HARDLY STRICTLY SAN FRANCISCO; ROOTS TO THE PAST

Good ol’ San Fran; I love it. Where else can you go and find a parade celebrating the so-called ‘Summer of Love’? Where else could you go and find that same parade in the fall, a full week after summer’s demise, a full year after an anniversary ending with a 0 or a 5? Where else could you go and find that parade punctuated by cross-traffic maintaining the same red-light/green-light schedule, as if the parade were just an elaborate wedding procession, designed for a hoot and a holler and a quickie in the Mission District before the rigor mortis of marriage sets into your joints and you forgot why you came in the first place. At least it keeps any competition with LA friendly, not like the venom that spews forth with any mention of Nueva York, Towers to Nowhere or that mayor Julie Annie. Vicious rivalry only occurs between equal matches diametrically opposed, contenders to thrones and royalty rights. Esthetically of course, San Fran has no equal, not in this country anyway. LA’s hippest neighborhoods would hardly rate a mention up north. So what if the clocks run a little slow?

This ‘Love Fest’ was the third-cousin twice-removed anyway, kids who got hip in the early nineties, helping the Grateful Dead rake in millions before Jerry ascended. Wavy Gravy wasn’t there, nor any of the old-timers, musicians included. They were all out at Golden Gate Park for the ‘Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival’, featuring some of the best roots music, broadly defined, from both coasts. Where can you find that in LA? LA has some of the best alt-country musicians in the world, but they have to act freak-folkie to sell themselves, while the hard-core worship at the temple of McCabe’s, have Sunday socials at the Echo and try to get a quorum once a year at Safari Sam’s for the dog-and-pony show.

There must have been at least 20,000 people in Golden Gate park last Saturday for a free show, hardly advertised, with a line-up that would rival the Folk Festivals of any major western Canadian city, all splayed across five major stages and many minor ones. LA’s ‘Indie’ fanaticism serves it poorly in this regard, throwing out the old folks with the bath water, while hanging on every word coming out of an infant’s precious precocious mouth. Welcome to Thailand. As if to add insult to LA’s injury, last Thursday Ry Cooder, LA’s own native son and patriarch to both world music and alt-country, played a benefit show at Great American Music Hall, something he swore he’d never do again in LA, for love or money. Ouch!

Of course with five stages going simultaneously, regardless of how staggered the set times or the carefree gaits, you just can’t see everything. If you try you’ll just end up seeing nothing, lost in the crowd and getting tripped in the pee-pee lines. The list of the acts I saw and heard last Saturday afternoon pale in comparison to the list of who I missed, to wit: Peter Rowan, Richard Thompson, Desert Rose Band (Chris Hillman), Del McCoury, and Global Drum Project were my hits; Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Laurie Lewis, Emmy Lou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Guy Clark, Nick Lowe, Dave Alvin, Robert Earl Keen, Jerry jeff Walker, Steve Earle and Asleep at the Wheel my misses, just to name a few. And that doesn’t even count Friday and Sunday, with such country stalwarts as Robert Plant and Elvis Costello to liven up the vibes. Like the name says, it’s ‘hardly strictly’. My God! What a summit meeting! Some Republican nut with a bottle of anthrax and an ax to grind could have wiped out Palin’s most down-home opposition right then and there. That’s truly scary!

Of course this is a world music blog and most of that wasn’t really world music, but I guess the definitions get looser as the desire becomes greater. Hunger speaks all languages. But Global Drum Project, featuring Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain, IS world music at its best and I’d never seen them before, so that was great. Zakir Hussain is the great Indian tabla master of course, who already did a solo show at Grand Performances in LA a few weeks ago, so if there’s anything better than seeing him alone, it’s seeing him with others of like mind and talent. If nothing else they prove definitively that percussion is something to be enjoyed for its own sake up front and center, not something to be relegated to the back line, largely forgotten until it’s not there, unusable if ‘rusty’. Think percussion’s easy, just banging a drum? Try it some time. They’ll be in LA next week. Check them out. Myself I’m going home to Argentina; I hear it’s nice there. I’ll be back.