in itself with unexpected spaces and abstract-expressionistic tree silhouettes. It redoubles the adventure of the whole day.
One tree that I was struck by resembled a large seahorse. In subsequent years I occasionally doubted that I had taken the right path out until I would look up and see the seahorse tree. In fact I began to notice another sensation just before seeing the tree. On the undulating walkway I would invariably find that my legs felt like they were giving-out. On this walkway you thought you were descending but you were actually walking uphill. It had to be an optical illusion caused by the lay of the surrounding land. This combined with the Seahorse tree that immediately followed it made for quite a Fortean moment for me, a recurring mystery.
Renewed I'd stagger uphill to Judah street and have a rest on Muni and Bart before my last walk home in Berkeley. In the following years I have never missed a day of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. So I come home make dinner take a hot bath watch a movie then get ready to do it again the next morning. Until that blissfully exhausted Sunday rolls around again.

Over those years, the number of stages grew from one to five, very well-known musicians have turned up to perform, and the crowds have grown and grown. Somehow even today it never overwhelms the very accommodating and resilient parkscape. The sound is always good despite the intersections where more than stage is audible. You can enjoy even the most remote performers when you can hear them.
Following what look like a flow of humanity through the wilderness rivaling biblical proportions, I too joined a crowd in the vicinity of the Star stage where Dolly Parton was strumming a dulcimer in a fringed cowgirl dress and a Marie Antoinette hairdo. "She's even pretty from a m-i-i-ile away," I proclaimed in my best hillbilly voice.
I was close enough to know it really was Willie Nelson sparkling up there on the Banjo stage one year. And of course who else could ever sound so good? At the end of one sterling chain of songs played without a pause, the crowd cheered so loud and long that the laconic Willie had to say, "I hear ya."
Beyond the traditional heroes such as Doc Watson, other musical favorites of mine over the years have occurred in little side festivals at the Rooster stage starring cats like great singer song-writer Jesse Winchester, or the guitarists extraordinaire Jorma Kaukonen and Richard Thompson on a day last year. Or last year's Friday afternoon show featuring Jeff Tweedy gifted singer of the consistently fine band Wilco. All in the most beautifully rugged settings with suitably cool marine-influenced October weather.
The sea is just over the not-distant horizon of trees.

I always catch Steve Earle's closing sets on the Banjo stage on Saturdays which alternate between himself with Bluegrass bands and himself with a various others doing more of his solo act--last year with a rhythm machine and his spouse Allison More on vocals. He usually does his "John Lynde Walker" blues a provocative song attempting to take the perspective of the "American Taliban" so-called, a kid from nearby Marin county, who was abused and railroaded. Between this song and others like it and Earle's between song banter, if there are any of bluegrass music's more reactionary adherents in the crowd they know what to expect the message to be.
Steve's act is sometimes subject to the most ironic co-incidence as has been the festival in general the past two years but not this year. That is the simultaneous extreme intrusions by the Blue Angels jet fighters demonstrating their terrible powers in a deafeningly display over the city of San Francisco and Golden Gate park. While I listened to Earle sing "Just another poor boy/ off to fight a rich man's war" with only an acoustic guitar in a quiet glade, four low-flying jets torqued through the sky just overhead. This year when the ducks flew over his stage again, he remarked, "That's so much better than the fuckin' Blue Angels."

Emmylou closing set remains the consistent highlight for me. As the daylight fades and the colors of the leafy painted scrim behind the stage stand out, as the clouds coming in from the sea turn dark violet, and a certain tired timelessness settles in over the crowd, her songs of the pain of life and a gospel-like hope could not felt as deeply anywhere else. One early year her mother was present introduced and sitting on stage and Emmylou always brings out the festivals benefactor at the end and he gets a real hand.
Then there was the year I found myself face to face with Emmylou and a helper after her set. This was the year that Arnold Schwartzenegger fronted for the Republicans in a recall of our recently and duly elected governor. This, as everyone knows, led to a state of affairs where the unelected governor of my state was the Terminator and the unelected president of my country was one of the fucking flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. Trying in vain to avoid that fate, in an effort to lose Arnold some votes from the so-called "values-voters," I made poster-sized copies of a photograph of him that I suspect he wished wasn't taken. I remembered an old issue of SPY magazine that ran a piece about Arnold's somewhat unsavory time starting out to be a celebrity body-builder. The article ran with a photo of him posing in full frontal nudity. I found it in an old box--saved for a Beat Generation piece it also ran--and and they say, blew it up. Lest anyone think it was unambiguously admiring of the extreme vanity shot, I added the caption "Fuck Arnold."
I left copies around and inserted them in the front windows of free newspaper boxes and what have you and I happened to have brought some to that Hardly Strictly. I had one left when I ran into Emmylou and thinking quickly I offered it to her saying it was a picture of you-know-who. She took it, unrolled it halfway for a look, and thanked me for it. I like to think that it ended up on the wall of her tour bus, or maybe her band's.
Our meeting took place in near darkness while the crowd dispersed in all directions. That was part of the thrill in the past but now they have installed many more light towers that are turned on before the last notes resound. In doing so they have reduced that sort of slightly frantic excitement of leaving the darkened and dispersing festival.

