It was sometime around 7:30 on Sunday morning when I approached the headless dancing bear. I was dressed in a marching band jacket, a Guns n’ Roses t-shirt, and a cowboy hat. That was from the waist up. Below the line, I had on green short-shorts with animal-print spandex for leggings. Perfectly normal attire for the occasion, but still… I felt underdressed.
The headless dancing bear wasn’t actually headless. And he wasn’t actually dancing. The slack-jawed, long-haired hippie inside the costume was holding the furry, blue bear head in his hands, as he surveyed the scene on the lawn. He had been looking for that head, hours earlier, after a late-night set by Lettuce. He seemed to apparate out of thin air, five inches in front of me, to tell me about his predicament. “Someone made off with it,” he explained. Still…he didn’t seem that concerned and neither was I.
“I’ll get head later,” he said, smiling.
“Debatable,” I shot back. He was joking; I was not. And I thought nothing more of the unexpected encounter.
But, sure enough, sometime in the shadowy pre-dawn, during the downtime between late-night shows and sunrise kickball, someone must’ve returned the bear head to our guy in the dancing bear costume; a missing piece that he was now holding at waist-level while he took in the screwball proceedings all around him.
“You found your head,” I said. Almost on cue, a man sporting an orange squirrel costume — head to toe, as if he was the mascot for a minor league baseball team — came up, ripped the bear’s head from his hands, and ran until he was out of sight. I grinned and said, “I stand corrected.”
As I watched the squirrel mascot disappear behind a building, I imagined that he ran straight onto a Warner Brothers backlot, reporting to Saturday Morning Cartoons for work. I looked at my iPhone. Almost 5:45AM, Sunday morning. “He’s six days early,” I said aloud. Without context, nobody could’ve possibly understood what I meant. That didn’t keep some strangers from chiming in: “Or six days late?” “Is that Eastern Standard Time?” “I could tell by looking at that squirrel that he was premature…”
A kickball flew above us and landed in a tree. A couple hoots and hollers from the other side of the field meant that two guys wrapped together in a sequined cape — or was it the girl in a zoot suit? — just scored a home run. That’s assuming, of course, that they made the required pit stop at second base to down a shot of Jameson. Meanwhile, a couple hundred fans of both music and altered states, from all walks of life, danced in the outfield to rhythms that only they could hear…on headphones. Three different channels were broadcasting live sets from three different DJs to each individual set of headphones. Which meant, even amongst themselves, everyone seemed to be dancing to a different drummer. And it was getting lighter and lighter out every moment. The sun was coming up in Quincy, California.
“Sunrise kickball” at High Sierra is one of those extra-curricular activities that — while not officially endorsed or even recognized by the festival itself — just could not be the same anywhere else in the galaxy. It’s the graceful absurdity of sunrise kickball, along with about 99 other weird, goldmine scenes over the event’s four days, that help make High Sierra Music Festival it’s own planet in the vast solar system of festivals orbiting the summer sun.
To switch metaphors, the festival circuit has erupted over America like the grand finale at a baseball fireworks show. There’s half a dozen bangs per second but it’s hard to differentiate one burst from the next — they all overlap. And it paints the sky alright, but you didn’t “ooh” and “ahh” over it like you did for that one bright starburst that rained glitter across the wide-open horizon. And it’s that lone explosion of sound and light — both the firework and the moment — that you remember most as you drive home from the ballpark. That’s the one you take with you. That’s the one that matters. That’s High Sierra.
Somehow, High Sierra has managed to be impervious to the Big Mac’ing of the American music festival. It has cleverly avoided the unimaginative programming and same-old attractions that have taken siege of almost every other music festival on the continent. At this point, most of the big name, major rock festivals have become carbon copies of each other, chasing their own tails, trying to compete by adopting whatever works at the festival next door. Some of them are even the EXACT same — there are two Coachella’s and two Austin City Limits. Exact duplications of themselves on consecutive weekends. Bah humbug. Every other festival tries to be like every other festival.
