It was, I suppose, inevitable: The entire Bumbershoot festival is now one big beer garden.
The fences are down and the beer-swilling hordes now mingle with us tee-totaling bumpkins. This year, once you’ve had your ID checked and are issued an wristband, you can sidle right up to one of the beer and wine dispensaries that are as plentiful on the Seattle Center grounds as Starbucks on the downtown streets.
The good news there is that there’s a lot more shoulder room for non-drinkers, who were left with increasingly less space at the venues in recent years as the beer gardens and sponsored “VIP” enclaves multiplied like fruit flies.
The bad news is that the brewski is now omnipresent. It’s ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. And its consumers reel among us, all tipsy and oblivious to things like kids and decency and everybody else’s personal space. In other words, this Bumbershoot is a little bit more like a fraternity party than any previous edition.
Probably because of the rain — and perhaps in part because much of the teenaged attendance block seemed to cloister themselves in Key Arena all day to take in whatever super-amplified swill was being force-fed them — Day One didn’t seem all that crowded. Memorial Stadium was less than half full for Father John Misty, although things picked up quite a bit in anticipation of the evening’s 1-2 punch of Halsey and Kygo. And the once prestigious Mural Amphitheatre — oops, fervent apologies, the “Starbucks Stage” — didn’t draw flies until the evening set by Zella Day, ostensibly a set-up job for closers the Blind Boys of Alabama which turned out to be a star turn for the 20-year-old singer-songwriter from Pinetop, Arizona.
Some impressions from Day One:
- If you want to see Lemolo (5:30 today, KEXP stage), get there early. The venue is tiny, in the rooms west of the Northwest Court (north of KeyArena) where the art exhibitions held court for the festival’s first 44 years or so. There’s a coffee joint and a vinyl record shop built right into the space, which is probably pretty nice the other 362 days of the year, but simply take up space that could’ve been spectators for Lemolo, Thunderpussy (4:10 Monday) and all the other acts booked in by KEXP.
- Friday, anyway, the KEXP Stage seemed haunted by weak bands with weak gear; the Starbucks Stage, at least early in the day, was weak bands with better gear; and the Fisher Green stage was weak bands with really good gear, perhaps a single streaming on one of the services and maybe a song “featured” on the CW network. St. Lucia seemed like something right out of the Nineties, and Atlas Genius and Bob Moses never really popped.
- The Starbucks Stage didn’t fare much better until the set by
the aforementioned Zella Day (pictured), who delivered a short
(scheduled that way), intense set of dramatic originals, sung and
occasionally shrieked by Day, who had a nice — but entirely too
loud — b
and behind her. She was
the first artist I saw all day who seemed like she was really
trying to make an impression. She did. - One of the reasons I liked Day so much was that I had just come from an embarrassing set at Fisher Green by Chevy Metal, a side project of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. I thought covers (the Van Halenized version of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” for instance) were verboten at Bumbershoot, but I wouldn’t have minded if they’d been better covers.
- Joshua Tillman, Father John Misty’s frontman, called their main stage show “the last show of the current album cycle.” He said the massive tour numbered 240 shows. And, frankly, the band seemed utterly without pep. Still sounded pretty good, though.
Saturday, it might come down to a coin flip between Lemolo and Reggie Watts, both of whom play at 5:30 p.m. (Watts will be doing his beat-boxing, improv-ing thing at the Fisher Green Stage.) I could try to go half-and-half, but if I invest the time to get to the KEXP shoebox early enough to get so see Lemolo for my first time in a couple of years, I ain’t leaving. If it goes down that way, Reggie will understand.
It’ll be back to the stadium to see Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (8:50 p.m.), who I didn’t get to see when the “Camping Trip” tour stopped at the Admiral last Wednesday — although, judging by the Thursday water-cooler conversations in the Sungeon, just about every other Sun employee did.
If you go, it’s liable to be warmer and drier than it was Friday. Use sunscreen, and drink mucho liquid. God knows that’ll be a pretty simple proposition, given that you can’t throw a rock at Seattle Center this weekend and not hit a beer stand. There are a few water stations, too, so re-fill early and often. Have fun, and say hi …
— MM
