Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival offers welcome respite after difficult week.
Hardly Strictly provides respite after Vegas attack
Lucinda Williams helped close out the 17th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival with a ringing note of defiance. As the sun dipped behind the trees on the west end of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on Sunday, Oct. 8, the singer-songwriter tore into “Protection,” a song from her album “Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.”
Livin’ in a world full of endless troubles. Livin’ in a world where darkness doubles, But my burden is lifted when I stand up, And use the gift I was given for not givin’ up.
The free three-day outdoor concert, a gift to the city by the late financier and philanthropist Warren Hellman that kicked off Friday, Oct. 6, has long offered a refuge from the daily grind with its freewheeling music and attitude. This year, it seemed to serve a higher purpose. After a grim week marked by the massacre at a country music festival in Las Vegas that left 58 victims dead and hundreds injured, and the death of American rock icon
Tom Petty, Hardly Strictly brought together thousands of music lovers eager to embrace the good vibes and great tunes.
“We wouldn’t miss this for anything,” said Anne Baylor of Santa Rosa, who brought her family out Saturday morning to stake out a prime spot in front of the main stage in Hellman Hollow.
It was a sentiment that was echoed across the festival.
Under clear autumn skies (and the occasional roar of Fleet Week stunt planes zooming overhead), thousands of fans filled out the grounds, which also stretched into Marx and Lindley meadows.
People spread out blankets and lawn chairs and shared bottles of wine with friends. Children blew bubbles and ran through the crowds. And there was a lot of dancing; most of it carefree, some of it brazen.
Organizers expected approximately 250,000 people in the park each day, with a total of 750,000 fans over the weekend.
“You have to live your life,” said James Reid of San Francisco, who brought along his own guitar to fill in time between acts. “You can’t live in fear.”
As always, Hardly Strictly was about so much more than banjos, mandolins and fiddles.
The festival offered some 100 acts on seven stages, many paying tribute to Petty throughout the weekend, from San Francisco’s own Sam Chase and the Untraditional, who opened the Swan Stage at noon Friday with a rip-roaring cover of “I Won’t Back Down,” to Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, who sparked a near-festival-wide sing-along with a rendition of “American Girl” on the Swan Stage on Sunday afternoon.
Along the way, fans were treated to a set of solo material by Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach on Saturday at the Rooster Stage; infectious Afrobeat by Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, whose Friday set on the Swan Stage was highlighted by a cover of father Fela Kuti’s “Expensive S—”; a bass-heavy set from the Queen of Bounce herself, Big Freedia; and a dream round robin featuring songwriters Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller and Williams bringing the political message of their Lampedusa tour for refugees to the Rooster Stage on Sunday, with a special cameo by the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.
From time to time, it felt as though the ills of the world — the tragedy in Nevada, the hurricanes, the tensions swirling around the White House — seemed to dissipate into the warm, lazy autumn sunshine.
But the news of the day still found its way into the park.
During his Sunday afternoon set on the Swan Stage, Randy Newman delivered his family-friendly tunes with a political twist. Diving into new tracks from his latest album, “Dark Matter,” he introduced the track “Putin” as a song he wrote about one of the most powerful people in the United States.
Even his 2004 “It’s a Jungle Out There” sounded poignant with lyrics like “It’s a jungle out there / Violence and danger everywhere” and “Even the cops are scared today / So if you see a uniform / Do exactly what they say / Or make a run for it.”
British singer and songwriter Billy Bragg was more outspoken as he chastised the U.S. for electing President Trump (whose name he tried not to use very often) and spoke out about the refugee crisis.
“We will be judged by our children and children’s children,” he said, shortly before he remade Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” as “The Times They Are aChangin’ Back,’ ” and invoked the line: “In the land of the free and the home of the brave / Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave.”
Before each performance, stage hosts such as Tim Lynch emphasized the message Mayor Ed Lee had issued in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting: “If you see something, say something.”
But by the time Nelson took the stage Sunday, nothing could keep him or the crowd down.
“I’d rather live a short life full of love than a long life full of fear any day,” Nelson said.