As I continue to get back on the concert scene, this month we got into some summer festival action, attending the Great South Bay Music Festival on July 10 and then hitting the legendary Newport Folk Festival on July 24…
Newport Folk Festival
Newport Folk Festival has been on my “bucket” list for years and we were set to go in 2020 until Covid showed up and it was canceled… last year, they had a pared-back festival with half the usual number of performers, so this year was the first full festival since 2019…
Newport is immensely popular with a dedicated fan base that returns year after year, many of them attending all three days… the fans are SO dedicated that the tickets, which went on sale in early February, sell out in 24 hours - before ANY of the performers are announced! This then leads to a unique but torturous (IMO) process where they announce three artists a week for the next few months until they finish around the end of May… it seems silly and unnecessary to me but NFF management defends it and the diehard fans love it…
When they were done, I was very disappointed in the lineup… based on the festival’s history, I was expecting a mix of mainly my wheelhouse Americana/roots artists and instead got indie pop/rock/funk, with a sprinkling of roots performers… nevertheless, I went in with an open mind, willing to be won over by artists I wasn’t familiar with… below are some observations on our Newport experience:
LOCATION… Fort Adams State Park, a beautiful scenic spot at tip of a peninsula on harbor with a sprawling old fort built in 1841… three main stages, one inside fort… you can drive to the fort but we took a water taxi back & forth which seemed like the best way to go…
CROWD… huge crowd (10k+), very chill & friendly… festival veterans complained to us that the crowd was largest ever and that they definitely “oversold” the tix (who knows?)… also, they weren’t happy with the sizable number of children under 10, mostly toddlers (who get in for free), along with their strollers and other gear…
FOOD & DRINK… food was great, lots of choices… Del’s Frozen Lemonade was a big hit with us! Beer etc was restricted to a tent at the end of a long pier far from the action and a “corral” inside the fort… so NO walking around with your beer! Kind of bogus!
FAVORITE SET… first set of day, Phil Cook’s rousing gospel revue featuring some great gospel singers & musicians from North Carolina, led by 83 year old, Lena Mae Perry… I have seen Phil in NYC in the past and he is the most happy, enthusiastic, performer you will ever see and a Newport regular…
PLEASANT SURPRISE… Joy Oladokun was an artist I had never heard of when she was booked… thought we would get some subdued solo pop/folk stuff but she had a 3-piece band behind her and they rocked… even did a blazing cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”... good stuff!
FUTURE STARS… teenage all-girl band, The Linda Lindas, were a spunky, hard-rocking blend of The Go-Gos and Sleater-Kinney… crowd loved them, should be heard from going forward…
ENTERTAINING SETS… Taylor Goldsmith from the band Dawes did a solo set where he called up members of the audience to play guitar, bass & drums behind him on a batch of Dawes songs… it worked surprisingly well and was a lot of fun… Valerie June is a talented vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who overcame technical difficulties to put on an engaging performance with her big band featuring strings and horns… The Roots did a funky soul-rockin’ set of mostly familiar covers and had the crowd up on their feet… true pros!
MOST DISAPPOINTING… Hermanos Gutierrez are an instrumental guitar duo that has been getting a lot of recent buzz due to their signing by Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) to his Easy Eye Sound label… I found their somber slow-paced Latino-flavored music to be more like background soundtrack stuff than fully-fleshed out compositions… no sparks, kind of boring…
HISTORIC ONE-OF-A-KIND SET… everyone has probably heard about the surprise festival-closing performance featuring the legendary Joni Mitchell in her first full set concert in over 20 years… since I have never been a Joni fan at all, it was a little tough for me to share in the crowd’s excitement but as a music fan I did appreciate the magnitude of the moment… the set was organized by Brandi Carlile who served as the “host” following her own brief set… she brought out numerous other musicians to join her and Joni, who has battled health issues in recent years but did a more than credible job singing, telling stories, and even playing guitar… highlight for me was her version of the old standard, “Summertime”...
SUMMARY… overall, it was an enjoyable, if VERY long and exhausting day… not sure if I would go again though because I am just not down with not knowing who any of the performers are going to be when I buy my ticket… the lineup was not even close to what I had hoped for and I felt the Saturday lineup was embarrassingly weak for the most famous festival in the country… although they did salvage things by bringing out Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon on Saturday, I felt overall it was kind of lacking in “star power” (or maybe I should say stars I wanted to see!)...
Great South Bay Music Festival
This was my third time attending this festival… in the past, the performers were mainly a mix of classic rock veterans, jam, and local Long Island bands with some older headliners who were maybe past their expiration dates, like, B.B. King, Jefferson Starship and Dickie Betts…
After the last time I went in 2018, I wasn’t figuring on going again… the festival seemed to lack organization, with no supervision of the seating area in front of the main stage… people just crowded in together leaving no paths out of the pack as it expanded across the grounds (other festivals at least set up ropes to make paths)... plus, the lineups were not always very exciting (see above)...
So this year, after being forced to cancel the past two years due to Covid, it appears they made a decision to up their game and bring in less, but higher quality, performers… the main stage Sunday lineup featured the Tedeschi-Trucks Band and their annual Wheels of Soul summer tour which included Los Lobos and Gabe Dixon, a member of TTB who also is a solo artist… TTB and Los Lobos are two of my all-time favorite bands so I decided to give it a shot again… the rest of the lineup consisted of ten local bands spread across two other stages…
With less acts, GSBF switched to a later 2:00pm start time and after a half-hour wait we were in the gate and set up chairs out in front of the main stage… for the next couple hours, we caught some solid local bands, had a couple Blue Point Summer Ales, ate some BBQ and returned to the main stage to await the Wheels of Soul performers…
TTB keyboardist/vocalist Gabe Dixon opened with his trio… he is a recent addition to TTB after a lengthy solo career that included a stint with Paul McCartney in the early 2000s… his band put in a solid set of soulful pop/rock but not anything I would follow up on…
Next up was Los Lobos, the self-proclaimed "just another band from East L.A.”... this was the 13th time I have seen them and they are definitely more than that, having been one of the best American bands for the past four decades and still going strong… they are the definition of “roots” music, blending rock, blues, Tex-Mex, soul, country, R&B, and folk styles into their own unique sound… this set featured some stellar lead guitar interplay between David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, who are also the two primary vocalists… highlights were bringing out Gabe Dixon to sing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” a song that has been a staple cover for the band over the years and the closing medley of “La Bamba/Good Lovin’”...
Tedeschi Trucks Band closed out the day with 2-plus hours of their usual mind-blowing mix of rock, blues, jazz and soul featuring Derek’s amazing guitar solos and improvisational excursions and Susan’s peerless vocals and also fine guitar work… pretty much every song was a highlight but a few standouts were the blues standard “Key to the Highway” (made famous by Derek & the Dominos) where they brought out Hidalgo and Rosas to trade licks with Derek & Susan, the Susan slow blues tour de force, “Just Won’t Burn” and one of their new songs, “Pasaquan”, a 12 minute instrumental reminiscent of classic live Allman Brothers…
Overall, I liked the changes GSB made to the program, bringing in higher quality performers and shortening the day… they also had the premier, immensely popular Grateful Dead tribute band, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead headlining on Saturday… I have seen them and highly recommend checking them out… — SL