This is a gross generalization, of course. There are still some destination festivals — be they EDM, jamband, rock, or funk oriented — between our two coasts where the organizers have built choose-your-own adventure-lands, with atmospheres that encourage individual experience and with infrastructure that supports it. It is at these kinds of festivals where attendees get to participate in scenes that could never be duplicated, and where the narrative is vastly different for each attendee.
But that’s not how it goes for most festivals, anymore. Sure, half the crowd caught one band while the other saw another. But even those who saw opposing anchor bands experienced pretty much the same basic trip. After all, it was handed to them. All they had to do was show up. Preferably with some cash in their pockets.
Festivals these days share similar lineups, follow the same formats, and have the same ferris-wheel by the entrance. Last year, if you missed the Red Hot Chili Peppers set at any given festival on any given weekend, you could’ve jumped a couple states over and a few weekends down and you would’ve seen virtually the same set. Pound for pound and, nearly, song for song. And your experience would’ve been mostly the same. You may have even enjoyed a slice of Spicy Pie on your way home.
But High Sierra is not your older brother’s festival. Well, okay, so Ms. Lauryn Hill’s headlining set on Friday night came straight out of a paint-by-numbers book. The performance was a cut-and-paste job. And, sure, it elicited the same varied commentary from the crowd as her sets at other festival stops, earlier this summer. With big headliners come big productions. We all get that. But most of the music of High Sierra tends to be made in the moment. Collaborations and good, ole’ fashioned jamming happen around every corner. Often spontaneous. Usually, unpracticed.
This year, for instance, Stanley Jordan jammed with Jennifer Hartswick, while being backed by members of ALO and String Cheese Incident. If you missed it, perhaps you were too busy watching Les Claypool get out there in the jam-o-sphere with Beats Antique. (Claypool was a surprise guest; he wasn’t even listed on the lineup).
Look, High Sierra didn’t invent the idea of the all-star jam. Bonnaroo has the Superjams and they tend to be on a scale twice as grand (and twice as rehearsed). Super-sized with super results. But at High Sierra, everything is liable to turn into a “super jam.” Ad hoc. On a moment’s notice…or less. They’re just not billed as such. Just like High Sierra’s kindred spirit, Jam Cruise, the amount of genuine jamming and spontaneous artist cross-pollination is an undeniable part of the event’s charm and an integral part of its identity. It’s a huge part of it. But it’s not the whole story.
High Sierra is not a spectator festival; it’s a spectacle festival. Every person on the property becomes an active, integral part of a single organism and it is the organism, on the whole, that drives people to drive all the way to this small town in the middle of Plumas National Forest — part of Northern California’s Sierra Nevada region — four hours from San Francisco and 90 minutes from Reno, year after year. They’re just trying to unplug from The Machine and charge themselves through the electric veins of The Organism for four days. Detach themselves from their insular lives of endless work and play cycles and attach themselves, instead, to a freewheeling multi-beast as it stomps through rodeo grounds in the wild west. It’s a vacation, sure. But it sure as fuck isn’t relaxation.
There aren’t many nearby hotels, per-se, but, at High Sierra, it’s too much of a risk to stay offsite. You end up missing out on some of the best moments. Sleep also necessitates missing many of these moments, so people do their best to minimize it. Some, in fact, barely do it at all. Those are Kerouac’s mad ones, the ones who are “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” And I try to be like them by being nobody other than myself.
When I was younger, I went to festivals to find myself. Now, I go to festivals to lose myself. To get lost in a string of moments until, soon enough, I realize I’m talking to a headless dancing bear at 5:45 in the morning, watching a human squirrel run off with his head.
After an early arrival on Wednesday night, I didn’t even have enough time to unpack my car or claim my spot on the RV when our neighbors made themselves known — they wanted to feed us dinner. We had the good fortune of camping next to Chef Larry’s encampment, where he designed a special menu (nothing too fancy, just your ordinary campground food. You know —- scallops, fried chicken, duck confit and, oh yeah, crawfish) to feed the community. There is a donation bucket that gets generously filled, but nobody is turned away. Bands not only show up to eat, they also show up to play unannounced sets, right in the thick of it, with tents and RVs scattered in every direction. During different pit stops at my RV throughout the weekend, I spied both the Budos Band and Greensky Bluegrass chomping down. Others, too.
