Windows Into Rothbury Festival

Written by Michael Garfield Thursday, 30 July 2009 07:04

Last year, the inaugural Rothbury Festival (at Double JJ Ranch in Rothbury, Michigan) was widely proclaimed one of the greatest music festivals ever – not only for its stellar musical line-up, but also for its installation artwork, secret stages, and extensive greening efforts. I missed it...so I had no choice but to tag along when my friends made their second annual pilgrimage.
As befits my own quirky relationship to place and my appreciation of music festivals as location-events as much as musical-happenings, most of the pictures I came home with were not of the acts, but of the environments. A thousand other websites have already chronicled the music of that weekend in exhaustive detail, and it's the space that makes something like this truly profound anyway. So here are my memoirs of the corners and odd angles on Rothbury Music Festival. Here are a few fleeting moments I managed to grab as the torrents of experience threatened to wash me away. Bits and pieces that just might convince you to drag yourself over hill and dale and burn a week of all-nighters at what is swiftly establishing itself as a Great American Occasion. For a moment, step with me into the light. Here we are at Rothbury...


I'm painting at The Ranch, Rothbury's third stage by size and second by distance, for afro-surf-groovers Toubab Krewe. It's Thursday afternoon, the first show of the whole weekend, and the excitement is brick thick. My friends and I drove over twelve hours to get here...thousands of people came from even further. Without any formal arrangements to paint for musicians this time, and basically just along for the ride with a handful of my oldest and closest friends, I was content to work from the audience. It ended up being a delightful way to share in the enthusiasm with the other people next to us and walking by.


One of the weekend's highlights for me was the Reincarnation Garden, a fenced-off passage through dozens of beautiful installation artworks. Emerald Installations in particular impressed me with their numerous altars made from all-natural ingredients: pineapple slices, pine cones, leaves, flower petals, twigs and shells... In the center of this image was a wrought-iron Buddha meditating with a crown of pine cones and a shirt of pine needles inside a large metallic lotus. It seemed fitting for the festival, which in spite of its high-tech presentation still managed to emphasize our human relationship to nature (by, for example, rewarding people's recycling efforts with modest swag and providing a cellphone charging station powered by stationary bikes).


One of my favorite installations in the reincarnation garden, just to give you a better idea. The velvet box in the middle was full of smooth white river stones. I ended up taking the black tourmaline point I'd been carrying in my pocket and placing it there. Altars have a way of gathering devotional items...


...And here's another look at that Buddha at night, his pine needles replaced by an internal flame. Somehow I took this photograph at the exact moment that a waft of smoke blew by from elsewhere in the woods...the same photo one second later didn't have it. I prefer this one because the smoke helps convey the mysterious and beautiful feeling this garden cultivated in everyone who passed through it. Leaving the garden one night, my friend even said to me, "Well, we've been reincarnated now. What animal are you?" It's like that.


This is the view from where my friends and I laid our blanket for String Cheese Incident's only show of 2009 at Rothbury's main stage, The Orpheum. That white plackard in front of us is the sign for the water refill station – of which there were many, to my great relief. It keeps the traffic in front of us thick but fluid, a lively place to sit and paint and watch the crowd of forty thousand or more go by. Floating in the sky is a balloon so large it seems like an artificial moon – and, in fact, Billy Nershi of String Cheese Incident made a remark about it not long after this picture.

I'd never seen String Cheese Incident before (at least legitimately, with a ticket – I'd caught their last show before indefinite sabbatical at Red Rocks by climbing the mountain behind the amphitheater, where I could hear everything but only see a rainbow explosion of lights). To be in the crowd for this was world-puncturing, a total freak-fest in the best sense of the word, as excited and electric a crowd as I'd ever seen but also more loving and open than I could have expected or imagined. It was really impressed upon me how this kind of concert differs from a show like those put on by Phish, where there isn't any conscious energy directed at creating a loving community. Seeing SCI is almost like going to church...if church were a titanic dance-a-thon with hundreds of halloween costumes.


