HSB: Warren Hellman's Musical Gift

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival

It is now less than 2 months from the start of HSB and I'm already getting into weekend bliss mode. That's what Warren Hellman's annual gift to the Bay Area has been for me.  No matter how shitty life has been in a particular year, for 3 days everything is beautiful. Thank you Warren and I'll be there in October. ~  My dear friend Scott.

For years Scott has suggested that I attend Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and for years I've always had something else going on..until this year.  Even though we went this year we missed hooking up with Scott who every year attends all three days. When he learned that I was writing a post on the event he offered some fodder for the post - an offer which I eagerly accepted. So this post is a shared work. 

It was day two of a weekend (Counting Friday) that the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce couldn’t have conjured in their wildest fantasies.  A convergence of events promising to bring an estimated million visitors and their money, money, money into the city.  That’s what it’s all about, right – money? The Giants are in the playoffs at AT&T Park, an America’s Cup Yacht race on the bay, a Blue Angels air show over the bay, a couple of street fairs, a parade, a 49er home game and in Golden Gate Park, the three day Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival (lovingly known as HSB).  Cora and I opted for HSB on Saturday, with plans to evacuate the house early and beat the hordes across the bridge into The City (“C’mon Cora, aren’t you ready yet? Hurry up!”).

I parked on Fulton Avenue which parallels the park and we had about a mile or so to walk, to get the concert.  The weatherman’s dreary prediction of fog was as reliable as a politician’s promise around this time of year.  As I was walking up Fulton I looked westward and saw a blue sky meeting a shimmering Pacific Ocean; not a wisp.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is not A concert.  It is six concerts; six stages spread out among adjoining meadows in Golden Gate Park.  On first hearing the name, the assumption is that HSB is a convocation of jug bands, fiddle players and inbred banjo pickers danced to by toothless old boys in slouch hats tipping jugs of corn squeezins and old grannies in linsdsey woolsey sucking on corncob pipes.  When we got home I was asked how the hick festival was.  But true to its name, the festival is hardly strictly bluegrass. 

This free, non-commercial three day concert was the 12^th annual.  HSB was conceived and funded by F. Warren Hellman a San Francisco venture capitalist and a man who knew how to put his vast fortune to good use.  Hellman spurned offers of corporate sponsorship in order to maintain the event’s non-commercial integrity.  In an interview given in 2010, Hellman didn’t fully disclose what it cost to put on the event but he did offer the word problem to figure out.

                “Every year I say, thank god I can afford this. And I sort of set an upper limit. What I can do is allow you to do the arithmetic without telling you [how much it costs]. So there are 80 bands.  Let's assume that they average $2,500. So you can do the arithmetic. And let's assume that the overhead is 50 percent more than that. So I didn't tell you what it was, but you can get certainly within a few gazillion dollars of the amount.”

Scott:  HSB started in 2001.  From then until 2004, it was known as Strictly Bluegrass.  That first year, there was a brief mention of it in the Chronicle a couple of months before the concert.  That first show was one day in late October with two stages and nine performers.  It attracted around 15,000. The weather was typical for Golden Gate Park, some high fog and around 60 degrees.  I met up with a guy who looked straight out of Haight Ashbury circa 1967 who had two ancient dachshunds and a cigar box full of cannabis.

Scott:  2002 was two days the first weekend of October, which has been the weekend scheduled for each year since.  There were three stages and 33 performers.  This time there was a heat wave, temperatures around 90, which you know is almost unheard of in Golden Gate Park.  The heat wave was unexpected. When Warren Hellman heard of it just before the weekend, he arranged for delivery trucks to be set up on JFK Drive to dispense bottled water, free of charge.

Scott:  2003 was the first year of three days of music.  It has eventually grown to six stages and nearly 100 performers.  I have gone every year.  In 2005, I made it to two days and because of back pain didn't stay all day.  Then the attendance was still fairly low so parking wasn't much of a problem. In 2007, I made it to one day because I was on crutches due to a ruptured calf muscle.  Every other year except for those two, I made it to all the days and stayed all day.

Scott:  After moving to the South Bay 7 years ago, my driving time to the show is much longer.  The result, along with the heavy dose of walking and standing, is exacerbated back pain which lasts for almost a month sometimes.   Fuhgeddaboutit, it is worth it.  Driving past the Doggie Diner head near the SF Zoo, each time laughing at the recollection of a friend from SFSU who once took LSD and ended up with a hallucination of a conversation with a Doggie Diner head.  Driving along the Great Highway, taking in the ocean smell and sight, remembering when I (and we, Paul and I) lived out that way. Parking on or near Fulton, usually between 39th to 45th Avenue.

Scott:  Getting into the park early is wonderful.  The early arrivals and the event staff are about all who are there, except for some joggers and local residents walking their dogs.  I read the artist bios on the HSB web site within the previous week and map out my schedule for each day.  I arrive at the stage of the first band around 10, with the band going on at 11.  I get to hear the sound check and just look around the grounds.  Anyone who is familiar with Golden Gate Park knows that feeling, being in a meadow and looking around at the trees and the birds.  If there is a wisp or two of fog, so much the better.  As nice as the park looks under sunny skies, it is especially lovely under a light blanket of fog.

