allgood festival
I Thought I hated the Desert: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mud (and Desert Too)
This was the 9th year for the Allgood Festival at Marvin's Mountaintop, featuring headliners the String Cheese Incident and the Flaming Lips, along with jam festival regulars like Keller Williams and newcomers Ozomatli. Until recently, Allgood was a well-kept secret like a "locals only" surf spot. Now with national sponsorship from Relix magazine, and major headlining acts, the secret is out. According to festival organizers there were over 14,000 tickets sold, but closer to 16,000 people on the Mountaintop.
We had heard about Allgood from numerous locals who praised both the music and the bountiful drug scene, as well as the small town attitude which compared favorably to bigger scenes like Bonnaroo. While the nerd base of Bloodless has never had much interest in drugs, and our attraction to the jam band scene has been limited mostly to admiration of technical prowess, we like being exposed to new music and are used to being the designated driver anyway. As for camping, we like camping! So when the opportunity to send part of the Bloodless Crew to the Allgood Festival came up, it sounded like a great idea. We enthusiastically jumped on board, especially looking forward to the smaller setting after camping at Coachella, where we watched bands in the desert with 50,000 of our closest friends.
Little did we realize there would be more in common with Coachella than bands and camping. The Bloodless crew had an inkling that this would be a big year for Allgood before we ever heard the attendance numbers. Under normal conditions, Bloodless Coup is headquartered about 15 miles and 20 minutes from the Allgood Festival site. It took us six hours to get there (about the same amount of time to fly to L.A. from the east coast, rent a car and get part way to Indio). Unfortunately, unlike the trip to Indio, which included a diversion to the UCLA campus (very spiffy) and a drive through the desert (including a stop to see the fields of windmill power generators), most of the trip to Allgood was spent stopped behind two frat boys from Connecticut in a Audi who were consuming - and also unfortunately, eliminating, on the side of the road in plain sight - one Busch beer about every 15 minutes.
The boys from Connecticut were not alone, and as afternoon turned to night, and the line of cars stretched, we started to worry about the line of thousands of drunk, impatient (or pissed off) people driving their cars through hilly, muddy back roads. Did we mention it had been raining for days with the aftermath of hurricane Dennis? Luck and tempers held, and despite some odd smells emanating from the clutch, we reached our campsite at 11:00 p.m., thanking Subaru for all wheel drive and turbos. In the dark, foggy wetness, we engaged in the Quickest Tent Pitch Ever as we scrambled to make it to at least part of the Flaming Lips set, giving up on part of Les Claypool's set in the interest of having staked out some ground for our home away from home.
As luck would have it, the rain that delayed the cars also delayed the bands, and we straggled, slipped and slid into the concert area as Les Claypool and the Flying Frog Brigade were taking the stage. Originally we planned to write about the set, but honestly, were too stunned to do much besides maneuver ourselves to the front of the stage area, around the backstage area and to the other side. What we heard sounded, uh, technically interesting, very funky, and, well, yeah - kind of like a super extended version of "One of These Days."
Keeping it all together in the aftermath of a hurricane must have been no small task for festival organizers. The rain had not only wreaked havoc with the schedule and everyone's ability to navigate, but also the sound, lighting and projection screens.
As the transition to the headliners drew out an already long night with more technical difficulties, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne tried to keep the mood up, chatting with the crowd about sitting in traffic for six hours and getting rained on. By this time, we were so delirious we can't remember what time they took the stage. Once the set began, with giant bouncing balloons, confetti flying, and giant projection screen behind Coyne's exuberance, all tiredness was banished. The set stuck fairly closely to the pattern established after the release of 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, with video closely synched to the music, and including several songs from the critic's favorite Soft Bulletin as well as their 1994 hit "She Don't Use Jelly" (known to many people as "Vaseline"). Two notable - and more rocking - additions to the set were covers of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." Known for their psychedelic rock and dreamy orchestrations, the Flaming Lips showed they had more in their bag of tricks than nun puppets, confetti and synthesizers Click here for full review and setlist.
Eventually we slogged back to the tent by 5 a.m., and drifted off to acoustic improvisation. We dream about being stuck in traffic and peeing in the bushes. Morning came early, with a false alarm freakout followed by 7:30 fireworks accompanied by the shouting of “THIS IS YOUR 7:30 FUCKING WAKE UP CALL!!!”
The Bloodless crew were better able to take in the scene on Saturday morning. We woke in fog, but soon found that we had camped on a hilltop with a magnificent view of the surrounding area. There had been little rain, and the grounds were drying up for a full day's worth of shows.
Ozomatli and their L.A born mixture of hip-hop, indie rock and Latin rhythms, combined the best of many worlds. In addition to the standard rock fare of drums, bass guitar and electric guitar, the group also incorporates hand percussion, conga, turntables and a horn line into their sound. What's even better is they have the stage presence of a salsa band, but are eclectic enough that their sound will never pigeonhole them into any one classification. Teaching the audience rhythms and singing in Spanish, their set was a fresh variation on the improvisational mood. It was easy to see how they were able to lead people all over town at SXSW, attracting the unwelcome attention of the police as well as the raves of critics. Ending their show with a samba drum breakdown and leaping off the stage into the crowd, the group struck up a chorus of "Ozomatli ya se fué, YA SE FUÉ!" and subsequently marched through the festival grounds with about 100 people in tow. It was like being at Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro where the crowd and the performers mingle freely, and everyone is delighted to be with the band.
In the spirit of Appalachian jam, Yonder Mountain String Band followed Ozomatli, overlapping parts of their set with the multi-tasking Keller Williams. Williams, who we had heard raves about, sounded like the love child of James Taylor and Ani DiFranco (don't think about that one too hard). His loops of vocals, different guitar phrases, and other various instruments, ranging from a triangle to a samba whistle, recombined into a one-man orchestra of sound. He even looped a decent snippet of "Groove is in the Heart" into his performance. Ultimately though, while we appreciated the barefoot singer's technical prowess and creative looping, his stylings seemed more and more like an acquired taste we didn't yet possess.
In the interest of not wanting to get tapped later on for mud wrestling, we stayed for part of Michael Franti's socio-political croonings and then fled as the skies began to open. Incidentally, this also meant skipping String Cheese Incident, which was headlining the traveling Big Summer Classic tour that stopped at Allgood (giant inflatable sumo wrestler and all) . However, in return for skipping the rest of the festival our axles and bodies escaped the second mudding of the weekend. After being led on a wild goose chase for the exit by poorly informed (but very nice!) festival staff, we found the exit road, and a line of some dozen tow trucks, waiting for the coming doom. We're glad we missed it.
Even with a weekend cut short by traffic delays on one end and mud on the other, the Allgood Festival was worth the trip. Yes, there were problems, but nine years ago Allgood never set out to be a Bonnaroo. So it goes without saying that much of what went wrong on the organizational end of things can still be fixed. As far as the mud and the distance from the stage goes, there are worse ways to spend a Friday and Saturday than on a gorgeous mountain ridge under a summer sky. The fact that a hippie festival in West Virginia can boast such natural beauty and a bill of such national talent, ranging from jam and jazz to rock and bluegrass is, well, almost heaven.
