I know that at Mayan Holidaze you’re supposed to be all peace and love about everything, with no real enemies, but I had an aggressive assailant alright and his name was “time.” It rode with the wind and chased me all weekend. I could never get it to stand still and hash things out with me like any other reasonable adversary. And it knocked me down a few times, even when I tried to dodge its path — especially when I tried to dodge its path. I knew all along that before I knew it I’d be on a flight back to San Francisco and headed back to daily routine, so I made a pact that I would abide by the rules of time but I would in no way follow its schedule. Thus, we would agree to be at odds and it (“time,” I mean) would rule in the end — as, true enough, in the blink of an eye, the whole weekend would slide right by — but in the meantime, I squeezed more out of each minute than most hours would ever allow. This, of course, meant surrendering sleep… but I knew this going in. It was in the contract that I signed without really reading, I’m sure.

Of course, you could ask yourself, why travel all the way to the Yucatan Peninsula just to see a few bands that you can see often enough back at home. It’s a good question. Or, at least, it’s a fair question. But the answer is not as simple as you might think. The answer isn’t just about seeing these bands at a resort in Mexico, or at a tropical locale in the dead of winter. The answer has more to do with Cloud 9 Adventures itself. Yes, Cloud 9 is the company that produces Holidaze and they also produce Jam Cruise, Holy Ship! and, most recently, Panic en la Playa. In other words, they’re responsible for throwing the greatest musical parties in history, as far as I’m concerned. Right up there with the Grateful Dead playing the pyramids or Phish bringing in the millennium with an all-night marathon on swamplands in Florida. Cloud 9 events are not festivals and they’re not vacations — they’re music journeys. Experiences of a higher order for people who like action and adventure at large, as much as they like dance-floor action and adventurous music.

So the Disco Biscuits rose to the occasion for the second night in a row, as they opened with the rare “Sister Judy’s Soul Shack,” inverted a classic (“Confrontation”), and wove in and out of their improvisational showcase “Basis for a Day.” They also finished the “Spaga” that they began the night before with the help of Big Gigantic’s Dominic Lalli on sax.

Any professional Mayan Holidaze review would include coverage of DrFameus or Michetti and their consecutive Saturday late-night sets — or else the review would conveniently sidestep them altogether — but I plan to do neither. After all, this is not a professional review; it’s a professional account. I’m relaying my first-person experience, not talking about everyone else’s. Subjectively, I can say that I missed out just as much as you did by missing these sets. That is true. But the hardest lesson to learn at Mayan Holidaze is that as hard as you can go, you simply can’t do it all. So I had to be put to bed early Saturday — yes, after all this talk of sacrificing sleep — because I had a big day on Sunday which was scheduled to begin in the morning, hours before my usual bedtime on any other Holidaze night. But missing both these back-to-back sets is my one big regret this year and the reason I mention them here anyway is because they were both worthy of being weekend highlights and all reports said they dutifully raged. I’m sure they did. Both artists — Allen Aucoin and Chris Michetti, respectively — are champions. Heroes, really.

But Sunday morning I was ready for a whole different kind of adventure. I was heading into the jungle as part of the optional Jungle Maya Excursion and it was the smartest decision I made all weekend. I chronicled the day for Rolling Stone and you can read all about it here, complete with a photo gallery by Dave Vann.

But there’s one thing I don’t really touch upon too much in that photo essay and that’s this: Music itself is supposed to heal. I mean, it’s supposed to entertain and make you dance or make you clap your hands or stomp your feet or annoy your neighbors late at night or wake up your whole household on some morning when you accidentally get caught up singing pop hits just a little too loudly in the shower. But beyond all of that, music is also meant to make you heal. It’s a cure-all. Just as it can make you smile on a cloudy day — both figuratively and literally — and ease your worried mind about finals or finances or whatever, it can take your mind off the girl at the store that never notices you or even the girl who wounded you so much deeper when, without warning, she just abandoned you altogether one day. Music gives you hope even after others have given up on you.

Yes, and music can make chemotherapy more tolerable, a root canal more bearable, a broken heart more endurable…until it has time to mend. And music will hold your hand as you go through the inevitable “much bigger losses” that life throws at all of us. It can take a damaged person and make them feel whole again. I have seen this happen just as I have experienced all of it myself, first hand. I can testify.

Music has saved me — more than once — and after all these times of reaching out to it for help, I think I’ve caught on to some of the secret of its magical powers. It’s about transcendence. First, you see, you dance yourself clean. You let the purity of the music, the literal vibrations as they push through the air, enter through your ears and affect both your body and mind. It gets you all sweaty and you let your sweat purge out all the poison accumulated by the rigors of daily life. Then you get to a space where you’re able to connect with something outside of yourself, through notes and melodies and beats — and by connecting with it through movement, you join in on its march towards the divine. When we get out of ourselves, we see things as they truly are: all is one. I and I. One love. Or, in Mayan speak, “in lak ech,” — “you are my other or my brother.”

That day in the jungle, I took the Mayan purification ceremony seriously. I breathed in only pure thoughts with nothing but pure intent and I took all of my current hang ups, my disappointments, things that have been holding me back lately, and I pushed them all out with each exhale. I let the Mayan priest sanctify me while knowing all the while that we each are responsible for our own sanctity. And, as I emerged from the cave by walking along a candlelit path back to the light, I felt kinda like I do immediately after dancing to a great set from the bands that play Mayan Holidaze. I felt purified. Like I had danced myself clean. But also… I felt connected to everyone around me. In lak ech.

I thought about this and how it related on the microcosmic level to Mayan Holidaze and how, with any other crowd or any other group of people, this experience just wouldn’t have been the same. And I mean even the people there that I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting or talking to… or hanging out with nearly as long as I wanted to.

And although it had only been four days, Sunday night felt like the final night of a four-week summer camp. Each band played one final set as a kind of victory lap. A grand finale. Umphrey’s answered the Disco Biscuits’ call for horns from the previous night by also inviting Big Gigantic’s Dominic Lalli out with them — this time, accompanied by Jennifer Hartswick on trumpet — for a cover of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” It was kind of perfect.

The Disco Biscuits also performed a “kind of perfect” set which began with “Therapy” and stitched in and out of “Little Betty Boop” by the serendipitous request of a fan who had been chasing the song for some time and just happened to relay it to bassist Marc Brownstein as he was in the middle of composing the setlist from my friend’s balcony. She called on up from the beach below and he answered the call. We all threw in our two cents and, by set time, threw our bodies into it as well.

After that, it was a long goodbye that led us into another sunrise and, eventually, onto shuttles back to the airport. The shuttle ride out had a decidedly different feel than the one on the way in. My eyes were closed for all of it.

As we reenter reality and come back to our daily lives, so begins the long slow crawl back to Mexico, back to Mayan Holidaze, back to the place where we all belong — a sacred space on a beach in Quintana Roo where music heals and all are one. Of course, that could technically happen anywhere where there’s a stage and an audience. But, for four days this past January, it happened at a resort in Puerto Morelos. It happened at Mayan Holidaze.

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