Off to All Points West!

We're currently en route to All Points West. Make sure to stop by the smoothie booth and say hello, maybe even have a smoothie!

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

Sunday was by far our busiest day at the smoothie booth. We were slammed for most of the morning which was great because we were not only making money, but I knew that once the afternoon rolled around I might be watching the three members of Phish who were at the festival play together. Our resident-artist Jumbie decided to give away all of his posters for free which meant that we had tons of people milling around, which in turn attracted even more people to the booth. One thing that I've noticed about lines at festivals is that the longer the line at the booth, the more people that will flock to the line. Anyways, the only thing of interest Sunday morning was when we got a hold of some ice cream and added the Goo-ball milkshake to our unofficial menu.

We caught most of Rodrigo y Gabriela and it was really, really good. I just don't know how so much music can come from two acoustic guitars. Somehow the duo was able to infuse all sorts of riffs from Metallica, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix into one 30 minute version of "Stairway to Heaven". The cameras mounted on the guitar necks was a cool little effect as well:



Seriously though, these two know how to play for an audience. I really think they could have started playing Madonna and I would have liked it. Those aren't drums in the background, by the way, that's the sound of their hands slapping the guitars.



Trey Anastasio was scheduled to play right after Rodrigo y Gabriela, so we rushed to get seats right in front of the soundboard when the first show ended. For some reason I felt kind of nervous before this show. It's not like I was playing my first show in 15 months or anything, but I felt kind of nervous nonetheless. Not to over-analyze the set or anything, but it seemed like a lot of the songs were not only carefully chosen but many seemed to take on a new meaning coming from this older, sober, kind of humbled, and seemingly wiser Trey Anastasio that took the stage. There weren't any distractions, no extravagant lights, not even the Languedoc was present for this one. It was just one man trying to connect with his fans, his band, and his music.

Get Back on the Train



Driver



Brian & Robert



Farmhouse



Sample in a Jar



For those of you who don't already know how this story ends, Mike Gordon sat-in at the end of the set for two new songs, "Backwards Down the Number Line" and "Alaska", as well as "Chalkdust Torture".



I thought Backwards Down the Number Line was fan-fucking-tastic. It had really emotional, direct, powerful lyrics and I bet this will probably be the first song Phish plays when they eventually reunite (instead of Shine). Not only were the lyrics themselves touching, but the song made me excited to think about the prospect of more new Phish songs, new albums, New Year's Eves, Summer tours, Halloweens, and everything and anything in between.



Alaska was fun, a little funky, and definitely has a few of those Phishy lyrics that inevitably get stuck in your head for days and days.





Chalkdust was a great way to close the set, and the whole crowd ran over to catch Mike's set, which began 15 later at another stage. Cactus started off hot with "Another Door" from his new album, the Green Sparrow. You could tell that Mike was really in great spirits. He professed his love for the audience, his new band, and of course, his old band. I professed my love for Mike, but I don't think he heard me.



The best way way to describe the second half of Mike's set: nearly perfect. Trey came in, did a little shredding, they played "Meat," and then Fishman joined for a kick-ass rendition of the Beatles' "She Said, She Said." It was definitely 30 of the best minutes of the weekend, and it gave me an overwhelming sense of relief, not just about the music, but about everything.

Meat





She Said, She Said



The trade off to seeing nearly 6 hours of music in a row on Sunday was that I had to work during Phil Lesh & Friends. Although I was slightly disappointed, I didn't have much time to reflect on my disappointment considering that the booth was really busy because it was warm out on Sunday night unlike the previous two nights. I was just in too good of a mood after the day's events to even care that we were missing Phil.

I really have to hand it Madison House, Charm City Hospitality, and the folks at JJ Ranch for putting on one hell of a weekend. Rothbury not only did the big things right, but they did all of the little things right as well, which is even more impressive considering that this was the festival's inaugural year.

And while I'm still a long way from being rich, we did well enough to hop on the Umphrey's McGee & STS9 Summer tour for a couple of stops.

Currently, the little smoothie booth that could has no plans until All Points West.

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

I awoke rested and opened the smoothie booth bright and early on Saturday morning. Our first customer of the day put a dose in the tip jar. Our second customer of the day looked a little messed up, so I jokingly asked him if he wanted some molly in his smoothie. He replied that he just took his medicine and then stuck out his tongue, which had no less than 10 doses on it! I also met my first reader, Chris, who stopped by and got a smoothie (extra molly on the house of course).

