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.
We’re fortunate to bring you a full gallery from one of the best photographers working the scene. Dave Vann is a man among boys, and his work follows after the jump. He’ll be shooting for us down at Echo, so stay tuned this weekend for some live updates from the field. Onto the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass shots…
When I first started downloading music from the Internet in the late ’90s, the best place to find live shows from the bands I liked was from the little site with a heady name called nugs.net. Nugs has always been ahead of the times, and they shocked the world in 2002 when they teamed up with Phish to make official recordings of their first post-hiatus shows available for download within 48 hours of the concert’s encore. Hell, I used to be excited to get a shitty fourth-generation audience tape of a Phish show, three weeks after it happened, and then all of the sudden we were able to download pristine copies of their shows quickly.
The success of livephish showed the major labels were behind the times when it came to selling recordings of live bands. Nugs.net knew what was up, and their reputation caught the attention of other bands who have started selling their shows through Nugs’ pay portal livedownloads.com Huge touring acts such as Metallica, Widespread Panic and Crowded House now make every show they play available for download through sites run by the Nugs guys, while smaller bands have also found a willing partner.
We’ve teamed up with the folks at livedownloads.com to feature one show from their vast catalog each and every week. First up, let’s check out their recording of a recent Widespread Panic show from September 27th in Oakland, California.
Usually when touring bands head out to the bay area they play any of the numerous amazing venues in San Francisco. Widespread Panic has always done things a little differently, and they decided to play their three night fall run at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Read on for a full review of this show…
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