Well the music festival season has officially begun!  Locally, the first festival of the season has come and gone with the Graves Mountain Festival of Music.  That event took place last weekend at Graves Mountain Lodge in Syria, Virginia and filled the surrounding hills of Madison County with the sounds of bluegrass music over the course of the three-day event.  Next up on a regional level is one of the biggies of the summer, as the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival prepares to get underway next week down in Manchester, Tennessee with a line-up that boasts over 100 bands.

So as a way to honor the ever-growing number of music festivals popping up around the country and on a personal level, as an excuse to travel down memory lane, I thought I’d share my own account of a little music festival that took place in my own backyard (literally) on a sun and star-filled Saturday back in September of 1997 as I put words to page for the first and only Festival on the Farm.

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In the summer of 1997 I was hired to run the kitchen for a small, Virginia-based restaurant chain that had just opened a store in Harrisonburg, Virginia.  I was twenty-three years old and at the time with only a couple years of restaurant experience under my belt.  Over the course of the year which followed, sixty to seventy hour weeks were the rule, not the exception, but I learned a lot, made a ton of mistakes, and still managed to have a whole lot of fun.

Once I was hired on, I was given complete control to hire my kitchen staff as I saw fit.  My first hire was a young musician who played in a local band and didn’t have a lot of restaurant experience, but we got along, related to each other on a number of levels, and as it turned out, he was a hard worker and a quick study.  We’ll came him Rasta for our story’s sake.

After Rasta had worked for me a short time he told me that he had a friend who was moving back to town who needed a job.  We’ll call Rasta’s friend, Buddha.  When Buddha arrived for his job interview we hit it off immediately.  He had just wrapped up a summer of living on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard, where he had worked as a waiter (not a cook mind you), and I hired him on the spot.  Rasta, Buddha, and I quickly became really good friends.

Before I continue, there are a couple details that need to highlighted before we go any further.  At the time all this was happening I was living in an old farmhouse about twelve miles outside of H’burg that sat on sixty acres of land which stretched all the way down to the Shenandoah River.  A big ol’ farmhouse with four bedrooms, hardwood floors, huge front and backyards, and at least a mile removed from any major highways.  Rent was $600 and the living, for the most part, was pretty easy, especially for a 23 year old guy enjoying the hell out of being 23.  No complaints.

It also should be noted that at the time, I had visions of becoming a writer (which I guess in a way I have become).  But at this time in my life I was writing poetry, short essays, rambling dreamscapes, etc. and I was completely in the height of my fascination with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, and Walt Whitman, to name a few.  I wrote everyday and still carry around the fifteen or twenty notebooks that I filled with words from the years which immediately preceded and followed this period of my life.  Running a kitchen paid the bills, but writing was my job.

So as Rasta, Buddha, and I continued to work together and get to know one another a lot of things were discussed on a very excitable and personal level.  Religion, philosophy, cartoons, women, life, and of course, music and writing.  Then one day at work I brought up the idea of starting a free, local literary zine inspired in part by reading the beatnik writer Ed Sanders and his book Tales of Beatnik Glory.  Well as soon as I mentioned this to Rasta and Buddha something about the idea just clicked and suddenly the three of us starting laying the groundwork for what would become The Festival on the Farm.

The idea was this:  To throw an admission-free, two-day event with a number of local bands, writers, and poets invited to perform.  Music and words on stage on Day 1 with folks invited to bring their own beer and food, provide camping for those who wished to stay the night, and then make breakfast the next morning for all the campers, followed by a collective clean-up effort in the late morning.  But the most important part of The Festival on the Farm was this:  Use the festival as a way to promote this literary zine (which would be called the First Free Voice) and to invite festival attendees to donate a dollar or two to help cover the costs of starting the thing from the ground up.  Who knows, we thought, this might actually work.  At the very least we might have one hell of a party!

Well within a week, the plans began to come together.  Rasta, with his connections to the music scene soon had three or four bands already lined up.  Buddha, who seemed to make friends in any and every situation, began to enlist folks to help spread the word.  And for my part, well I had the perfect place to throw a big party.  By the end of that first week, we had set a date.  Saturday, September 27 and Sunday, September 28, 1997.  This was actually going to happen.  But what Rasta, Buddha, and I had no way of knowing, was that not only would it happen, but it would turn out to be a much bigger event than we could have ever imagined. 

I don’t know if you have any idea what it looks like to stand on a stage in your frontyard and see a huge bonfire around back with at least one hundred people around it.  Or to wake up the next morning and find 200-300 people camping in the field behind your house and then realize you promised to feed these people breakfast!  Or, at the height of the madness, look around and see 500 hundred people at your house and watch, as off in the distance, a parade of carlights continue to stream in, one after the other, down a dusty dirt road. 

Well I can tell you what it looks like from the eyes of a 23 year old kitchen manager and aspiring writer who is in the middle of throwing the biggest party of his life.  It looks pretty damn cool…and a little bit frightening. 

We’ll pick up the story next time as the Festival on the Farm begins to take shape and the first guests begin to arrive.  Stay tuned.

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