Restless Leg Syndrome

You can't really go wrong here

In a recent ruling, three out of three attendees on their way to the 2010 Barcelona Primavera Festival said summer is not complete without at least one music festival. Even 10 hours later, after these three were doused in sweat, beer, and lets face it, probably the urine of others due to the festival’s poorly thought out male-urinal system (which I will not go into here, but you can use your imagination), their ruling remained the same.

That was my first festival of the summer, thousands of miles away, looking out on the Mediterranean Sea. This past weekend, I went to number two. Newport Harbor ain’t no Mediterranean, but the legendary folk festival where Dylan went electric proved to be a calming and nearly perfectly orchestrated event.

Music festivals in the summer always feel like a gathering of the tribes. Maybe this is an after effect of reading and seeing too many Woodstock depictions, or maybe it is my desire to imagine that the “human be-ins” described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test still exist in some form. While I am not delusional enough to equate the rather tame Newport Folk Festival with the legendary pioneers of music festivals circa 1967 and ’68, the basic tenets of bringing people together to listen to music and appreciate a brief turning down of our turbo-charged lives remain guiding forces in these gatherings. Sure, they get messy – Inevitably by the time the last band comes on, regardless of how long you’ve been waiting to see the famed closer play, all you can think of is sitting in a bath tub of ice while getting a foot massage. But is that a reason not to make it through? No. It is not.

The beautiful Newport Bridge is a lovely backdrop for being serenaded by Andrew Bird in late July

Anyway, I could rant about my best festival moments, wax poetic about how the setting sun and pungent smell of cigarettes and marijuana punctuates a good performance, but I won’t. Instead I’ll skip over the general run down of the festival, which has already been covered by every media outlet with any focus on music this past week. NPR’s All Things Considered did an excellent job of that, as per usual, which you can find here.

Instead I want to highlight a band I hadn’t known of pre-festival whose performance was especially noteworthy and for lack of a better term, special.

Dawes at Newport Folk 2010

Dawes set overlapped Andrew Bird, which left me running to only catch the last half of their show at the smallest of the three Newport stages. Despite my love for Mr. Bird, I ended up repeatedly kicking myself for not getting there sooner. A show like this doesn’t happen too often, especially in the setting of a festival. By the time I got to the stage, the entire audience was on their feet while the band rocked out, literally looking like they may all burst into joyous tears in response to the enthusiasm. Dawes features a set of brothers, lead vocalist Taylor Goldsmith and drummer Griffin, and they even brought their father out on stage with them for their last song.

Family love

I recognize I may be a bit late on jumping aboard the Dawes boat: They’ve already played Bonnaroo, recorded their most catchy and excellent single “When My Time Comes” with The Morning Benders, sold out Webster Hall in New York and will be going to Lollapalooza in a few days. Regardless, they absolutely recruited new followers with their Newport performance. Their first full length LP North Hills, which I promptly obtained as soon as I got back from the festival, has some great tracks, but to see them live is to love them. The foursome is said to have a “Laurel Canyon” sound, reminiscent of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and other folk-rock bands who congregated in Dawes native northern Los Angeles in the 1960s. While their roots are clearly comfortably stuck in that Laurel Canyon and L.A. mud, Dawes remains inventive. Their live show was endearing, and their enthusiasm to play Newport really showed.

Look at the joy on this dude's face

When in the thick of a music festival, it is easy to forget that the true beauty of bringing artists from disparate eras together is introducing different generations of music lovers to newer or older bands they otherwise might never have heard. Newport is especially good at this: Legendary headliners like John Prine, Richie Havens and Levon Helm bring in the baby boomers, while Andrew Bird, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and the Low Anthem bring in youngin’s. At the end of the weekend, everyone goes home having seen at least something they weren’t expecting to love or even care about, and the music community grows and benefits.

When I walked away from the Dawes stage, head shaking in disbelief that I missed the beginning of their show, I heard an older woman ask the musicians while they packed up their gear, “Where are you going next!?!” The entire band, still seemingly seizing with excitement told her they’d be going to Western Massachusetts. The woman told them she was from right around there and that she would be at their next show. If she hadn’t been introduced to them at Newport, would she still be there? I think not.