Summer Goes Out With A Bang

So, I played a nice festival called Not Fade Away last weekend. As one might expect from the name, it was a festival of Buddy Holly aficionados.

Just kidding.

The name is a Grateful Dead reference (according to Wikipedia, the Dead performed the song 532 times) and the festival was suitably hippie dippie. VW buses and Vanagons as far as the eye could see! A lot of Dead and Dead-inspired music, jam band music, and one Classic Funk Band.

That would be us - Magnolia Blue.

Here I am Onstage

We performed with a couple of extra horns - five pieces in all - which was cool. Unfortunately, we're without a female singer right now and with Shade having left the band, Cornelius has to shoulder all the singing. He's a great front man, but that's a lot of singing for his pipes. Fortunately, we were able to compensate by throwing in a number of instrumentals (or near instrumentals).

During our set, apparently there was a scuffle between someone (we think he had wandered over from the more rave-oriented stage at the other end of the property) and security. The guy drew a gun and tried to fire at one of the security guards. Fortunately the gun jammed (though others say they heard it go off - the story isn't clear). This all happened just feet away from me off to the side of the stage; however, I was totally unaware of it until later on, as it was behind my back. Pretty scary to think that after all I've been through this year, I could have been shot! Check out the news coverage here. Check out a video from our performance here.

What's interesting is that while this was a public festival, it seemed to draw mostly a sort of extended family of festival-goers, many of whom know each other. As I play more of these shows I'm starting to get to know some of them too. It's pretty cool - this crew seems to spend its summer camping from one festival to another. Not a bad way to spend some summer weekends!

Anyway, other than the gun battle it was a wonderful, mellow scene. Great "green room" for the bands. Beautiful, sunny weather. After the show I popped open a beer (Lost Rhino Faceplant IPA, in case you want to know), and settled into my chair to hang out - and saw some excellent bands. I had a very nice time.

Backstage