Topanga!!!

My band, Morning Glory, finally played at the Topanga Days Festival this weekend. We’ve been dreaming of playing there for a while and, like many dreams come true, this one had mixed results. I’m happy to say that it wasn’t terrible, but I do wish it could have been a little bit better.

The festival is a big hippie thing that takes place over the Memorial Day weekend. Em and I always have fun just going there; there are tons of things to do, to see, and of course, to buy. They’re also pretty kid friendly there, with lots of activities that are fun for the guys and not too expensive. Finn got to slide down a giant inflatable shark, which is pretty much his dream come true! The food there is excellent, especially if you stick with the vegetarian hippie cuisine. They do a curry there that always makes me want to give the Moosewood Cookbook another try.

There is also some great music there, although they do tend to be a little nepotistic. This means that you might see a great blues band, or you might see someone’s kids doing Black Sabbath covers. This time we saw a terrific group of women playing folk songs in the kids’ area – they did traditional songs, plus Dylan & Gillian Welch (!!) and it was fantastic. And then there was Chevy Metal (Deep Purple covers).

And Stephanie of course.

Of course we’ve always felt like the one thing that this little séance was missing was Morning Glory, so it was exciting to finally have a chance.
Anyway, although we are fully capable of messing up gigs on our own, on this one we just had a little bad luck which cramped our style. It started with the band before us. Unfortunately, they were horrible – super loud and obnoxious – especially bad in an indoor room with brick walls. But the real problem though was not so much that the band was bad, but that the person who was “running” the area where we played (any level of responsibility is always in question at a real hippie festival) had to run out while the band before us was playing. Apparently she needed to go home to charge her cell phone!

So this awful band just kept playing on and on, so even though they started early, by the time the cell phone lady came back, everything was really late. For us this meant a really rushed set-up (never a good idea), and a severely truncated set – four songs!!! For a band that takes about three hours to get warmed up, this was a little frustrating. We also had some technical problems (mainly from rushing to get set up), and were definitely not in top form, especially when we realized that it would be so short. Don’t they realize that we’re a Dead band???

On the bright side, we actually played pretty good. Some members of the band (Dan) were of course grumpy, but it actually could have been a lot worse, and we did get a lot of nice compliments afterwards. We played a good Dead song (Loose Lucy), after which we got many Dead requests which we could have played given more time. But we also played three originals (Nightingale, Wake One Morning, and the new Nature Girl), so we got to show a more original side, which was nice. It wasn’t perfect, but hopefully we can get back there again next year & really do our thing! Artists are so masochistic. Thanks especially to Em, Rachel, and Doug’s sister for supporting us!!

Hope you all had a great Memorial Day!!!