For some reason I swear I kept seeing the Disco Biscuits walking around the festival all weekend. Pretty much every generic looking Jewish person could pass as Brownstein.


Add a jew-fro and you’ve got the Barber.


And Magner, well he just looks like any white person that would fit in a Dockers commercial.


We got out of the booth in time to catch the Emmit-Nershi Band, which was really great. Drew Emmit (of Leftover Salmon) and Billy Nershi (of String Cheese) basically went back and forth the whole show trading licks. The show also read like a highlights list from any Cheese show: "Good Times Around the Bend" "Restless Wind" and of course, "Texas". This was just a really fun and upbeat set, even when it sounded a little sloppy. The band also announced that they would be playing a secret show in the woods later that night, but unfortunately they didn't say when, so we were never able to find them.


Texas:





We served some smoothies to one of the artists and the manager of a group called "Gandalf & the Hobbits" who simply described their sound as "Hobbit Rock." I eventually traded them a smoothie for a CD, but the CD seems to have misplaced itself at the moment. We caught a little Derek Trucks, which was alright, but I just couldn't seem to get that into it for some reason. I guess my expectations were just too high for someone who has been touring with the Allmans since he was 12 or something like that. Considering that I hadn't seen any real shredding since the Disco Biscuits, I was definitely in the mood for some, and the whole soul stew thing just seemed to me like a lot of horns and not a lot of shredding...

We worked the booth during Dave Matthews and waited for Sound Tribe, which ended up being more than worth the wait. I've only seen STS9 a few times so I don't have much for comparison, but this was a great show. One of the great things about this band is that they take all sorts of other styles of music and fuse it into electronic dance music. In the 4 or so hours they occupied the stage, we heard elements of rock, funk, jazz, classical, and pretty much everything else (except for Bluegrass). Take "Breathe In." This was the song I enjoyed the most not because it had the best beat or the best guitar solo or the coolest effects, but simply because it evolves into such a melodious, pretty piano song for the last couple of minutes.



Unfortunately, I forgot to charge my camera before this show and so I don't have any pics or videos. My final thought on this show that this was such a good show that I went out and paid for the download rather than waiting for it to rear its ugly head on the net.

As I finally went to bed after STS9 I was excited. Excited that we had made some money slinging smoothies. Excited that I would be seeing at least 1/2 of Phish the next day. And of course, excited that there was only one day left...

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

I woke up Friday morning around 9:00 a.m. to find out that one of my business partners, let's call him Einstein, had not yet sold a single smoothie despite having been open for two hours. Apparently, the ice truck that he went to in the morning didn't have any ice and so rather than going to one of the other 10 ice trucks or the general store or getting in the car and driving .2 miles to the Rothbury Gas Station, Einstein thought that it would be better if he just turned away all of the customers until the magic ice ferry suddenly appeared.

We let our old friend Jumbie, who makes all sorts of trippy show posters, sell some of his art under the table at the booth. Not only did we make a couple of extra bucks on the posters, but we got a ton of people to stop by, look at our menu, and order stuff just because the art caught their eye. It also helped that whatever combination of drugs the guy was on made him a great salesman. Unfortunately, that same combination later inspired him to give away the vast majority of his posters for free at one of the late night shows. Hopefully he gets his shit together and puts up a website one of these days, because these posters of his really are spectacular.


The booth was pretty busy all morning and I basically worked until Tea Leaf Green. I was excited to see this band after enjoying the hell out of them at Summer Camp, and was even more psyched when I saw that Reed Mathis was on the bass, because he definitely brings this group to a whole other level. Unfortunately for some reason it was a pretty weak set overall. There were some moments, but it just seemed like a really slow, uninspired performance. In general it seemed that there was too much soft piano and not enough guitar. Maybe my expectations were so high that they were bound to disappoint, maybe they were just tired. Either way, one lackluster performance has not reduced my opinion of this band, especially if Reed Mathis sticks around. His bass playing was definitely the highlight of the set for me.

