Outside Lands Music Festival is now in its sixth year– a nice time for the event, because they’ve worked out a lot of the idiosyncrasies of holding an enormous festival in San Francisco’s stunningly beautiful Golden Gate Park. Here’s the recap from Day 1: Friday.
As we’ve previously reported, on May 10 the legendary Booker T. Jones will release the follow up to his 2009 Grammy winning album Potato Hole, with The Road From Memphis. This time around Jones has recruited the hardest working band in show business – The Roots – to serve as his backing band as well as an impressive roster of talent to make guest spots on the record (Sharon Jones, Lou Reed, Jim James, Matt Berninger).
READ ON to check out the video for Booker T. and The Roots’ instrumental cover of Lauryn Hill’s Everything Is Everything…
In an age of Facebook, Twitter and any number of social media outlets capable of documenting the minutia of your day to day life, sometimes something as simple as the lost art of the phone call serves as the best way to connect with someone on a personal level. For their latest social activism campaign, HeadCount is doing just that by taking a back to basics approach in order to remind people to head to the polls to exercise the Constitutional right to vote in next Tuesday’s mid-term elections.
The non-partisan organization, that was founded in 2004 by Andy Bernstein and Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein, and has helped register over 175,000 people, has enlisted a impressive roster of musicians from the indie to jam world, that includes Jim James (MMJ), Willie Nelson, ?uestlove, Matt Berninger (The National), Jon Fishman (Phish) and Warren Haynes (ABB, Gov’t Mule) to not only pre-record reminder messages, but also make live personal calls to a select number of the approximately 25,000 people who have made a “Pledge to Vote” via HeadCount.
In a media conference call yesterday to talk about the inventive initiative, HeadCount board member Bob Weir (Grateful Dead/Furthur) stressed the importance of a “Vote For You” mentality, saying that young people need to take the future into consideration and participate instead of letting a bunch of “crusty old folks” made the decisions that have direct impact on their lives and those of future generations. Weir, who joked that his call list was so large he better get to work on it immediately, said that would seize the opportunity to talk to people to help figure out where the organization’s efforts will be centered in the future.
READ ON for more from HeadCount’s conference call…