Same location, different angle. Right behind us and making our meeting spot very easy to find was this giant wicker "ROTHBURY" sign. At night it was illuminated by Christmas lights... My friend Amy is off to the right, wearing her tragic "FREE HUGS" t-shirt. At a music festival like Rothbury, her shirt held us up wherever we went as she was asked to stop every twenty feet to give some other elated human being a moment of mutual appreciation. But then again, at a music festival like Rothbury, we could hardly begrudge anyone a little affection.


As String Cheese Incident starts to play and the sun sets over the hill behind us, I turn around and am utterly captivated by the wispy clouds above. Something like offering hands, or a horse's tail flowing in the breeze of a gallop. Beautiful settings are tremendously important to an enjoyable concert...the feeling of garden safety contributed greatly to my experience that night, and everyone else's too, I'm sure.


It's dark by the start of String Cheese Incident's second set, which they announce by releasing a flock of flame-powered paper lantern balloons into the sky (confusing thousands of trippers unfamiliar with the wonders of low-tech). Closer and brighter, the artificial moon balloon adds...some nameless and ancient comfort.


From a bit deeper in the audience, artificial moon closer overhead, we can see the cherry on top of an already death-by-chocolate concert production: a twenty-foot inflatable ball, and several person-sized inflatable balls, which seriously short-circuited my sense of scale and distance and catapulted the whole affair well over the edge into the utterly surreal. My friends and I all agree that these balls came out of nowhere – we looked away for an instant and then they were there like apocalyptic flying whales. If that sounds like an exaggeration, ask anybody who was there. It's amazing how the simplest things can keel you right over into stupefaction.


Each night, Sherwood Forest (a wooded path between two stages which by day was the only decent shaded place to nap on the entire grounds) took on a deliciously spooky vibe perhaps best described as "Tim Burton Goes To Burning Man." Here is the main entrance, framed by giant inflatable torture implements.


We're in Sherwood Forest now and it's a raging party – or, more precisely, a few hundred small parties with two rivers of traffic through them. Color-changing lights splash the trees, and the air is alive with the dust of human footwork.


Parked only one row away from my tent in the campgrounds is the Renegade Stage, an RV owned by some of my friends from Boulder where they're setting up pirate DJs and kicking it well past dawn every night. Rothbury's scheduled acts are all over by about 2 or 3 AM each morning, so this humble campsite catches quite a bit of traffic. Dancing on the top of the bus is one very happy and groovy lady, resplendent in her candidness. Oh yes, the place is bumping...


The festival sun-up wander, a kind of limbo for people who can't go to sleep, walking ghostlike through the dawn hours and full tents, our melatonin clocks skipping ticks, utterly calm and pleasantly exhausted but still alert, ready, listening. This is one of my favorite parts of any day, and at festivals it is especially magical. It's the only even somewhat quiet moment a person can expect out here. Nobody is looking at anyone else. The portapotties are a war zone suddenly full of hilarious and strange graffiti. People are shuffling around like zombies or walking briskly through the morning cold to somewhere very warm and specific. Pink and blue coexist like secret lovers while almost everyone is looking somewhere else, at the inside of their heads. If I could go to a festival made up of only these moments, I probably would.


The Orpheum again, this time for The Dead, on Independence Day...the metaphorical weight of the whole thing is threatening to knock me over. Suddenly I feel like I'm finally standing with my feet in the stream of history. I later heard from a fellow who'd seen over 200 Dead shows that this one was in his top five. His top five! I bet the collective eagerness of everyone there created a disturbance in the Force large enough to be registered by Princeton's Global Consciousness Project.


Another shot of the moon balloon...


I am trying to catch up on my poor photographic account of the hilariously motley crowd at Rothbury, and luckily there's THIS guy in a clone trooper helmet, spinning fire at The Dead. It's a sample of the absurdity that only exists, to my knowledge, at music festivals...something about being in a place with people from thousands of miles around who either don't know you at all or know you and love you.


Although I'd managed to stay in place and paint for SCI, I made a point not to carry anything heavy into the Dead show so I could get up front for a good look. This Steely, surrounded by a galactic wheel and bounding some kind of yantra-like crystal, is projected on an enormous screen hanging over the stage. The galaxy swirls around it and the crystal glows and pulses, and I'm pretty sure I'm actually witnessing as cosmic an event as they're leading it on to be. After all, they're playing "Space" right now. No wonder I feel like the breeze of eternity is whistling through my ribs.