We caught Yonder Mountain with Fishman next and this was an absolutely perfect daytime show. Everyone was dancing, the hippies were twirling, and the hula-hoopers were hooping. Although I wanted Fishman to be center-stage whaling out some sort of Moby Dick action, I realized that this was Yonder with Fishman and not Fishman with Yonder. Although YMSB's music doesn't exactly highlight Fishman's strengths as a drummer (it seems like most of their music has very simple, basic rhythms), that's not to say that he didn't add anything to the mix. You could tell how excited these guys were to have Jon Fucking Fishman playing with them, and it definitely translated to a great, high-energy set, if only to impress the drummer. I'm not familiar enough with YMSB's catalog to really give a song-by-song breakdown, but "Two Hits and the Joint Turned Brown" was definitely the highlight of the set for me.


Two Hits and the Joint Turned Brown:





Unfortunately, between all of the work, walking back and forth, and lack of sleep, I was too exhausted to make much music on Friday night. We sat around listened to Widespread Panic from the booth and watched the fireworks before packing it in early. I'd have to say that one of the biggest disappointments for me this weekend, surprisingly enough, was missing Widespread Panic. Not because I'm a huge WSP fan or anything, but because Ann Marie Calhoun (of fiddle "Stash" and "Ripple" fame) sat in for a decent chunk of the show. Although I was disappointed, I knew that sleep Friday night would mean energy for Sound Tribe on Saturday night, which was more important to me anyway. Besides, I was scheduled to open the booth at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, so the sleep was totally necessary.

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!

Rothbury 2008 (or These Rothburys Taste Like Rothburys): Tuesday & Wednesday

Although the Rothbury festival did not begin until Thursday for most, it started on Tuesday for me. For those of you who don't know this, this Summer I am part of the smoothie-slinging brain-trust known as Hippie Dips, and we had ourselves a booth at the festival. For some laughs, check out our misadventures at this year's Summer Camp Festival (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4).

Our trip to Rothbury, Michigan started where it usually does: good old Lexington, Kentucky. After loading up the cargo van, picking someone up in Louisville, and backing the van into a tree, we were on our way. 8 hours later we had finally arrived. We did not rent anything from the retards at Oasis Tents in Paris, Kentucky this time so instead of 6 hours it only took 1 hour to set up the tent. Wednesday morning rolled around and we passed the health inspection without any problems. Everything was going smooth; too smooth actually.

Then it came. The skies turned pitch black at 2:00 P.M. and a monstrous thunderstorm with tornado-force winds came down on us. Hard. So hard that it cracked our tent in half, nearly flooded the whole site, and even knocked over a row of porta-potty's in the campground.

Our Tent: Totally Destroyed

Although we were hit hard, other booths got it worse. The French bread pizza folks forgot to tie their tent down before the storm which meant their tent got blown up into the trees. Strawberry Fields (our biggest competition) also had all of their stuff destroyed, and I was kind of hoping that they would just call it quits and go home.

The Tent Would Never Make it Back Down

A side note for those of you who are interested: if you want to sneak into a festival without paying just show up on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. None of the security will be there yet, no one is checking credentials, and the only people out there are food and craft vendors who don't know you, don't know that you're not another vendor, and wouldn't tell anyone even if they did. This might not be true for every festival, but it is something that seems painfully obvious that I had never thought of before doing this vending thing. With festival tickets ranging from $150-$300, this might not be the worst idea in the world. Once inside the grounds, there isn't anything between you and the music that a little duct tape and scissors could not fix.

Back to Rothbury. After the storm we had to buy a new tent and wait for a few hours before setting back up. We hung out in the nearly empty campgrounds, cleaned up all of the mud that had caked on all of our shit, and prayed that the weather would clear up. The music hadn't even started yet and I was exhausted from our battle with mother nature.

Review: ROMP Bluegrass Festival, Owensboro, Kentucky

This weekend we did vending at the ROMP Bluegrass Festival in Owensboro, Kentucky. Although I've seen a lot of Bluegrass at various music festivals, this was my first true all-Bluegrass festival. ROMP stands for River of Music Party, and this was a two-day Friday and Saturday festival. At first I was curious why there was no music on Sunday but I soon realized the reason: church.

We got in Thursday night, set up the tent, and overall it was pretty uneventful. We set up Friday, and since there was hardly any business, I had a lot of time to take it all in. Here are a random series of observations:

-There's no way around it: every intro to every Bluegrass song either sounds just like "Ginseng Sullivan" or "My Long Journey Home"

-We had a Swedish customer, and after we chatted for a few minutes and I mentioned that I am in law school he pointed to the other people in the booth and asked if they were lawyers too. Apparently, he already had the impression that everyone in America was a lawyer, just like everyone in Sweden is an engineer.

