(before I begin, I would like to apologize ahead of time for the image quality. I am using a year-old clearance $29 camera and it shows. working on acquiring another REAL camera)
Even though I entered Golden Gate Park from the South, because of the “walk this way” and “enter here” signs, I ended up entering the festival from the North, walking past the Rooster Stage which was, apparently, still being set up.
The first act I saw, at the Banjo Stage, was a fairly good bluegrass group called the Dry Branch Fire Squad.
This stage was at the top of my itinerary because a couple of groups called “The Mavericks” and another called the “Punch Brothers” sounded pretty promising, but first, between the Dry Branch Fire Squad and The Mavericks, there was a horrible White Guy Blues Band™ (“Ofay Blues” to borrow James Baldwin’s term) from San Francisco aptly named the “Monophonics”, who looked & sounded like they got their inspiration from “The Blues Brothers”, not realizing that it was supposed to be a Comedy.
I moved along to the Arrow Stage, where a band called “SaintSeneca” a mediocre (at best) rock band was finishing their set. I thought, perhaps, they might be a slightly renamed Irish band called “Seneca” that I reviewed back in 2008, but they weren’t. Naturally, I figured this might be a good time to hit the Food Stands.
Friday, I went for the Crawfish Étouffée.
And since the food vendors were located next to the Arrow Stage, I listened to a bit of Lee Anne Womack’s set. More or less traditional C & W (which I’m not particularly crazy about), but she was OK. And I figured, since I was eventually planning to hit the Swan Stage to see T-Bone Burnett and didn’t see anything that particularly gabbed my attention for that particular time slot, I figured I might as well go there early to see a group called the Oh Hellos (get it? Oh Hell o?)
From the Festival Group Bio PDF:
Since forming, The Oh Hellos has earned a rightful reputation as a very special live act. The Heaths are joined on stage by an often-epic ensemble – a rotating roster of pickers and players numbering as many as 13 onstage at any given time. The duo has developed an organic, cult following in their short existence, due to extensive sold-out headline tours as well support slots for bands such as NEEDTOBREATHE and festival plays, including Newport Folk Festival
When I arrived at the stage, though, Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds were toward the end of their set, and they were pretty good, playing a sort of a Lydia Pense & Cold Blood kind of R & B.
As it turned out (and as it used to happen so often at HSB), the group that stole the show that day was the group I had never heard of previously, The Oh Hellos.
Led by (I believe) a Husband & Wife team named The Heaths (above center), this group from Central Texas played a varied and lively set of Irish-sounding melodies & rhythms that jumped and shifted without being jarring. Also, the surrounding musicians danced & jumped around the stage with abandon. But far from being stagy or gimmicky, this dancing seemed to help the entire group keep a very tight & lively groove throughout, especially the second drummer / percussionist (unfortunately hidden in back, to the left, photo quality courtesy of aforementioned $29 camera) who made dancing an integral part of his drumming, accentuating poly-rhythms that brought to mind an Irish version of early 1980s Tom Tom Club crossed with the vocal stylings of, oh, I don’t know– Cowboy Junkies? Hard to describe it, but I recommend you hear it for yourself. The only complaint I had was that the Bass Player, apparently suffering from some sort of hearing loss, kept turning up his Ampeg SVT to the point where it occasionally drowned out the other players (all the while standing directly in front of his amp/speakers), and it took the Soundboard People 2 or 3 songs before they were able to get a handle on it.
Next up was the Peter Rowan Band. Peter Rowan is a singer/songwriter/guitar player who cut his teeth playing with the legendary Bill Monroe, but he has since developed a style of songwriting of his own. His style falls somewhere between C & W and Electric Bluegrass; but at one point he began an odd rhythmic/melodic riff that at first seemed out of sync, until the rest of the band bit by bit followed his lead, providing a rare authentic acoustic psychedelic break into a genre that doesn’t lend itself easily to this sort of adventurous musicianship (and there is SO much cheesy ersatz psychedelia out there– even in the “psychedelic” 60s).
Finally, the guy I came over to the Swan Stage to see hit the stage. Anybody who’s never heard of T Bone Burnett probably doesn’t get a lot of exposure to popular culture. A name that, along with Joe Ely, I’ve associated with SXSW since I first heard of it decades ago (god i’m old), he is known for fusing everything from punk to country, producing, and for providing the soundtrack to numerous films, from Indy to Hollywood, I was really looking forward to what he would bring to HSB.
I hate to say it, but I was somewhat disappointed. To begin with, his band was too loud, to the point that the different parts seemed to run together into an indistinguishable mush (although I could occasionally barely make out a guitar riff that might have been interesting had it not been buried in the mix). And for a musician who has worked in so many genres & contexts, his songs had a bland sort of sameness and, in contrast to the Oh Hellos, not a lot of variation in rhythms or song structure. His voice was strong, and his songwriting, while a tad didactic for my tastes, struck me as fairly thoughtful & intelligent (again, what I was able to make out in the general mix). My favorite song in the set was actually a Gillian Welch number which was delivered following a short lecture on listening to music for free online– ironically, because much of the Festival was being streamed live online.
All in all, an enjoyable Friday at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.