Cora and I settled in at the first of three stages that we would visit; set our low backed beach chairs on a little hill and watched the opening act at The Rooster Stage; The Go To Hell Man Clan, along with some invited guest singers and musicians.  The colorful name comes from the fact that many of the band members are children and grandchildren of Warren Hellman; hence Hell Man Clan; what a wonderful way that the generations shared a love of music. An hour long set of Hell Man bluegrass and off to The Arrow Stage. At the Arrow Stage it was alternative/country/rock by Reckless Kelly; hard driving music sung with an unmistakable Texas twang.  And then it was a change of pace with Bill Kirchen and Texicalli, playing lively, lilting country swing.

Bob Kirchen knocks out some country swing and couples dance to the tunes 

                               

The crowd was relatively small at the Arrow Stage early in the day

 Cora smiled at a young couple dancing to bluegrass and offered, “I didn’t think that college kids like this music.”  Any doubts about the eclectic nature of San Francisco, are quickly dispatched at HSB.   There were seniors, juniors and babies; college boys, cowboys and Coca-Cola cowboys; Jimmy Buffet parrot heads and Grateful Dead heads; aged hippies, aging hippies, young hippies and fledgling hippies. There were women in long calico dresses and Asian girls dressed for clubbing, sipping wine from a proper glass; the black woman wearing pointed cowboy boots made of some exotic skin peeking out from under a flowing leopard skin dress.  A pale fellow in Bermuda shorts and Chuck Taylor tennies attending with a Filipina in short skirt and knee high cowboy boots sporting a detailed embroidery of vines and flowers.  There was an older fellow, distinguished looking all in white, topped with a white straw fedora.  With a Pimm’s Cup in hand he could have been an English gentleman straight from a Kipling short story.  Next to the man in white was a young fellow in riverboat gambler’s garb flirting vigorously with a hangover as he pulled from a bottle of Jim Beam Rye Whiskey. There were sports fans in abundance; Giants, A’s, 49ers, Cleveland Indians, University of Texas Longhorns, Cal, and a young man wearing a vintage University of Oregon track singlet (a paean to Prefontaine?).  A thirty something fellow protested to his mates; “I just can’t smoke pot.  I never could.”  On this day the choice wasn’t his.  Maybe this diverse crowd is a byproduct of technology; music so easily accessible, from so many different outlets all directed through a hand held smart phone.
                                     

There were all manner of different faces and characters at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.
          

And there were the dogs; mutts and pedigreed; small, medium, large; long haired and short; squirmy, jumping pups and old boys dragging along wearily with bowed heads, languidly swishing their tails; all of them loving the attention and head rubbing they attracted.

By early afternoon the air show was beginning over the San Francisco Bay a few miles to the northeast.  Military jets passed overhead doing their turnabouts from high speed passes over the water.  In a touch of irony, the rumble of the Canadian Snowbirds fighter jets jousted angrily with Bill Kirchen’s version of Bob Dylan’s, The Times They are a Changin’, a song that became one of the anthems for the anti-war movement of the sixties and seventies.  Later the audience would again look upward to see the Blue Angels’ F-18 Hornets making passes over a stage filled with musicians who had made their bones singing songs that protested war. 

By mid-afternoon the crowd had swelled at The Banjo Stage

We headed for the Banjo Stage and an all-star tribute to the HSB founder Warren Hellman.  We found a spot some feet behind the raised sound stage, knowing that folks would be standing in front of us.  We enjoyed the all-star band’s rousing bluegrass as the crowd continued to grow. We remained for some traditional Irish music by The Chieftains but the crowd was pressing and we did want to beat the traffic and catch the baseball game so we decided to leave early.  It was then that we realized the magnitude of the event.  Walking past the various stages we saw that each meadow was packed.  John F. Kennedy Drive, which runs the length of the meadows was crowded with foot traffic; it could have been the financial district on a weekday.  As we left, we talked about how we would come back, music we hoped to see next year and how we might do it differently.  We allowed that it would be nice if our kids would join us one year. 

Scott:  Many good musical memories.  Great sets by Emmylou, Alison Krauss and Union Station, Eileen Ivers, Old Crow Medicine Show, Poor Man's Whiskey, Gillian Welch with Dave Rawlings (once joined by Bob Weir), Buddy Miller, Elvis Costello, Hot Tuna, Boz Scaggs, The Whoreshoes, Jorma Kaukonen, Richard Thompson, Patty Griffin, Lyle Lovett, et al.  I'm not sure I could physically handle more than three days of HSB, so it is perfect for me. 

There's value in HSB beyond simply a three day concert.  If you were to stroll the meadows and stop briefly at each stage you would be taking in a living history lesson of American music; jazz, blues, country/western, zydeco, rockabilly, pop and rock in various forms.  You would experience the musical fabric of American culture from the 18th century to the present day.  It is America in music.  Throw in some world music and you have HSB.  And then there is that unique man; Warren Hellman.  Hellman was a rich, corporate man with a selfless wonderful dream of bringing free music to the people of the Bay Area without the corruption of commercialization or corporate sponsorship.  He developed a special relationship with the city and it's various departments and bureaucracies, with musicians, and with the many people who have taken so much enjoyment from his three day celebration of music. Hellman passed away last December and the outpouring of love for this man was evident this year.  During the course of the show, the musicians spoke lovingly of the event.  One comes away feeling that these artists come as much if not more for the love of the event than they do for the money.  

Before he died Warren Hellman set up a trust fund to finance HSB for at least 10 years after his death.