Festival Rundown: Wakarusa 2009
Written by Michael Garfield Tuesday, 16 June 2009 19:46
A short visual tour of the rebooted Wakarusa Music Festival, as seen from next to the stage by this year's resident live painter...
Last year, I swore I would never attend another Wakarusa Festival. Chronically mismanaged, exploitative, over-policed, and generally a pain in the ass, Wakarusa was still close enough to my home court of Lawrence, Kansas to lure me out for its fifth year in 2008...but then tremendous summer storms closed the stages for two of four days and turned camping into an apocalyptic adventure. That was when I thought back on all of the insanity I'd gone through for this ostensibly national-class music festival in years past: unpaid gigs without a soundman, confused and ill-tempered security staff, cops with infrared goggles, crucible marches between the stages and campgrounds, sweltering shadeless summer camping, ethically atrocious production directors...and I ducked out.
But this year, I'm back from another go at Wakarusa with a smile on my face, happy to announce that things have turned around. The reasons are at least twofold:
1) Wakarusa moved from their original location right outside Lawrence on public park grounds to Mulberry Mountain, a private and remote meadow forty-five minutes from Fayeteville, Arkansas. Now a safe distance from the interest of city cops and the burden of daypass attendees, it was a smaller, more passionate, more manageable, more invested and carefree crowd. What more, the relatively small and distant locale gave Lawrence events producer Johnny Gallup of Cicada Rhythm a chance to turn his previously neglected electronic music stage into the show-stealer for this year's entire festival.
2) I was able to go through Johnny (a highly professional and friendly guy) to get into the festival through his Outpost Stage – instead of trying to petition Pipeline Productions, the music factory farm that runs the entire event. Working with the honorable Cicada Rhythm, I was able to get significant real estate on their fest-within-a-fest's website interstellarmeltdown.com – as well as a wonderful spot right up by the stage where I set up to do live painting all weekend as the stage's resident artist. Promoted as an official feature of the event, and invited to participate in the production with over a dozen amazing musical acts, I finally felt both useful and appreciated in a modest way in the scheme of the entire event (as opposed to my artist's experience from years past, which consisted of being treated as an irritant and listening to other musicians' similar horror stories).
I was "stuck" behind the easel at the Outpost Stage all weekend and so missed most of Wakarusa's billed main stage acts, but I didn't mind at all. As far as I'm concerned, I was where it was going down all weekend. Here's a brief pictorial memoir:
This is what I saw every time I turned around at night...what an enthusiastic wonderful crew! The Outpost Stage was in the smaller of two revival tents. After every act, there was a DJ ready to go at the other end, so people didn't even have to leave to stay in the vein of music. Johnny Gallup and Cicada Rhythm specialize in electronic music (he has almost single-handedly kept the scene alive in Kansas City and Lawrence), so this tent was popping all weekend with novel combinations of conventional instruments with laptops and turntables.
One such act was Fort Collins' Pretty Lights (whom I actually painted for the first time I did live art back in 2007...memory lane), which divides musical responsibilities between Derek Vincent Smith on laptop with various innovative control interfaces and Cory Eberhard on live and electronic drums. These guys have blown up super fast...when I painted for them back in Boulder, they were at the Trilogy Wine Bar (capacity 250?). This July, they're opening for Sound Tribe Sector Nine at Red Rocks (capacity somewhere over ten thousand). Here you see Cory taking one of his many regular brakes from drumming while Derek apparently tweaks out. Somehow they make it work.
Colorado just keeps giving. Here we have Praang, which is a supergroup composed of Jamie Janover on hammer dulcimer, Steve Kimock on guitar, and Michael Travis and Jason Hann of the String Cheese Incident on keyboards/computers and drums, respectively. My friend Krystle is painting on stage. Out of the frame, my friend Tourmaline Todd Shepherd was also painting at this show...I like the gigs with lots of us live painters out and in it. This all-improv band is the definition of crunkasaurus electronic psychrock...if such a thing even needs a definition. With no prior compositions to work from, this collective of exemplary improvisers rides a wave of rising and falling intensity throughout the set, very naturally and fluidly giving every player time to shine, until a face-melting crescendo left us all ringing like bells.
During the day, there were more "conventional" acts at the Outpost, like St. Louis badasses Madahoochi. Aside from having one of the only singing drummer front men in the business, they share songwriting and lead vocal responsibilities pretty well and are one of the most flexible ensembles I've ever seen. Their set at Wakarusa swerved from peppy bandgeek pop jams to majestic electronic dance interludes to face-shredding country-footed guitar rock and beyond. I'm not the only guy in the world simultaneously awed by Scott Rockwood's amazing lead guitar and struck stupid by schoolboy puppy passion by keyboardist Shawn Hartung's effortless talent and beauty. Before I make a further slobbering fool of myself...
Boombox of Huntsville, Alabama features Grateful Dead baby Zion Rock Godchaux on electric guitar playing an appropriately Jerry-esque train of slinky noodles with Russ Randolph holding it all together as multi-controller DJ. I'm still on the fence as to how engaging this kind of performance is in light of more active instrumental work by other artists, but there's no denying it's groovy music and the beating heart of a fabulous party...Boombox shows are a good time, whatever else they are. It's like being on tour with the muppet band.
This guy did what a lot of us FELT like doing all weekend during Shpongle's DJ set. He survived.