-We had some really cool neighbors again. The people to our right were these really cool older biker hippies who only do vending at Bluegrass Festivals in Kentucky. The people to our left were from the northeast and have been on the road with their vending business since Langerado, and were stopping at the ROMP in between Bonnaroo and July 4th at Nelson Ledges. They've been doing the vending thing for two years now, and gave us a ton of helpful advice.

-I know that throughout the course of the weekend we heard "Paul and Silas" along with "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad" and I'm pretty sure we also heard "Poor Heart."

-The older, more traditional Bluegrass bands would sit there and tell stories for what seemed like hours between songs. I felt like my grandpa was on stage telling these tall tales that never really went anywhere, or if they did go anywhere it would take too long and it wouldn't make any sense. And a lot of the time, of course, the stories didn't really end, they were just the background to the next song, which was a whole other story.

-Apparently "Let the Circle be Unbroken" is Bluegrass' version of "Soulshine" - I think we heard three groups in a row play that song during their sets on Saturday, not to mention that we had already heard the damn song twice on Friday. I kept having flashbacks to when I was on the college debate team and the debate coach, who was essentially what you would get if Mr. Burns and Darth Sidius had a love-child that lived to be 1000 years old, would play that song over and over at top volume on the van on trips across the country.

-One of the main acts got the audience to cheer based on their Christian denominations. "How many methodists do we have in the audience? What about Baptists? Catholics?" etc. At this point I yelled "what about Jews?" really loudly and then ran away, fearing that I might have inspired the town to play its own version of Throw the Jew Down the Well

-I was bit by a field mouse as we were taking down the tent. Here's to hoping that I don't have rabies.

-One of our smoothies is called the "vegan breakfast smoothie," and the 15 Western Kentuckians or so that ordered it asked for the "veggin' breakfast smoothie."

-Favorite band of the weekend: Crooked Still. This sounded a lot more like newgrass than bluegrass to me (the distinction always seemed trivial until this weekend), but they put on such a great show that they got a better reaction from the church-going, 50+ year old crowd than I thought possible.

-Runner up: Cherryholmes. They were just a rowdy Bluegrass band who put on a really fun show. Apparently they are pretty popular.

-Honorable mention: the Japanese Bluegrass band that played Friday night with the rest of the Bluegrass allstars (the whole thing is sponsored by the Bluegrass Museum and they got together literally 25 aging Bluegrass legends up on stage to play together and videotaped it all for historical documentation purposes). These Japanese dudes have been playing Bluegrass music their whole lives, singing about Kentucky, Tennessee, coal, moonshine, etc., only in Japan. Come to think of it, there were also Swedish and Italian Bluegrass bands there as well. I was astounded at how many people flew in from other countries to attend the ROMP.

Back to business: business was so slow that it was questionable whether we were going to be able to pay for company herb, let alone pay ourselves for the weekend. We'd sell a smoothie here and there, but overall we were getting crushed by the "Redneck Concessions & BBQ" booths, whose owner kept trying to get us to try the Rocky Mountain oysters.

Business was slow for three reasons. First, there were only 2,000 people or so at this thing and we were competing for those people with an Italian ice booth and a homemade ice cream booth. Second, and this was very surprising, no one moved during the music sets. Everyone sits in their lawn chair the entire time and only gets up during the 10 minute set breaks, like it would be rude to stand up during an artists' performance. Third, let's just say that most of these folks are not exactly thin (this town has a drive-thru Panera), have never had a smoothie, and would only be interested in one if it was barbecued and then deep fried.

But then, there was a miracle.

The festival director announced that the Kentucky Governor's Scholars, which is comprised of 400 high schoolers with lunch money and a taste for smoothies, were being bused into the festival. Let me tell you: high school kids loooooove smoothies. I think we probably sold a smoothie to every high schooler there. One of them actually ordered a Honeydew smoothie which was so good that we added it to our menu right then and there. Because of the high schoolers, we got to get paid, which is a wonderful thing. And as a plus, our little operation is getting to look a lot more legitimate and a lot less like a shit-show.

Overall I thought this was an awesome weekend, and this will definitely not be my last Bluegrass festival.