Concrete Blonde

It’s taken me a couple days to get to this, and it’s not going to be nearly as long as last year’s opus — but I did get to spend last Saturday out at this year’s [Bumbershoot1. Unfortunately, I could only hit one day this year, so I decided to go Saturday, as it seemed to have the best lineup of artists I knew I wanted to see.

I started the day by walking down to the Seattle Center from my apartment. I’d originally planned on taking the monorail from Westlake Center, but the day was nice enough that I figured I’d just go ahead and walk it. When I got to the entrance, there was a street performer who had a boombox playing Jimi Hendrix tunes, and a (I believe) homemade Jimi marionette doing a really impressive show. I grabbed my ticket, and wandered in to explore what this year had to offer.

I was supposed to meet Chad at the Flag Pavillion at 2pm, so I started by heading that direction. Unfortunately, as it turns out, there is no Flag Pavillion anymore! A new pavillion has been built, that had been designated the “Tiki Terrace” and “Lagoon Lounge”. Made it fairly difficult to find Chad, so I just kept up my wandering, figuring we’d run into each other eventually. The new building’s pretty nice, though…not quite finished yet, but it’s close.

While I was down by the new pavillion, one of the frequent mini-parades through the grounds was getting started, led off by the Zambola drum and dance troupe. I have no idea if any of them were professionals or not — I kind of got the impression that they were all doing it just because they really enjoyed it — but it was a lot of fun (and not to shabby to look at, either!).

A lot of the fun of wandering the grounds is the multitudes of smaller acts, street performers that have come in and set up shop somewhere on the grounds. There were a couple guys with a juggling act that had just found an audience volunteer — a 9-year old girl who was having a blast being the center of the show for a few minutes. After dressing her up in a clip-on tie and bowler (so that she’d look “just like her dad”), they had her hold onto a couple posts, and set two spinning balls balancing on them…and she was a star!

In one of the less-packed areas of the grounds, I came across a really fascinating performer. He was standing on a box, playing a truly unusual instrument that had a very ethereal, resonating sound to it. Turns out that he’d created the instrument himself after seeing it in a dream, and taught himself how to play it, after welding it together from a lot of metal bars and a couple extra large steel salad bowls. Really interesting stuff (and I just found the artist’s website, including an article where about halfway through he discusses the creation of the Stamenphone).

Eventually I wandered over to the Rhythm Stage and sat down to watch Si*Sé, a ‘latin/electronica’ band that I ended up really liking (enough to pick up their CD later on in the night, even). While I was enjoying them, who should walk up, but Chad and not just Chad, but Aimee and Marty, too! Very cool — so now that we’d found each other, the four of us wandered around for the next few hours.

We wandered the grounds for a bit, then headed into the stadium to snag a place on the floor to see Ani DiFranco perform. Chad, Marty and I pretty much stayed about halfway back, while Aimee bounced around, doing her best to get a better view of Ani during the show. Ani did a pretty good job, though apparently she wasn’t too thrilled about being stuck in “that damn stadium”…still, the audience loved her, and she put on a good show.

After Ani we had a couple hours to kill before seeing Concrete Blonde (my primary reason for choosing Saturday over the rest of the weekend), so it was off to wandering again. We ran into Kate and a friend of hers for a few minutes at one point — it was great to see her again! We all talked for a few minutes, then she and her friend headed off to get something cool to drink. Chad, Marty and I spent a fair amount of the next hour people watching while Aimee dove into (seemingly) every booth we passed to see what they had available…certainly not a problem, though, we weren’t exactly in a hurry to get anywhere. Besides, standing in one place for a while makes it easy to run into friends — like Jory and Adri, who were down for the weekend. That was kind of funny — the last time I’d seen them was last Bumbershoot, when they were down for their honeymoon!

Aimee at one point had to run off to get money out of an ATM, and after waiting fo a while, Chad and I decided that we really didn’t want to miss the Concrete Blonde show, and left Marty to wait for Aimee while we headed into Key Arena. We found my friend Laura and her friend Renee in there, and so the four of us stuck together during the Concrete Blonde show — which was flat-out incredible. After having listened to Concrete Blonde for years, it’s so great to be able to see them live — especially since this was the second time in a year I’ve been able to do so! Both shows have been incredible, and I’m definitely looking forward to any more I can catch.

After Concrete Blonde, we all split up — Laura and Renee went off to find food, Chad headed home, and I headed into the Wherehouse booth to pick up Si*Sé’s CD. I also on a whim picked up a CD by Blackalicious, a hip-hop group that had played earlier that I hadn’t been able to see, but had heard a lot of good things about, so I figured it was worth a shot. Then I started working my way home…and managed to catch just the tail end of a performance by Jason Webley, one of my favorite local artists that I’ve found yet (though I’ve not been able to catch any of his shows). He’s got a new CD out, so I picked that up also, and then — finally — made it out the gates, and walked my skinny lil’ butt home.

All in all, a very good day. It’s a bummer that I wasn’t able to go for the full weekend again, as I did last year, but hey — there’s always next year, right?