Concert Wrap — Mulberry Mountain, Day 2
September 13th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
By the time the blog got to the Mulberry Mountain Ranch near Ozark, it was pretty early into the weekend: 4 p.m. Friday (Sept. 12), while most poor souls still had an hour before their weekend started.
Of course, by that time, at least 13 hours of music had already passed.
Like its predecessors, the third annual Mulberry Mountain Harvest Music Festival started rockin’ (and bluegrassin’ and jamming’ and folkin’ and a lot of other things) on a Thursday.
Click the ‘more’ link to continue reading about Mulberry Mountain’s second day and see more photos from the festival.
A thousand people, perhaps many more, where already at the venue at 4 p.m. Friday. It’s hard to tell. There were enough cars for a thousand, but the music patrons have the freedom to roam 650 acres, choosing between two stages of music or their campsites, where the audio is clear and the sightlines to the stage are not bad. The Frisbee playing and beer drinking is also enough to distribute people all over the place.
But that’s what’s great about festival, too: It’s your choice, your stage, your music, your decision to skip a band and take an afternoon nap if you so choose.
I decided to park it in front of the Main Stage, where California jam rockers New Monsoon were just getting ready to launch into their set. When the band played its first note, perhaps 10 people were on the lawn area directly in front of the stage, including a girl with a weird gold skirt that may have been the most talented hula-hooper I’ve ever personally witnessed. More on her later.
But as New Monsoon cranked up the volume, the crowd responded by filing in and dancing like only hippies know how to dance. I spent too much time snooping around the vendor booths (Corn dogs! Hemp necklaces! Posters!) to take many notes, but the crowd was responsive enough for New Monsoon. Several times, however, the band tried to brighten the edges of its progressive jam sound with keyboards, and I found myself disinterested, wanting to cruise the vendor booths again.
Next on the main stage was Split Lip Rayfield, a trio from Kansas. As a native Kansan, I must disclose here that I’m quite a fan of SLR, and this is probably my fifth time to see them. Not sure on that. Considering that history, this was a pretty good output from the band. The last time I saw them, the group was still mourning the loss of Kirk Rundstrom, a founding member of the band. Without him, the trio looked a little timid, maybe even sad.
Timid would have been a pretty ill-deserved adjective for the band that played in the early evening hours of Friday. The band roared through several of its better known songs ( “Never,” “Redneck Tailgate Dream”) and a few new ones, too. A rain delay held the band up for about 10 minutes during the middle of the set, but the mandolin, homemade bass and banjo combo didn’t lose its stride when it returned. It closed with a killer quartet of songs: the three-part harmony, shifting tempo grandeur of “River,” the farcical playfulness of “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat?” (Answer: 49, and a ham of meat), the singalong lament of “Crazy” and the firebrand bluegrass-meets=punk of “Kiss of Death,” about the singer’s knack for having cars break down on him.
The next band onstage, North Carolina’s The Avett Brothers, are a big draw themselves. One young lady in dreadlocks standing near me was going to enjoy the entire festival but mostly came to see the Avetts.
I can’t imagine she was disappointed.
The band is bluegrass, but perhaps most so in instrumentation. The energy level and sometimes screamed lyrics of The Avett Brothers is befitting of an emo group, not some stodgy bluegrass outfit. On a banjo, acoustic guitar and upright bass — and for several songs, a cello was added — the Avetts told of murder, posses, lost loves, blackmail and other various hard times.
The group’s set, which lasted more than 90 minutes, contained such gems as “Murder In The City” and “Salina,” an uptempo burner that later morphed into a string ballad with dueling bass and cello.
After the encore — yes, an opening act had an encore — the venerable and extremely difficult to describe Leftover Salmon closed out the evening.
The band did take a 20-minute break about an hour into its set, which began at 10:30 p.m. At about 1:30 a.m., it launched in its 21st song of the evening/early morning: “I Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow.”
Unfortunately, I did, both in filing this review you’re reading and taking care of a few other items. So I had to leave. For all I know, Leftover Salmon is still playing. Not that the crowd would mind.
For the better part of three hours, the band entertained, alternately, with slide mandolin solos, duels between the keyboards and banjo and a host of goofy activities that included pulling a man from the audience to yell to the crowd, bringing out a friend of the band to play washboard and allowing the crazy good hula hooper to sway about for a song.
Sometimes the band’s irreverent nature got the best of them, “Ask The Fish” seemed forced and not nearly as funny as it was surely intended to be.
The bulk of the material, however, was danceable, groove-heavy bluegrass/Cajun/many-other-things rock courtesy of a band of ace musicians.
Specifically, the lead trio of Drew Emmitt on mandolin and electric guitar, Vince Herman on acoustic guitar and Noam Pikelny on banjo impressed as they alternately took charge of the music, losing nothing in the song or in the interest of its fans during the switches.
Being a showman and a great instrumentalist are often two different talents. Thankfully, this trio can show its virtuosity through solos without extending them to the point of audience boredom, as many of the group’s jam contemporaries often do.
And when those parts flow together, the non-technical term for that magic is a groove, something the 2,500 or so on the festival grounds were still appreciating at 1:30 a.m. And perhaps still are.
The music continues today, but with an ominous outlook. Hurricane Ike has made landfall, and the associated weather systems are expected to push rain into the area. But the current crowd doesn’t seemed to be phased. Late into Leftover Salmon’s set, Herman offered the following lyrics as he sang “River’s Rising”: “Big storm is coming.”
Indeed it is. We’ll see you at the festival regardless.
A word on the set lists: I have some notes on the Avetts, Leftover Salmon and Split Lip, but not enough to write anything down. I’ll be glad to try to piece something together if you’d like.
E-mail me and I’ll send you what I have.
I would like to get your notes on the Leftover Salmon setlist. I should’ve kept up with the list myself but I was having too much fun during their set. Some songs that stood out for me were when Billy McKay, the keyboardist, sang on 44 Blues (first set) and on Railroad/Highway (second set). I also recall a tremendous River’s Rising sung by Drew Emmitt in which he ad-libbed an extra soulful shout of “Can you feel it” as he sang about the rain waters.