hardly strictly

You may recall that last year, I canceled my Sunday plans after a Saturday at the Hardly Strictly Blue Grass Festival because it was so great. This year, I can't get out of my Sunday plans (birthdays rank higher even than music), but I did clear my Saturday schedule to enjoy the show.

Last year, Brian advised me on where to be when. This year, I had my coworker Andrew do it. (I realized that my main limitation for being knowledgeable about music is my poor memory of names. I can remember other things usually.) We got there around 1:30 in time for the Jayhawks which I found a bit shrill but maybe I wasn't warmed up yet. We moved from there to hear "Three girls and their buddy" which was secret code for Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller. You can't argue with that, but the show didn't blow my mind. They just sat around playing as if the 100,000s of people in the audience were a camp fire. I grew up on Emmylou. I just learned about Patty Griffin a couple years ago, but I love her.

We crossed back at this point to Nick Lowe who turned out to be both of our favorites of the day. He covered a range of lyrics-driven songs that made us think and feel happy inside: "all men are liars", "(what's so funny about) peace love and understanding" (a song I always thought written by Elvis Costello, but just learned is actually by Nick Lowe for Elvis), etc. (other names are alluding me).

From there, we trekked over to hear some actual bluegrass with the Del McCory Band, and that was great. We ended the day with Robert Earl Keen who had a sort of standard rock 'n' roll sound that didn't overwhelm me but I liked it when he covered "Touch of Grey".

We stumbled upon the end of the Lovefest at Civic Center on the way back... because there's never anything to do in San Francisco. I had wanted to hit Vertigo playing at Union Square but my campanion was concerned about having missed the beginning of my favorite movie which he'd never seen. So, after sipping wine all day long, the main activity of my Saturday night was sleeping.

I should also mention that Friday night, I saw the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss show, and it completely blew my mind. Danielle said Robert Plant probably never imagined he would play music like that, but, well, it not only worked, I think I can safely say it was lifechanging. He played the maracas and made his Led Zeppelin sounds along side, well, Alison Krauss (bluegrass country).