Photos by:  Ken Friedman

 2007 may just be the year that Hardly Strictly Bluegrass got too big. Or else maybe it’s just right. The free festival, now in its seventh year and second name (once it was Strictly Bluegrass) is held annually in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It has grown from just a few acts on one stage to a three-day, five-stage, multi-band festival. And it’s all bankrolled by one man—billionaire financier Warren Hellman, a banjo picker himself, who played a set with his own band, the Wronglers—as a gift to the city and the world of bluegrass and fringe country.

San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Lyn Tomioka estimated Sunday’s crowd alone at 560,000. That would make HSB one of the biggest music festivals in the country. And this year, it was actually sunny. Festival mainstay Gillian Welch only half-joked when she noted, in her Banjo Stage set on Saturday, that in past years, she’d pretty much had to wear a parka.

The festival covers about an eight-block length of John F. Kennedy Drive, in the heart of the park, including two stages in Speedway Meadow. The crowds flowed in all day on foot and on bikes, and in sometimes overwhelming surges up and down the hill from stage to stage between sets. Despite ample valet bike parking (which was pretty full), hundreds of bicycles hung chained to fences, signposts, stray lengths of barricade and even tree trunks. The audiences filled the park’s bowl-like meadows and creeped up into the surrounding, forested hills and ridgeline roads by the thousands. And for the second year the fest coincided with Fleet Week, when Navy corsairs and aircraft carriers strut under the bridge in force, and the aerobatic fighter jet squad the Blue Angels roar overhead. It doesn’t get more American than listening to banjo-pickers and fiddlers whilst fighter jets loop-de-loop overhead.

The festival opened Friday morning, with a musical presentation for 5,000 middle school students from around the Bay Area. Friday afternoon featured a set from T-Bone Burnett and Friends (including John Mellencamp and Neko Case) and some mellow tunes from Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy.

Saturday the full lineup started at 11am. Many fans had gotten to the park early to claim space with blankets and tarps and coolers and chairs. With so many bands playing simultaneously, it was impossible to see more than a fraction, especially if you wanted to catch whole sets. The Knitters—most of the punk band X, dressed in black, played country with Dave Alvin on guitar, on the Star Stage at the fest’s west end.  John Doe and a ghostly pale, fire-haired Exene Cervenka traded off verses. This was the punk generation’s iteration of country – with feel-good, slightly off-key lyrics, not trying too hard to be perfect, rambling pokey on the traditional “I’m Just Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail.”

1950s New York folk scene trio the New Lost City Ramblers, recently celebrating their fiftieth year, played real old-time mountain music on the main, Banjo Stage at the east end of Speedway Meadow. On banjo, bass, and fiddle, they played “The Battleship Maine,” a war song, about newsman William Randolph Hearst’s promotion of the Spanish American War (to sell papers). It was a song they bemoaned having had to recycle so many times. Likewise, gravel-voiced guitar picker Chris Smither railed open-chord rock blues at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a squad of red and white Canadian stunt fighters whined overhead in formation.

Folksinger John Prine played a huge set, one of the fest’s choicest, accompanied by upright bass and mandolin—to yet another overflow crowd, with fans sitting on top of the equipment trucks in the road. Prine played the classic “Angel From Montgomery,” which he recorded with Bonnie Raitt, mimicking pedal steel with his slide guitar. He sang a weary, talky one for his wife, back in Tennessee, “She’s My Everything.” And the fans, in chairs and stretched out on blankets, played “Lake Marie,” a long story-song, connected by spoken vignettes, in the Dylan-Ramblin’ Jack Elliott tradition.

The mop-haired, digi-loopy multinstrumentalist Keller Williams followed Prine, strutting and strumming, sampling and looping himself on acoustic guitar, bass, drum machine, mouth beatbox and whistle, through favorites like the slap-poppy “Freaker By the Speaker.” Newgrass banjo master Bela Fleck joined in and the duo picked their way through Nirvana’s “Lithium,” with the chorus of growling “yeah-eah-eah-eah-eah” a bluegrass stomp. Flecktones bassist Victor Wooten stepped out, too, thumb-strumming on “People Watching” as the crowd caught Williams’ infectious good-time vibe and the Angels roared overhead. Fleck and the Flecktones followed with a set of their own muscular electro-weirdo-grass.

It ain’t a bluegrass festival without the offstage jams—and a few bands took the opportunity to play guerilla sets along the road through the festival. Mountain-style bluegrass jug band Blackwater Union, from San Luis Obispo, playing acoustic stomp on guitar, bass, fiddle, and banjo, gathered enough of a crowd to create a human traffic jam on the road. The Ferocious Four ripped on guitar and drums. The two-gal band Moe Provencher played throughout the park, one member playing brushed washboard with a ring tambourine on her foot and shaker in her hand, the other playing banjo—and both singing harmony.

And only a few hundred feet away, Bruce Hornsby was playing the grand piano with Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, with the whole big band pushing out bluegrass readings of Hornsby’s 80s pop hit “The Way It Is” — “some things will never chay-ee-aynge!” —and Rick James’ “Superfreak,” in hayseed harmony.