This year, the eighth festival began at the end of the first gloomy week of October. Rumors of economic devastation and yet another massive dirty deal by the administration rained on everyone's garden. I felt a cold coming on, I was out of brandy and out of smoke and had no opportunity to restock in time. I would have to brave the festival largely on edibles from my freezer--not a terrible fate rather almost a preference for me now. Never is the music and fun of the event more experienced more profoundly than after a cookie made with high-grade cannabis butter.
The weather was in transition as well, a somewhat humid overcast day was forecast to turn to rain by five o'clock. That was just about the time the headliners would take the stage at the rain-or-shine-music festival. Adding to a sense of foreboding was the fact that the headliners were a duo that included the lead singer from of the most notorious and popular hard-rock bands of all time. Robert Plant together with American country singer Allison Krause would showcase works from their celebrated collaborative album together with producer and musician T-Bone Burnett.
Over the years I have devised certain strategies for travel into the festival and for enjoying the music while negotiating the crowds. I stick to my N-Judah strategy and stay on as fellow bluegrass-seekers disembark from 19th to 25th streets. I remain on board all the way to 34th street--sometimes I see a fellow local or two take this knowledgeable route. I had found through previous experience that all the earlier stops which may be more lateral with the Speedway meadow center of the event, nevertheless entail dusty trails over hill and dale with tempting but ill-advised shortcuts. While the way I go takes straight path a gradual slope down to the polo field which is encircled by a smooth paved track that I can walk swiftly with little impact on my feet and legs. Such impacts accumulate over the course of the weekend and together with a great deal of sitting on the ground produce a great many aches by the time it's over.
Predictably the crowd for the single Banjo stage show was biblical as well. Wending my way to the extreme right flank I advanced as far as I could without a lot of effort and sat down in one of the interstices of exposed ground between the land claims of the earlier settlers. Kids lolled around in Led Zeppelin t-shirts and in general it was the highest level of unlikely bluegrass fans I had seen there to date. Jerry Douglas was finishing up his set no doubt to the satisfaction of the more authentic country music devotees. I devoured a caramel with a jar of coffee I'd brought in.
After a long pause between acts the stirring vocal harmony of Plant and Krause brought the crowd to life. I realized that I was behind a typical forest of standing tall guys and must relocate in order to enjoy the show. The crowd extended well into the area between the food vendors with not a promising direction to be seen. So I resorted to joining the refugees who take precarious positions on the ever-eroding hillside that flanks the field. After a steep climb I found a spot with a good sight-line to the stage and all I had to do to remain there was to stamp down the sliding loose dirt and brace myself to sit down.
Binoculars would have helped but otherwise I was good for a third of the show. From this distance Plant still looked fair and young. He cranked up a few Zeppelin-sized vocals as well to the cheerful approval of the audience. "Fortune Teller" the old Northern Soul classic in a sweet and hoodoo-inflected new version was a show-stopper.
I had a view of the whole stage framed by the branches of a tree, but I was too far from the stars to fully enjoy myself. Unlike 75-80% of the present day attendees, I don't come for the elaborate picnics, for endless beer or wine, for the socializing, the cell-phone calls, and the incessant loud gabbing that drones on and on-- I come for the music.
I took advantage of a momentary twilight-zone created by T-Bone Burnett's eerie tune "Earlier Bahgdad" and came back down onto the meadow. As cooking food smoke and the strange music and the overcast loomed over the huge crowd they were lulled like tranquilized bees.
I was determined to try a ploy that had previously been successful to get up close. The roadway, where I was once courteously dropped off, is now heavily structured with fencing that keeps people from crossing except for at a few choke points this is so a firetruck as I did so observe can drive through despite the crowds. The front of the stage is now this way as well with hard-fencing, a large area for invitees only, bleacher seats that form barriers, and other intrusive facts-on-the-ground--frankly it ain't the wide open space it used to be.
My route entailed following the road as if to leave then slipping in behind the white tents and merging into the crowd up front. Walking directly toward the front of the stage is hampered by profuse security guards in yellow jackets who determine who can pass back to the blanketed area and who will be blocked and have to mill around off to the side.
I just go wide and there is always room for me. I work my way forward and I'm generally in front of the stage by the last phase. There it was that I finished the show dancing to "Gone, Gone, Gone" an old Everly Brothers tune revived by these professionals who take a long view of country music.
But for a few drops, the rain had held off as I walked out past the dark deserted polo field. I past the last stretch of trees where I had spied a coyote last year. This time I noticed a massive vine growing up a tree to resemble the artist Jeff Koons' work "Puppy", a large topiary sculpture of a terrier.
I mentioned the coyote to another exiting pilgrim. As we walked on he said he was originally from Iowa and mentioned Kerouac's descriptions of his travels through it. We glanced back at the 20th Century America Jack wrote about. Then I had to dash to catch the train. When we came out of a tunnel shortly afterward, it was raining.