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Green Apple Music Festival, Speedway Meadow, San Francisco, CA, 4/20/08 |
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Written by Richard B. Simon
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Monday, 28 April 2008 |
Photo Credits: Josh Baron
The San Francisco iteration of the Green Apple eco-music fest caught a break April 20 from the high winds that had been whipping across the city over the weekend. The festival, sponsored by Zenbu Media (owners of Relix), fused acoustic music and drumming with eco-awareness in an attempt to raise consciousness and understanding—chiefly about global warming—in the old-school way, with a free concert in the park.
The show, in historic Speedway Meadow, featured sets by Mickey Hart and a new project, Mass Drums, featuring drummers from two local youth music programs; Yonder Mountain String Band; local guitar picker Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks; and Brett Dennen—with some guest turns by Motley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and rapper Ludacris, who were on site filming for their television show on greening rock music, as well as folk icon Joan Baez and Phish drummer Jon Fishman.
Hicks, in a black fedora and shiny shirt, played western country blues swing, with a big acoustic band and Gypsy jazz inflection—and String Cheese Incident alum Michael Kang sitting in on mandolin. One of the two female vocalist-percussionists played castanets on the Spanish-flavored “I Scare Myself,” Kang soloing like Gabor Szabo.
The day featured speakers during set breaks, including perennial Emcee Wavy Gravy, and a green-faced puppet monster called the Little Green Man, who announced his candidacy for President of the United States. 
Some of the speakers were as compelling as the musical acts.
Rainforest Action network founder Randy Hayes exhorted the crowd to support “the Green Cities revolution.” “We can’t put all our eggs in the international basket” of the Kyoto Accord, he said. People must act at the local and personal levels to solve massive environmental crisis such as global warming.
He lauded San Francisco for reducing its waste stream—the amount of waste that goes into landfills rather than being composted or recycled—by 71%, and said the city is on track to achieve zero waste by 2020. It’s a feat once imagined in Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia.
Green author Bill McKibben announced the 350 campaign (www.350.org) to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, a level deemed safe for humanity to avoid the harshest consequences of global warming. Earth’s atmosphere currently holds 385 parts per million of CO2.
MC Radioactive introduced the four-piece Yonder Mountain String Band, which played Colorado mountain-style acoustic stomp. “Steep Grade, Sharp Curves” was slow and melodic. “Damned if the Right One Didn’t Go Wrong,” a fast, banjo-fueled choogle, with guitarist Adam Aijala and banjo picker Dave Johnston twisting chops around each other.
Meanwhile, back in the backfield, an eco-fair featured small businesses touting solar panel installation, including a new program, Solar Lease, that allows homeowners to install solar for little money down, and pay off the lease over time, instead of paying electric bills—essentially making home solar systems (and the company that installs them) a major provider of large-scale solar electricity to the grid. Another booth offered tailpipe filters called the Blade, designed to decrease particulate and also decrease CO2 emissions by purportedly increasing fuel economy by 2.5-5 miles per gallon.
One local business, Blue Turtle Roofing, installs solar rooftop ventilation fans and coats roofs with light-colored rubber, increasing the roof’s reflectivity, and thus keeping the house cooler during the hot summer—instead of using air conditioning as the house bakes under a coat of heat-absorbent black asphalt.
Greenpeace touted its Project Hot Seat, an attempt to pressure Congress to pass the Safe Climate Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and former Vice President Al Gore’s new We campaign (www.wecansolveit.org) collected signatures, also to pressure Congress to act. They’re aiming for a million.
The environmental law-advocacy firm Earthjustice sought to inform festival-goers about its current campaigns, among them a battle against the coal industry to stop “mountaintop removal,” a coal mining process that devastates local ecosystems by literally blasting the peaks off of mountains in the Appalachians, to allow easier access to the coal buried within. Burning that coal, of course, contributes mightily to global warming.
Other groups were on site, including the antiwar group Code Pink, slinging pink T-shirts that urged impeachment of the President and Vice President, and an end to the Iraq War. Another group demonstrated growing in compost with impromptu veggie gardens planted in the meadow.
There was even a travelling circus—the Sustainable Living Roadshow, part of the eco-caravan—including trapeze, puppet shows and a Hippie Strongman, laying on his back in the grass, with hippie girls standing on top of his barrel chest.
The main musical event was Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s set.
To the crowd’s surprise, Hart came out joined by guitarist Bob Weir.
“Well, we’re not going to be overly rehearsed today,” Hart warned the crowd.
Yet the set—almost a long, flowing rhythm symphony featuring Hart and Weir and friends and local drumming ensembles Rhythm Village and Loco Bloco—flowed nearly flawlessly from one group into the next.
A hush fell over the crowd—perhaps 50,000 strong across the Meadows—as Hart and Weir played a duet on the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” with Weir on acoustic and Hart keeping time on a deep tom with padded mallets.
Kang and Yonder bassist Ben Kaufmann (on electric upright) joined in for Dylan’s “Peggy-O” and “Friend of the Devil.” The side stage was packed, in the Dead tradition, to watch the set, as Hart switched to brushes for a nice country groove. Weir led the band into a jam on “Throwin’ Stones,” the Dead’s 1980s eco-political complaint. Hart played with hard mallets, while Kang ripped a distorted rock tone on electric mandolin.
Suddenly, a group of drummers and three African-garbed dancers from Rhythm Village joined in—and Hart, Weir, and company departed—yielding the groove seamlessly to the new tribe. Each dancer took a turn soloing at center stage, then more drummers spilled out, and more, and before you knew it, Joan Baez was dancing at center stage, in her close-cut silver hair, a black outfit, with a red scarf, while two of the drummers began to boing boing boing on the Jew’s harp.
Sticks and bells and shakers, the dancing in the crowd picked up slowly as the drumming got louder, and a new group of red-T-shirted young people ran out onstage with congas and timbales, rocking left and right in synchrony, a beautiful girl dancing like crazy on stilts, ten feet tall in purple sequins and long satin bellbottoms behind them. Loco Bloco pulled it into a big hip hop beat with whistles—then Hart returned on toms, with Kang noodling and Bobi Cespedes chanting sweet intonations, a dark drum groove.
With nearly forty people onstage, drumming, dancing, singing, chanting—including Fishman, Ludacris, Lee,and Sikiru Adepoju on the talking drum—Baez returned to the stage to sing with Cespedes, and Kang began to tear into Carlos Santana’s riffs on Olatunji’s “Jin-go-lo-ba,” and the dancers returned to center stage.
Hart beat out the Bo Diddley beat, Weir and Kaufman returned, and they chanted the refrain to the Dead staple, Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” The jam ended, the drumming army departed, and they picked the tune up again from the beginning and played it through.
By the end, Hart and a lean, tattooed Tommy Lee were left, beating out a rhythm to end it all, after which they shared a hug.
If the Grateful Dead and Motley Crüe can come together on this, maybe there’s hope for Congress and, well, maybe the next President.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 28 April 2008 )
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