Renegade Nashvillians Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, festival favorites who have worked their way up to a headlining slot on the main stage, played the sunset spot to tens of thousands, a crowd that stretched across the meadow and around the bend, as far as the eye could see. Welch strummed in a turquoise dress and Rawlings flatpicked in a purple-brown corduroy suit, their minor sound subdued as sea foam, an anachronism, something from 1890. Silverhaired Emmylou Harris, another festival regular, joined the pair for a shivering a capella rendition of “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby,” which Harris and Welch recorded with Allison Krause for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? And those tens of thousands of people? Silent. All the way back. Unreal. Lit red by the red setting sun, Welch and Rawlings played “I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll,” then dedicated Neil Young’s “Pocahontas” to Jimmy Carter. Their harmonies and groove had the crowd dancing during the gospel “Keys to the Kingdom,” and they closed with Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately.”

Political folk troubador Steve Earle closed the day; his stage was visited by antiwar protest mom Cindy Sheehan, who is running against Nancy Pelosi for her seat in Congress.

Hellman opened Sunday morning on the shingle-roofed porch stage, at the fest’s east entrance, with his band, the Wronglers, featuring friends, colleagues, and even his wife singing bluegrass standards. The amiable Hellman joked between songs—a natural bluegrass storyteller. “We have our own mantra,” he said of band. “Simple music played by complicated people.” About 300 well-wishers gathered for the early set. With two guitars, two banjos, mandolin, electric bass, and two fiddles, the band had a nice, big sound—mountain music with an Irish lilt cast by the twin fiddlers and the women’s voices singing. Banjo legend Bill Evans even joined in for a song.

Over on the Rooster Stage, legend Charlie Louvin, in a bright red shirt and suspenders and a white cowboy hat, was playing half-electrified country-swing with his band. He played some Jimmie Rogers and Carter Family classics, a few Louvin Brothers numbers, and dedicated a couple tunes— “I Like the Christian Life” and “Cash on the Barrelhead” —to the late Gram Parsons

David Grisman’s Bluegrass experience picked and grinned on the Banjo Stage, with Grisman’s son Sam on upright bass, and early Flatt & Scruggs cohort Curly Seckler, telling corny jokes and playing the guitar on old Flatt & Scruggs numbers like “We Can’t Be Darlings Anymore.”

British proto-punks the Mekons loped a lonely desert vibe on the Star Stage, on “Perfect Mirror.” Lost Planet Airmen alum Bill Kirchen played Bakersfield-style country on the Arrow Stage. And bluegrass originator Earl Scruggs himself played a set on the banjo stage, including a take on “Salty Dog Blues.”

Before the narrow bottleneck lawn at the Rooster Stage, the gray-bearded rock and folk icon Jorma Kaukonen picked guitar with Barry Mitterhoff on mandolin. The duo picked and grinned through Hot Tuna and Jorma solo tunes, as well as Gary Davis songs and the Dead’s “Operator.” Four Blue Angels roared real low overhead during “Blue Railroad Blues,” so close you could read “U.S. Navy” in yellow under their wings. Jorma didn’t miss a beat. “ ...well I’ve got the blues ...” They did Davis’ “There’s a Table Sitting in Heaven” —and with the jets looping overhead, it felt like Hot Tuna’s Splashdown record, which features some tape from rocket cockpit transmissions. The “Fur Peace Rag” had a playful little riff, which they played in synch harmony. Tuna cohorts Jack Cassady and Pete Sears visited backstage; they had been playing with G.E. Smith and others on another stage as Moonalice.

Dressed all in black before the swelling throng, guitar master Doc Watson picked on the Banjo stage with guitarist David Holt. They did Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel Number

Nine,” then dedicated Leadbelly’s “In the Pines” to Grisman, with Watson howling the sound of the wind blowing through the trees. Watson’s grandson Richard joined in for “Summertime.” Holt exhorted the whole crowd— “All hundred thousand of you” —to sing on Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s “Walk On.”

Even at this point, people out for their Sunday afternoon jog or rollerblade through the park were still cruising through the fest, wondering what was going on.

Hellman came out to introduce Emmylou Harris, “who I always think of as the heart of the festival.” Indeed, Harris’ set closes the fest every year.

Harris sang breathily, leading her backing band, Carolina Star,  through classics (the Louvins’ “Father With The Angels Rejoiced”, George Jones’ “One of These Days”, Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty”), her own material, and Parsons-Hillman tunes Harris’ voice is a country classic in its own right—and when she sings, her old partner Gram Parsons’ spirit is never far off. This band had the slow shuffle of tunes like “Sin City” down. Thrumming on bass, fiddle, mandolin and dobro—with Harris on guitar—they sang four-way gospel harmonies throughout, a warm, low-slung sound. The sun set. The stage lights came up.

During the quieter moments, you could hear the other bands stompin’ and rockin’ late on the other stages.

“This,” Hellman said, thanking the crowd at the festival’s very end, “is like a whole Summer of Love in just three days.”