San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cover story
Key strategists put Hardly Strictly Bluegrass together bolt by bolt
Our coverage of the 2018 Hardly Stricly Bluegrass festival. Pictured are staffers Greg Wynn, producer, operations; Sheri Sternberg, executive producer; Ryan Smith, production manager; Bonnie Simmons, transport director; and Arlene Owseichik, art director. They are posing with their mascot, Butter the Cow.
On Sunday, Sept. 30, a fleet of eight long production trailers will be hauled into place at the west end of Hellman Hollow in Golden Gate Park, the hidden-away production compound for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. All week these trailers will be charging up to release the energy it takes to put 81 acts onto six stages for San Francisco’s free three-day outdoor festival, from Friday through Sunday, Oct. 5-7, which has become a summer’s-end tradition, invented and funded by the late financier and banjo picker Warren Hellman, and perpetuated by his family foundation.
The logistics for the annual event — now in its 18th year — involve 12 departments and a staff of 350. Add in vendors and security, and it comes to between 750 and 1,000 workers dispatched through these eight trailers, via 70 golf
carts, constantly crackling walkie-talkies and any number of thumbs frantically typing text messages.
The crew must contend with delayed flights and city traffic, fog, wind, rain and the Blue Angels (the festival coincides with San Francisco Fleet Week). This year will be the first without talent buyer Dawn Holliday. Holliday, who was there from the beginning in 2001, is now a consultant.
In her stead is Chris Porter, who works out of Seattle. The other strategists, all local, work out of their homes, but they also keep an office near the Anchor Brewery on Potrero Hill. At that office is a dining room table, with all the leaves added in, and a dozen mismatched chairs. Here the festival veterans sit at the table to bring the biggest free festival to the Bay Area.
Sheri Sternberg City: San Francisco
Years with HSB: 18
Executive producer. Production is staging, power and lights — everything the spectators see and hear. I start at 6 a.m. and leave at 7 or 8 at night.
The tools: My work box comes into the trailer with me. It weighs 200 pounds and has everything I travel with, like lock cutters and duct tape and bungee cords.
Landing the gig: We had done a festival in the park with Dawn Holliday when I worked at the Great American Music Hall. It was called Southern Comfort Rocks the Blues. This was in the mid-’90s. Dawn and I went to lunch with Warren Hellman, and he said, “My sister (Nancy Bechtle) has just stepped down from the (San Francisco) Symphony and is not feeling well, and I want to do something in her honor.”
The beginning: The first year Warren looked at us and said, “Do you think anyone is going to come?” To be able to see 10,000 people show up for that first year when there were just nine bands was pretty amazing.
The name: It was called Strictly Bluegrass the first two years. Then we were sitting round the table discussing how it had become anything but strictly bluegrass and I said, “It’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.” It was inadvertent, but it stuck.
The preshow nightmares: The other day I had a dream that the internet didn’t work. This is the first year that we’re doing “Live From Here,” the radio show with Chris Thile, who took over for Garrison Keillor. Their thing is very internet dependent. That woke me up.
The war story: Dolly Parton arrived late, and we had to bring her tour bus right through the middle of the meadow (in 2005). There were people in the trees; they didn’t want to move. It was crazy. Then the console died in the first or second song. We brought it back to life, and it died again. We swapped out the brains of the console, and it worked for the rest of the show. People still talk about it as one of the highlights in all their years of coming.
Greg Wynn City: San Francisco Years with HSB: 10
The job: Producer, operations. Basically I handle everything that is not onstage. This year, they hired me full time. I’m the only full-time employee of HSB.
The qualifications: I started at Shoreline as a backstage drink boy doing dressing rooms. This was back in the day of the Eagles. You have no idea how nervous the tour manager was about getting the right drinks into each room.
Landing the gig: I’ve known the people who do Hardly Strictly for over 25 years. Ten years ago they asked me to come in and help a little bit. That turned into running the parking and changing the footprint year to year.
Wynn’s crew: We have a 40-foot container unit where I put all of my key people on the operations team. We receive all the moving parts. We start loading it on the Sunday before the event and do 12 to 14 hours a day. We have two crews — an early and a late — that run for the length of the festival. Just on my operations team I have 20 people. Then I have a parking crew, a signage crew, a security crew, decor crew.
The transportation: We have about 70 golf carts to move the artists to the stages. It’s like synchronized golf carts. It’s a sight to behold. We have a set of people who figure out how to get the artists out of their van to their stages with all their gear and back again.
The victories: I designed a chute made of 4-foot fencing down the middle of JFK Drive for vehicles to move through carrying the artists. We have a pedestrian crossing with gates to create a thoroughfare. When you see a vehicle going down JFK and you see the gates close one by one, it is a thing of beauty . ... We do a lot with not very much. Outside Lands builds a city. We build a little town.
The music: On a good day, I never see a musician. I always want at least one set of friends there so they can go see it and tell me about it. I live vicariously through them.