July 6, 2008

Another day, another blog. As you can see from my titles I’m having a sort of Talking Heads themed weekend at Rothbury. It all started on the car ride here when This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) played as the sun was rising. That and I was doing my best David Byrne dances in order to successfully keep my driver awake.

Crosseyed and Painless describes how I feel at this point. Crosseyed because Sound Tribe played so late and Painless because even though I’m sleep deprived it was all very much worth it. Yesterday I wasn’t able to get out and about on the site until the evening. HeadCount had David Murphy and Zach Velmer from STS9 at their booth for some political discussion in the afternoon, so I decided to stick around and see what they had to say. After they were done and I finished my blog from yesterday, I headed over to Medeski, Martin and Wood for a rousing performance of acid-latin-funk-jazz.

Later I headed over to see Michael Franti so I could count how many times he said “How you FEEEEEEELIN?!?” (it was 5, but I was only there for 3 songs). Next, I went back to the Sherwood Court stage to catch Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi’s Soul Stew Revival, where Col. Bruce made a surprise appearance. After that, I headed over to the headliner for the evening — Dave Matthews Band. I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a fan, I enjoy some of their songs but they aren’t one of those bands that speaks to me. Jeff Coffin sat in for LeRoi (who was in an ATV accident recently) and he did a phenomenal job pushing the band as much as his little saxophone could. Finally, I headed over to Sound Tribe and they closed the evening out for me.

Overall, the experience has been great. Still no potable water (I’m convinced they don’t exist) and the security has tightened up worse than going through airport security (I don’t think there are terrorists here). I’m going to cut this blog a little short because I need to head over to Trey so I can take some photos and see how well he’s doing.

READ ON after the jump for some pics from Saturday for your enjoyment…

So here I am again, a little later than I had planned but that happens when you spend the entire day running from stage to stage and back and forth to the camp site to grab some grub. Yesterday was fantastic, to the point that I’m almost speechless. I hadn’t realized until the fireworks that I had never seen a show on the 4th of July and a day long set of shows at that.

I still haven’t found the potable water and I doubt at this point I’ll buy any ice (thanks for lasting dry ice!), but I did find a few of the drink stations around the festival grounds. I saw TONS of music yesterday and did a little more exploring. I have a feeling that I’ve still not seen everything on the site yet — but that’s what is so nice about 3-4 day festivals (and much like the childhood trips to Disney World, where you explore a new park everyday). With the grounds and amenities I believe this festival to be the closest thing that we, as music fans, have to being a resort. Everyone has a choice of what to do, where to go, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be music. If I wasn’t typing this, I would be checking out the water park.

Being Independence Day, artists took the liberty to make their views known on certain issues and freedoms, and also pointed out things we should celebrate. The Wailers celebrated the music of Bob Marley, Snoop Dogg celebrated the freedom of gin & juice, Drive-By Truckers encouraged their fans to register to vote and exercise their independence, Yonder celebrated the return of Jon Fishman and objects turning brown, and Widespread got political, albeit poetically. I think it is no coincidence that they ended their 4th of July performance with a rousing rendition of Life During Wartime quite appropriate (but I’m not going to lie — also really fun to dance to).

Well, I’m going to wrap this one up as I need to get my laptop back to the campsite so I can go out and shoot some bands and enjoy the weather. Until then, READ ON after the jump for some more pics to tide you over: