The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival finally confirmed for us there’s an East Coast bias. Last weekend’s three-day event drew anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, trotting out some heavy hitters like Jeff Tweedy, Bela Fleck, John Prine and Emmylou Harris. Yet HSB still fell off the radar of just about everybody we know. Blogbuzz? Not even.
But we’ve been hearing nothing but positive reviews since the 52-hour, 72-band orgiastic aural fiesta ended. And our man on the scene said this year’s seventh annual edition may have been the best. We couldn’t persuade him to jot down some notes before heading off to the upcoming Echo Project in Atlanta, so we’ll point you to some professional reviews and hit you with the best photo gallery of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass you’ll find on the world wide superweb.
The San Francisco Chronicle penned a decent review of the festival from start to finish, but as BeyondChron astutely points out, the Chronicle’s reporter failed to even mention Jeff Tweedy’s memorable 100-minute acoustic set on Friday night. The San Jose Mercury News provided three separate days of fantastic coverage, which you can check out here, here and here.
That should be good enough to satiate you on the words…now let’s bring you the pictures. Voyage onto Hidden Track for the low-down.
