And now we’re truly on the road to Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. The last few days have been compact, combining practices and planning, packing and repacking, Heather has been working her indiegogo campaign and tying hundreds of ribbons (packaging her old CD with the teaser EP). We’ve played a couple of shows (Friday was our first-ever “real” show at the All-American General Store – sadly under-populated, though we frankly blame Kansas, Saturday was a ferocious show at the Stoughton House of Brews) and an open mic feature (Tuesday night at Joanne Lurgio’s open mic at Pub on Park in Cranston, RI was just an incredible showcase of talent and our performance was tight and powerful if I DO say so myself!) but most of our time has been spent in betwixt clerical tasks and it’s simply good to have naught but festival before us for a couple of days.
Well, four days – actually. Today we’re racing the weather and stress is a bit high as we drive steadily into the clouds that are gathering over Hillsdale, NY. As main stage artists we get a hotel, but Heather’s a die-hard and plans to camp (I’ll spare you the gory details, but my plumbing and camping plumbing aren’t very compatible) so we’re really trying to beat the incoming storms. We’ll see what happens. Looking at the glowering skies, I just have no idea – and of course I’ve grown to view weather reports as suggestions at best… wild speculation at worst. Setting up a tent in the rain sucks, for sure – but driving up the Falcon Ridge hill in the mud is a nightmare so there are a lot of considerations.
I’m mildly concerned about how everything gets home – it’d been long in the cards that we were picking up a reprint of Another Life / Another Live on the way up north. Dropping by Discmakers in Pennsauken, NJ has long been a tradition. But when we realized that the difference betwixt a reprint of 500 discs (what we’d been thinking) and a thousand discs (what we got) was minimal, the number of boxes we were picking up suddenly doubled. Heather decided she wanted to have an EP available to kick off her indiegogo campaign and the same math suddenly doubled THOSE discs as well. That PLUS our normal pack PLUS our normal gear PLUS camping gear – well, space is at a premium even before we PLUS in food and supplies for 4 days.
I’ve actually managed to maintain a good little nest in the Weaselmobile, but during the drive up it was a little more like a cave.
Thursday at Falcon Ridge – you show up expecting it to be huge, and you get there and it’s not as packed as you thought it was going to be (because in your head you’re visualizing Saturday but actually it’s only
Thursday and theoretically the festival hasn’t even legitimately “begun” yet) and then you start running across people and wandering the tents and realizing holy crap – it’s already big ENOUGH thank you very much – and none of the food vendors are quite up and running but even setting up smells amazing and someone offers you the new bourbon they just discovered and everyone’s friendly and everyone remembers my name and I’m TRYING trying but I’m closer to like… 50/50 at best….
Yup. It’s the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival MADNESS.
Thursday – Falcon Ridge Folk Festival hasn’t officially begun, but the rush and the chaos is already at full-speed. The weather should be as close to perfect as August in New York can be for the majority of the weekend, but for the moment we have cloudbursts rushing through the area, followed by periods of sunshine so extreme that the whole mountain STEAMS.
This morning we rolled out of bed and rolled out of Glastonbury, CT and headed west, first to our hotel and then to Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. I have no shame about sleeping in a hotel room as everyone else either fries or freezes moistly on the hill. There’s a certain amount of comfort that comes from being able to “go home”, not feel like THINGS are crawling on you, get showered – and for something as potentially IMPORTANT to our career as our appearances at Falcon Ridge, I think it’s important to make sure we’re as prepped as possible. Heather Loves camping, and I don’t begrudge her that at all, but I am glad things have worked out for all three of us to follow our re: sleeping arrangements.
The hotel’s rustic by chain standards, but more than comfortable – and certainly better than last year’s! The beds are comfortable, the fridge works, the AC powers up, the spiders are on the OUTSIDE and there’s hot and cold running water. Who could need anything else? No cell signal to speak of, no WiFi, but we probably won’t have time to make use of either so I’m not worried. Once we’re checked in and extraneous stuff is loaded into the room, it’s time to run on to the festival where our mission is to get Heather’s tent set up before the threatened rains come.
No problem. We roll in, grab Heather’s usual spot and have the tent set up in under 20 minutes. Once we were into the rhythm of it, I was surprised by how swiftly set up went. Tempers were a little frayed, but once it was clear we were beating the weather, things smoothed out.