Chef Larry’s culinary celebration climaxed on Sunday night with 100 pounds of crawfish (FedEx’ed straight from New Orleans — arriving fresher than the funk) while the California Honey Drops — still dripping from their official sets at the festival proper — unwound by playing a bonus round at Chef Larry’s. I had to step around people eating and dodge a dozen dancers just to get into my RV, five feet from the makeshift stage. It was the closest I came to thinking I was roughing it. You know, with all the musicians and crawfish and dancing, oh my.
Since High Sierra fans tend to be lifers, they establish names for their independent “camps” and expand upon them year after year, claiming the same space in the campgrounds. In addition to all the bands that played at Chef Larry’s spot, groups from the New Mastersounds to the Slip have performed other such campground sets for other such recurring “camps” over the years. Still other bands, including Toubab Krewe, have played impromptu sets on the tops of busses, or in the food court, or wherever they could find space and a power supply. These sets usually weren’t planned more than a day in advance and, sometimes, weren’t even planned at all. They just happen. These musicians weren’t getting paid for their extra-curricular performances. They were playing music just to play music. And they were playing music for music fans who love music. There wasn’t a neighbor in any direction who would dare yell, “Turn it down.” But that doesn’t mean they didn’t shush people… for talking too loudly during a jam.
Concerts are supposed to be all about the music and, for the most part, they are. But festivals are not just about the music; they’re about the experience. They’re about forgetting who you are for awhile so that, on the ride home, you can remember exactly who you are. And who you are is a slightly better version of who you were before you got to the festival. Before you got to High Sierra (or Jam Cruise, or Oregon County Fair, or just a child’s handful of other ones). High Sierra is Burning Man for hippies. It’s catharsis and release. And it supports a whole different kind of “burner.”
High Sierra lifers will be the first to admit that it’s not just about the music, sure, but make no mistake: You don’t find your way to High Sierra in the first place unless you’re a serious fan — even if you’re not so serious, yourself. Like the revelers who danced until 3:45 AM in the Funk ‘n’ Jam House to the rock ‘n’ roll sounds of the Mother Hips. Local to the area (they formed in nearby Chico), the Mother Hips played music that was well-suited for performance in the fairgrounds of this authentic California gold rush town, because the very spirit of the Mother Hips’ music was born and raised here. Its heart is in this dirt, in these mountains, in this area code. It’s locally grown rock ‘n’ roll. And it rocked and it rolled with the best of them.
About 14 hours later, the Mother Hips returned to the stage, this time to rock an afternoon set in the Vaudeville tent. “We received such a wonderful response from the crowd,” Hips’ guitarist Greg Loiacono told me afterwards. “They were with us and for us the whole time. We all walked offstage exhausted but with huge smiles on our faces. There were a group of [costumed] ‘athletes’ in the crowd, who had arranged some very clever Hips cheers. They chanted them in-between songs. ‘H-I-P-S’ and what-not. They taught the cheers to other crowd members. It was extremely fun.”
Loiacono hit the stage again on Sunday, this time with his power-trio project, Sensations (featuring Tea Leaf Green’s Reed Mathis on bass and ALO’s Dave Brogan on drums). Up against Widespread Panic on the grandstand stage, Sensations played dirty rock ‘n’ roll with all the grit and all the glory of rock music’s nearly forgotten past, present in each groove. Mathis, in particular, gave a Sunday evening effort that was worthy of a Friday night. It was fresh, hungry and full of fury as Mathis proved (as he has, time and again) that he is one of the most badass bass players in America. A legend in jeans and a work shirt.
