Rothbury 2008 (or These Rothburys Taste Like Rothburys): Thursday

We awoke Thursday morning to nearly-perfect festival weather. Although the gate wasn't supposed to open until 8:00 a.m., they started letting people in around 4:00 a.m. and so by the time I woke up there were already a couple thousand folks milling around and ordering smoothies. Overall business was pretty decent, and we were all ready for the festival to get going. We had the Michael Jackson blasting from the booth, and we were starting to look like a legitimate vending operation.


I was fortunate enough to spot the Cheesecake Lady a.k.a. the Twirling Hippy walking past us. If you've never met her, I highly suggest that you seek her out and taste her wonderful delicious cheesecakes. Between the 10 or so of us working the booth, we easily bought over $100 worth throughout the weekend. I wanted to eat them all, but they were so strong that any more than one and I would have probably started hallucinating. My favorite was definitely the chocolate raspberry.

Our booth was right in the middle of a row of 25 food vendors in the campground, next to the main entrance from the campground to the stages. Since the music didn't start until the evening we all just kind of hung out around the booth for most of the day. To our left was Hotbox concessions out of Madison, Wisconsin. We were able to trade smoothies with them all weekend for grilled cheese and quesadillas, which was awesome considering the fact that the fat person inside of me always comes out and eats 100 grilled cheeses and 50 gyros at every festival.

At about 4:00 p.m. when it was hot and sunny some kid who couldn't have been older than 17 passed out right in front of us while ordering a smoothie. We gave him a chair and some water, and after a few minutes he was good. He swore he passed out due to a lack of water and not an excess of drugs. Damn kids.

We also met this one guy who traded with us who somehow managed to combine elements of Hinduism, Islam, the Mayan Calendar, telepathy, rainbows, and the Helping Phriendly Book into one seemingly coherent philosophy. Then he claimed not to do hallucinogenic drugs and lost all credibility whatsoever.

We caught a little Zappa Plays Zappa and it was pretty good but not amazing. I only got to catch a couple of minutes of the show before running back to the booth to close it up before Lotus and the Disco Biscuits. Things took a little longer than I had hoped and as a result we were only able to catch a little bit of Lotus. From what I saw it was a great show: Bellweather > Flower Sermon > Greet the Mind and the place was packed. They definitely should have had Lotus on a bigger stage with the size of the crowd they attracted. Lotus has definitely been one of my new favorite bands for a few months now and it pretty much sucked that they were scheduled to be playing at the same time as the Disco Biscuits. Here's some of what we caught:



...and we were off to catch the Biscuits! The Disco Biscuits' Thursday night set will likely require an entire post of its own but I'll give the short version now: one of the greatest shows I've ever seen.

Stay tuned!