Falcon Ridge is a lot of hurry-up-and-wait and a lot of walking. We walk up the hill, down the hill, across the hill and back. After we set up Camp Heather, we drive the car down the hill, park in performer parking, walk back up and over and then it’s on to the Lounge Stage. Six years ago, Ethan and Jake of Pesky J. Nixon started running Thursday night shows of their own to make up for the fact that Falcon Ridge had had to cut costs, becoming a Fri, Sat, Sun festival rather than a Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sun festival. The Lounge Stage, begun as a guerilla event up amongst the tents, has really grown to the point that the “unofficial” beginning of Falcon Ridge is possibly just as large as the “official” beginning of Falcon Ridge ever was. A couple of years ago Falcon Ridge, far from berating the Peskys for creating the event, gave them semblances of officialdom by allowing the ever-growing Lounge Stage to use one of the tents on the official grounds. This year, with last year’s Lounge Stage flowing out from underneath the Family Stage tent, they were upgraded to the largest tent on the grounds – and though the Lounge Stage didn’t get to actually use the physical Dance Stage per se, the Lounge Stage DID get to set up under the Dance Tent – and filled it to capacity with Pesky-sourced artists, sound, lights and audience.
It’s been amazing to see this thing GROW. The Lounge Stage is no small part of how ilyAIMY found our foothold at Falcon Ridge, and we probably have Pesky J Nixon (along with We’re About 9 and the Budgie Dome) to thank for our continued presence at the festival.
In any case – we get to the Lounge Stage, set-up still under weigh. We grab hugs from Jake and Ethan and then get the Hell out of the way as they and Scott and Tribal Mischief (their newly-minted production company) continue last-minute prep to run sound for over a dozen rounds of perhaps three times that many artists for an audience that at its height will perhaps be a thousand strong.
Yeah. Unofficially speaking of course.
We’ve been to Falcon Ridge frequently enough now that I wasn’t expecting to be too emotionally invested, but a real thrill went through to me as the first amplified notes of the festival (again, UNofficially) filtered into the afternoon air. The Barbara Cassidy
Band had the honour of kicking things off – and they did so MOST admirably.
Lots of old friends – both Greg Greenway and Pat Wictor of Brother Sun, Matt Nakoa, Katie Graybeal and Brian Gundersdorf of We’re About 9 (or is Katie a Gundersdorf too now? I don’t know if she took his name post-marriage…), the absolutely STUNNING new-to-me-artist Irish Mythen whose voice and presence filled the entire tent even without microphones, Jean Rowe, Reggie
Harris – I probably shouldn’t name ANY names because I’ll invariably miss some – and then over the course of this incredible night of music the almost-full moon slowly rises and whips through wisps of cloud, black-and-whiting the surrounding landscape. Brother Sun especially seemed coordinated with the moon over the course of the weekend and tonight was just the first night of many that combined the the click of the shutter and the sound of Pat Wictor as I struggled to capture the moment passing me by in the sky.
Just before we hit the stage we’re warned “keep the stories short!” because of course it’s a FOLK FESTIVAL and everyone’s intros are running very, very long. As an unofficial stage using an official tent there was the very-real possibility of getting shut down if they ran too far behind schedule, and so I fear we weren’t our most relaxed when we took the stage – but we quickly rallied and the four songs that ilyAIMY brought to the Lounge Stage definitely won us some new fans and reconfirmed old ones.
The end of the night was a group of more politically-minded artists singing songs of protest and solidarity. Jake and Ethan had wanted to cap the night off with something that really MEANT something, said something important – and I think they did a great job of putting that together. Harnessing our superpowers for good? Probably nothing more important to be doing.
After the Lounge Stage came to a halt the crowds melted off into the night and Kristen and I headed back down the road to our hotel for the night. Falcon Ridge had really come through in not only finding a more comfortable spot for their Main Stage artists this year, but also a CLOSER one – and that was really welcome. After so many miles and so much music, it was beautiful to only have a twenty-minute drive through the mists and hills of Hillsdale, NY to reach our beds for the night. Showers and sweet sweet horizontalness came with a swiftness. Almost time to OFFICIALLY go to Falcon Ridge!
Other thoughts include : a great way to phrase the Lounge Stage’s existence – of course coined by Brian Gundersdorf : “a grass roots festival within a grass roots festival”. Also centred around Brian : he had a heartrate monitor thingie on his smart watch and as an experiment I tried to raise his heartrate. I was successful to the tune of an additional 12bpm. Go me!
