(no subject)
A friend of mine organized a three-day long hippie festival in honor of April 20th called "The Last Daze of April." I'm not a hippie, but as it was organized by a friend I came along. That and he wanted me to perform on stage. Everyone camped out in a field for three days. During the day, everyone smoked pot (except me, I don't like it) and drank beers and hung out playing acoustic guitars and djembes and what-not. At night someone set up turntables and there were DJs spinning techno music. Which was new to me, hippies dancing to techno music. But they were doing it, and judging by the number of them it must be kinda widespread. Then a little before dawn, everyone crawled back to their tents, worn out from dancing (I danced two rips into my snake-skin chelsea boots).
On the third and final day, we were going to have live bands, and my friend wanted my Dream & Shadow Huntsman Group to be one of them. With the band consisting of just me at the moment, it seemed a challenge, but I decided to do it. I knew that I could do most of the folksy stuff with just my voice & my guitar, but for the more rockin', bluesy stuff I'd need some drums. Or at least percussion. So the day before, I recruited a guy named Leon who used to play drums. There were a few junk piles in this field, so me & Leon went through them looking for pieces of junk that made good noises when you hit them with drumsticks, and that became our drum set. I showed him all the beats and we rehearsed them a little.
The live band performances were opened up by a band of dextrous 11-year olds called Bullet, who played things like "Eruption" by Van Halen. They were followed by 2/3 of a band called Hezery, who didn't know until the day before that they were supposed to be performing. The PA system belonged to them, and they thought they were just supposed to bring the PA. But the guitarist & the drummer came anyway and played a few songs but mostly just jammed together.
Then it was time for the Dream & Shadow Huntsman Group. Dressed in a blue three-piece pinstripe suit and a black fedora, I played all the biggest DASHG hits, and started off with the hard stuff first, saving the folksy stuff for the second half. Halfway into the second song, someone start playing with the stagelights, turning them on and off at certain times, and someone finally came up with a strobe light and set that up. When the lights were off, the only source of illumination were two citronella torches at the front of the stage, so it looked pretty spooky and cool from the audience's point of view (from my point of view, it just looked hard to see what I was doing). At some point, Leon vanished for some reason, but the guys from Hezery jumped on stage and started playing all the percussion. They were pretty good about picking up on all the weird changes, and we did a few completely improvised jams. I think the set went on for an hour and a half, which would be thirty minutes longer than it was supposed to last.
After the Dream & Shadow Huntsman Group went off, this guy from Baltimore named Matt Pless got onstage and played guitar & harmonica and sang. The guitarist from Hezery remarked that he was like Bob Dylan with rhythm.
On the third and final day, we were going to have live bands, and my friend wanted my Dream & Shadow Huntsman Group to be one of them. With the band consisting of just me at the moment, it seemed a challenge, but I decided to do it. I knew that I could do most of the folksy stuff with just my voice & my guitar, but for the more rockin', bluesy stuff I'd need some drums. Or at least percussion. So the day before, I recruited a guy named Leon who used to play drums. There were a few junk piles in this field, so me & Leon went through them looking for pieces of junk that made good noises when you hit them with drumsticks, and that became our drum set. I showed him all the beats and we rehearsed them a little.
The live band performances were opened up by a band of dextrous 11-year olds called Bullet, who played things like "Eruption" by Van Halen. They were followed by 2/3 of a band called Hezery, who didn't know until the day before that they were supposed to be performing. The PA system belonged to them, and they thought they were just supposed to bring the PA. But the guitarist & the drummer came anyway and played a few songs but mostly just jammed together.
Then it was time for the Dream & Shadow Huntsman Group. Dressed in a blue three-piece pinstripe suit and a black fedora, I played all the biggest DASHG hits, and started off with the hard stuff first, saving the folksy stuff for the second half. Halfway into the second song, someone start playing with the stagelights, turning them on and off at certain times, and someone finally came up with a strobe light and set that up. When the lights were off, the only source of illumination were two citronella torches at the front of the stage, so it looked pretty spooky and cool from the audience's point of view (from my point of view, it just looked hard to see what I was doing). At some point, Leon vanished for some reason, but the guys from Hezery jumped on stage and started playing all the percussion. They were pretty good about picking up on all the weird changes, and we did a few completely improvised jams. I think the set went on for an hour and a half, which would be thirty minutes longer than it was supposed to last.
After the Dream & Shadow Huntsman Group went off, this guy from Baltimore named Matt Pless got onstage and played guitar & harmonica and sang. The guitarist from Hezery remarked that he was like Bob Dylan with rhythm.