July 4th weekend I attended The Peach music festival at Montage Mountain near Scranton, PA. I like big music festivals - a chance to see bands I like and discover new bands, and just the feeling of enjoying music with thousands of fellow music fans. I had never been to this festival before and decided to go when my Deadhead cousins (that's a story in itself) invited me to join them there. When the festival rolled around the air across the mid-Atlantic was thick with smoke from Canadian wildfires; as a result my four hour drive up to Scranton was surreal, driving through never-ending smoke, like I was headed to Mordor.
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| People get a little crazy at festivals |
This was the first music festival I attended where I stayed in a hotel rather than camping. I do still love camping in nature settings, but camping at festivals is something else - you're jammed together cheek to jowl with a lot of other generally boisterous people. Festival camping areas feel like refugee camps populated entirely with hippies (actually, the modern term for scruffy Bohemians who show up at jam band festivals is "wooks"). And whenever you camp at a festival it always seems to be the case that the adjacent campsite - maybe three feet away - will be populated with wooks who are tripping on some sort of speedy acid which fuels them to party loudly all through the night - and maybe to rummage through your stuff when you're not there (this has never happened to me, but I've heard of it). In contrast, my routine at The Peach was very civilized: wake up in a real bed in an air-conditioned room after a good night's sleep; shower and eat breakfast at the hotel; spend the morning working out, catching up on email, or whatever; pick up food at the Wegman's near my hotel; and then head to the festival parking lot where I'd eat lunch (a sandwich or a salad, accompanied by a beer, so I wouldn't have to pay a fortune for food and beer inside - no outside alcohol or food in the festival grounds); then head in to see the music. The 20 minute drive off the mountain and over to Wilkes-Barre every night was well worth it.
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| Spotted in the RV area |
The LOCKN festival in Virginia is held at a giant plot of dusty undeveloped land with no infrastructure. - the only bathrooms are porta-potties, and there's not much else there in terms of creature comforts. In contrast, the location for Peach is a ski resort. The largest of the three stages is permanent, almost like a Wolf Trap kind of place. Tthey have a summer concert series there and there are amenities like real bathrooms and paved trails. And a water park. Yes, a full fledged water park which you can use as a festival attendee. And you can do fun things like ride the chairlift. While I didn't in fact take advantage of the chair lift or the water park, they give the whole enterprise a feeling of being a little more civilized. Plus there's lots of vending, and lots of good food vendors (never mind that one of the food vendors had a propane accident and burned down the Friday night of the festival).
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| The main pavilion or "Peach stage" (not my photo) |
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| The "Mushroom stage" - note that it is nestled in the middle of the water park |
(not my photo)
Friday I headed straight to the festival. Since I hadn't yet discovered the Wegmans, my lunch was a sandwich from the local Sheetz. On the way into the parking lot there's a security check - you get out of your car and they wand you, and take a quick look around the car. Given how perfunctory the check is, they must be out to stop only the laziest of evil-doers, those who keep their pistols (or glass bottles - also prohibited) right out on the passenger seat. I purchased a parking pass which afforded me a spot within walking distance of the venue, which turned out to be really valuable, since two of the three days I took the opportunity to go back to the car and snack rather than buy dinner at the venue. At the venue entrance there's another security scan. This time you have to pass through a metal detector and if you beep they'll rummage through your (clear only!) bags. Friday and Saturday I was OK, but Sunday I brought an umbrella which caused the metal detector to beep. I was shunted aside to bag check, where they found the little snacks (granola bars, dog treats, and such) I had hidden in my bag (remember, no outside food) - but amazingly they allowed me to hold onto them.
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| My cousins Anita and Rob - at 6' 7", Rob is the tallest person ever written about in this blog |
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| With Rob and Anita |
My routine for the days was pretty regular - floating among the three stages and between hanging out with my cousins and with various DC music friends who were in attendance as well. The main stage and the smallest stage were fairly close together, making it easy to bop between them. The mid-size stage was a long walk up a hill through some nice woods - not the strenuous climb that some had described, but long enough that you didn't want to do it too often.
As at Wolf Trap, a GA ticket gets you access to the lawn at the main stage; you have to buy more expensive tickets to get a seat in the pavilion. But one nice thing about this festival is that for most of the day they don't care who sits in the pavilion, which means that even those like me with the cheap GA tickets could sit on a real seat, out of the sun (or other weather) until late afternoon, when they started enforcing the seating policy. And I have to admit that on Sunday, with the encouragement of some friends who had GA+ tickets (which gave them access to the rear of the covered pavilion), because of the threat of rain I cheated and managed to stay inside when they were kicking the unwashed GA ticketholders out. This was for the best, since a torrential thunderstorm did indeed sweep through the area. The weather got bad enough that they invited everyone from the lawn to come inside the pavilion for safety until the storm passed, so I would have eventually gotten inside, but not before getting totally soaked and muddy. Instead, I cheated a little and stayed dry.
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| With Pam |
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| With Cindy |
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| With friend Rob, not cousin Rob |
My cousins unfortunately had to go home (to South Carolina!) early because of a pet emergency and missed the acts they (and I) most wanted to see: Tedeschi Trucks Band, Lettuce, and (to a much lesser extent in my case) JRAD. JRAD is a band that plays the Grateful Dead repertoire, but in a very different style. A lot of people like it; I don't. Other highlights from my perspecitve included Kendall Street Company (a Charlottesville band we first came across at another festival in 2019 when some of them were still college students - nice to see how they and their audience have grown), Baked Shrimp (had never heard of them, but my friend Rob - not my cousin Rob - dragged me to see them. The band is from Long Island), Lawrence (never heard of them before either - but fun soul/pop band fronted by a brother and sister. Nice, except that they're both Brown alums), Cris Jacobs (a Baltimore roots rocker who is always great - here he is sitting in with my band a few years back). "Lowlights" included Les Claypool's Flying Frog Brigade (people had strongly recommended them, but I didn't like them one bit), Brown Eyed Women (an all female Grateful Dead cover band - meh). I avoided seeing Andy Frasco (he is all hat and no cattle - lots of shtick like jumping up on the instruments and crowd-surfing, but his music kinda stinks), and the Australian Pink Floyd Show (not worth staying up until 2 AM to see a cover band, no matter how good they are). I also saw Ziggy Marley, who I would have skipped but didn't want to do the long walk to the other stage in the rain, a bit of Daniel Donato (the latest big young thing) and Taz Niedehaur (a child guitar prodigy now growing up), and others.
By Monday morning the wildfire smoke had lifted, so I had a less surreal drive home, and since I hadn't been camping I didn't have a backlog of grimy camping gear and clothes to deal with. When it comes to festivals, luxury rocks!
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| Aerial shot of the lower festival grounds (not my photo) |
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| Walking between stages at night |