Mathis is a hard working musician with a short leash that ties him to his instrument and which, more nights than not, pulls him onto the stage. He used his time at High Sierra to do what he does best — make music with his friends. On Saturday night, he sat-in with the Incidental Animals during their Big Meadow set, for a spirited version of ALO’s “Falling Dominoes”
The Incidental Animals are an all-star side-project that was formed from opportunity last fall. The core lineup features Kyle Hollingsworth (String Cheese Incident), Jennifer Hartswick (Trey Anastasio Band), Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz (ALO), Steve Adams (ALO/Nicki Bluhm) and Dave Brogan (ALO). They anchored the Big Meadow stage on Saturday and then returned for a late-night show at the Funk ‘n’ Jam House on Sunday, playing two entirely different shows, despite the fact that they had less than half a dozen shows, total, under their belt. They’re not even a “real band,” per-se. That just made it all the more special, for both the musicians and the fans alike.
Building on the spirit of High Sierra, the Incidental Animals welcomed a rotating cast of special guests, which, in addition to Mathis, also featured: Stanley Jordan, Scott Law, Ross James (Terrapin Family Band), Fred Torphy (Big Light), and the T Sisters. Naturally, both sets were cover-heavy and included classic anthems such as “Piece of My Heart,” “Tax Man,” and “Higher Ground,” alongside surprise choices like “Always in Love” by Wilco and New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.”
“I’m leaving High Sierra with a full cup and I feel honored to have had the opportunity to collaborate with so many fantastic musicians,” Lebo told me in the aftermath. “What a festival!” Indeed, at High Sierra, the musicians feel proud to be there, proud to perform, proud of their music and proud of the people they get to perform it for. No musician told me this, but they didn’t have to — it’s in the way that they walk and the things they say between songs. And the way they play their instruments.
Thursday night’s grand opening on the grandstand stage featured a sunset set by Lord Huron followed by STS9’s first NorCal show with their new bassist, Alana Rocklin. And, true to her last name…well, you get what I’m saying. New blood equals new life and, as a result, STS9 sounded more inspired than they have in, perhaps, years. Rocklin hasn’t changed STS9’s overall sound so much as given it a swift kick in the pants.
On Friday night, Ms. Lauryn Hill made the audience wait for her arrival, sauntering onstage about 15 minutes beyond fashionably late (following a lukewarm “introduction set” by her DJ). Meanwhile, across the fairgrounds, the boys in Greensky Bluegrass were going full steam ahead in their jam-heavy Americana-laden throw-down on the Big Meadow stage. They delivered something that Hill simply could not this round: jammed-out, improvisational takes on the Fugees’ “Ooh La La” and “Ready or Not.” (Hill, a founding member of the Fugees, sings on the originals and performed “Ready or Not” during her High Sierra set as well).
After the fact, I asked Greensky’s Paul Hoffman about the clever, if ballsy, move. I had been wondering just how premeditated that moment was. “I was inspired to sing those songs while we were laying a solid groove down,” he said. “Spur of the moment. That happens sometimes… I like the Fugees and knew it was likely that Lauryn Hill was playing it at the same time. Maybe someone was caught in the middle of the stages wondering which was up and which was down.” (If so, they wouldn’t be the first person ever at High Sierra to wonder that.)
When I asked Greensky’s dobro master, Anders Beck, about the Fugees teases, during sunrise kickball on the morning after, he smiled and said, “We like to do things like that.” The spontaneousness of those moments are as much fun as dancing to Greensky’s well-oiled Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen covers, which they played during their late-night set the night before, in the High Sierra Music Hall.
Other musical highlights of this year’s High Sierra included psychedelic cowboy Sturgill Simpson singing country songs about blazing up and blasting off, an infectious dance set by Brooklyn funk collective Turkuaz, East Coast jamtronica in the form of Dopapod, future indie-rock breakouts Typhoon, and the viciously demanding and challenging creeper music of Darkwave — another all-star group, this one featuring John Medeski, Skerik and Lettuce’s Adam Deitch.
Meanwhile, back in the campground scene — on Friday afternoon, I briefly sported a tutu and fishnets, to compliment my cowboy get-up, for Camp Sporque’s annual “fashion show,” somewhere deep in Shady Grove. The theme this year was “Like…woah,” and there were no rules for the runway. My interpretation of the theme manifested itself as a confused Texan cowboy cheerleader, who galloped and steered a small stuffed antelope across a painted starscape. Like…woah nelly! (If you want something done right, do it yourself.) Before long, the “fashion show” turned into a dance party and when the camp DJ put on Madonna, I was already ready and properly, um, “dressed” to get into the groove.
Saturday night, I had to take an RV break in order to put on a milkman costume. Despite everything I just said, I don’t particularly like wearing costumes. I much prefer my everyday outfits…ties, black jeans, definitely not fishnets. But sure enough, there I was, putting my legs into white denim and trading in my trucker hat for a milkman cap for reasons that I could probably explain but that will never really be clear. And they don’t need to be. It’s High Sierra. Things just get…weird. And, as Hunter S. Thompson once instructed us, that’s when it’s most important to go pro.
Dressed for a specific occasion, I did indeed have a destination. But I swung by the Vaudeville tent on my way there and a rather enthusiastic lady came running up to me, arms flailing like she was trying to catch the last taxi on Earth, obviously excited about something. She looked me up and down and grunted, approvingly. In keeping with the established uniform of milkmen everywhere, I was dressed head to toe in white, except for a 2” black bow-tie. “We’re having an all-white party in an hour at my camp!!” she said. “You have to come!!”
“An all white party? Lady, that sounds racist!” I joked. I had to pass. “I’m already on my way to another camp party.”
She probably wasn’t a big Phish fan and, either way, it didn’t register with her that I was actually dressed as the Harry Hood mascot — a direct reference to Phish’s song of the same name. Except, of course, that I was also packing a water pistol. It was meant to represent a particular side of Clint Eastwood — Dirty Harry. Yes, friends, it was a mash-up costume: Dirty Harry Hood. The lady trying to get me to attend her all-white party didn’t get that. But she didn’t need to. There was no right or wrong.
Costumes mean nothing more, in the end, than fun and mischief. And, tonight, my mischief was meant for Camp Harry. Of all the independent “camps” at High Sierra, Camp Harry might just be the one that most embodies the spirit of High Sierra. It’s the dynamic encampment — 14-years strong — of an ever-expanding group of friends from the Bay Area. Throughout the years it has hosted unannounced sets by Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers, Surprise Me Mr. Davis, Nathan Moore (solo), the Loyal Scam, Perpetual Groove’s Brock Butler, Rotary Downs, Eddie Roberts, and others.
And while, according to their rules, you have to be cooler than Milhouse to enter, seven years ago it was the camp’s inclusive nature, commitment to weirdness, fun and frolic that influenced my decision to move clear across the country, from Pennsylvania to California. It was one of the best decisions I ever made and I made it on a Sunday night at High Sierra. I wanted High Sierra to be my local festival, for its soul has grabbed a much bigger piece of my heart than a festival like Captain Morgan’s Jam on the River, or Budweiser’s Made In America ever could.
Seven years after first stumbling upon Camp Harry, I showed up to their (“our”) “Hooray for Harrywood” party well-prepared, with the faces of friends I love so much scattered in chairs all around. I missed the ice luge at some other camp, and probably a dozen other theme camp parties. They all would’ve been cool, I’m sure. But Harry’s was the best.
The concept behind “Hooray for Harrywood” had something to do with a mashup of Hollywood and festival culture. Apart from Dirty Harry Hood, other arrivals on the red carpet (and, yes, there really was a red carpet), included RJD2Pac, Charlie Chan and the Chocolate Factory and a modern-day Hans Solo and Princess Leia chaperoning a very spun Yoda. (The OG wookie, Chewbacca, was off being a passed-out wook somewhere.) The stars came out at night, alright. All together, they formed some kind of new constellation. I found myself surrounded by magnificent music, colorful commentary, cosmic comics, and enough brilliance to light my path for another year. Guidance for my journey.
All told, it was another memorable night at High Sierra.
Of course, if you’re reading this and you went to High Sierra, you’re probably scratching your head right about now, because I likely didn’t so much as mention a single thing you experienced or did during your entire time there. And your time was just as incredible as mine. And that, my friends, is the best part of it all.
In a world of dime-a-dozen music festivals, High Sierra rocks its own quarter.
