The scene in the afternoon midway through the 10th annual Power To The Peaceful festival.
As the bus I took to the 10th annual Power To The Peaceful Festival rolled toward the western end of San Francisco's Haight Street (where it famously crosses Ashbury Street), the plain white stucco front of the apartment buildings on either sides of the street were transformed into three-dimensional facades coated in zebra stripes and rainbows. I stepped off the bus to grab a large latté, and some free wi-fi, in a coffee shop named Coffee To The People. As I sipped my cup and reviewed the acts for Michael Franti's impending celebration of pacificism to the extreme, I looked around the inside of the café and saw a collage of bumper stickers covering the walls, featuring quotes by everyone from Abbie Hoffman to Aung San Suu Kyi.
After walking about 100 yards into the park, which is about 3 miles long in total length, I passed by a man singing quite loudly the chorus to Peter Tosh's classic, "Legalize It." When I finally got to the entrance to PTTP's grounds at Speedway Meadows, a clearing about a mile west of the downtown-side entrance to the Park that constituted one-third of the grounds for the recent Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival, I encountered three tables worth of advertisements for the Green Party 2008 ticket of Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez (a former Supervisor for San Francisco County and candidate for Mayor), and only one lowly table for Obama. When I got inside the festival grounds and approached a couple of volunteers manning the information booth to ask them where I needed to go to pick up my media credential, I had to wait for a couple minutes to get any help, as one of the volunteers was busy answering someone else's question and the other was too busy rolling a joint and making sure that the maximum amount of weed was packed into the doobie as possible to attend to my concerns. I'm going to miss this city.
This is one of my last blogs before I scale down my activities for FP (temporarily) and move down south to attend university in Los Angeles, where the hippy demographic is replaced with surfers, the drugs are harder and have a negative rather than positive effect on one's world view and social outlook, and the left-wing is constituted by liberals whose wallets, rather than hearts, bleed in support of the Democrats and like-minded advocacy groups and PACs. And with the knowledge of imminent departure, I was not sickened by the mind-numbing radical altruism that would form Michael Franti's pet festival's rhetorical backbone, as I thought I very well might be, but rather comforted, overjoyed, and touched. I came to the realization that the extreme cultural freedom and commitment to social and political justice promulgated by every second of Power To The Peaceful 2008 is what also makes the City by the Bay one of the greatest places on Earth.
I also realized that San Francisco's main festival, the one that the entire city and the rest of the SF Bay Area should look forward to, the one that should be able to bring in the best performers and drain finances the most, should be this one. Only at this event would you find either a member of Code Pink (one of the protestor groups that crashed McCain's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention), the Revolutionary Workers' Group or the Cannabis Action Network, or see Ziggy Marley flashing peace signs and shouting "One Love!", no matter which way you look. Only this festival, rather than Outside Lands or the upcoming Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, deserves to fill Golden Ga te Park's concert-friendly patches to the brim with San Franciscans, because it is the only festival that decidedly lives up to San Francisco's legacy of peace, love and stretching the left-wing into the fourth dimension. Only Power To The Peaceful adds a worthy new page to San Francisco's history as the bastion of counter-culture. Hardly Strictly, and especially Outside Lands, simply mooch off of that history, though sometimes quite subtly, in publicity campaigns so as to ensure that their bankbooks don't end up full of red ink.
Even at the beginning, in the groggy hour of 9 a.m., the pacifism was being exercised quite vigorously, though only at the spiritual and personal level. Thousands of fans gathered to practice yoga in front of the festival's main stage at the instruction of world-famous yogis, including Eddie Modestini and Seane Corn (I did not participate in any of the excercise, but instead watched from a distance, partly out of laziness and partly out of being scarred at a young age by seeing my dad get into the "Downward Dog" position with nothing on but some prohibitively small tighty-whities). The rhythm of the growing mass of bodies was eventually worked up where it could sustain a dance mini-session set to the intense beat of Indian bhangra music, courtesy of Non-Stop Bhangra, a collective that performs at a downtown club, the Rickshaw Stop, almost as indicative of San Francisco's cosmopolitanism as PTTP.
Immediately after the spiritual and musical tempo had reached its apex with the Bhangra, the multi-talented (he's the executive director of a Craigslist-sponsored non-profit foundation) Adrian Heyman (a.k.a. DJ Hey Man!) kicked off the initial set at the festival's DJ tent, pitched under the shade of a large Cypress, and quickly set a motif of socially conscious sampling on the tent's turntables, and the hundreds of fans who had already trickled into Speedway Meadows began dancing at the spacious entryway to the festival. Thus, a natural discotheque began to materialize at the end of the grounds to continue the uber-positive vibes while the yoga crowd dispersed, though most of them are no doubt ended up attending the all-day Power To The Peaceful Yoga Jam at a spot called the Yoga Tree, located in San Francisco's famous Castro District.
A masterfully in-the-pocket performance by the social commentator duo of Richmond rapper Silk-E and pianist-vocalist Kev Choice helped keep the energy sustained for those who tired of the DJ tent and wanted to dance to some more organic sounds. They were followed by Rebelution, who, for all the blandness of their lyrics, managed to deliver a set that was quite compelling and poppy in all the best ways, emulating their in-the-studio tightness, and subsequent catchiness.
Warren Haynes, all by his lonesome, came next and tempered the vibe a bit, knowing the rational limit of exuberance that one should show when out on a stage with just one's voice and electric guitar performing for a five-digit crowd. He also knew that covers can be embraced, albeit with much care in such situations, even with a long career of song writing under one's own belt. His best moments, by far, during the afternoon were his revisiting of "Soulshine," one of the gems from his work with the Allman Brothers Band during their early '90's comeback, and U2's "One," which honestly sounded better than any live performance of the song by Bono and Co.
Ziggy Marley came on after Haynes and gave a surprisingly stirring run-through of songs like "Dragonfly," "Love Is My Religion," and "True To Myself," while also paying tribute to both his pops, by kicking things off with "Redemption Song" and playing "No Woman, No Cry Later." But the most pleasant surprise of Ziggy's set, no doubt especially for that joint-rolling festival volunteer from earlier in the morning, was inclusion of "Pass The Dutchie," the smash hit by Musical Youth, the contemporaries of the Melody Makers, the band that Ziggy formed with his siblings in 1979.
Below: King Britt spun some excellent house beats at the
festival's open-air DJ tent.
One problem that arises when a festival is adequately organized and programmed, however, is that one can never be able to take in every performance on the bill as much as they'd like, and the situation at PTTP was no exception. I kept racing from one end of the Meadow to the other, trying to get a listen in on both artists performing on the main stage, such as Ziggy, with those at the DJ tent. SF-based Adnan Sharif had continued where DJ Hey Man! had left off, infusing some basic, yet catchy big beats with samples of speakers concerned with political equality rather than the sexual innuendo that tends to permeate the samples of most live DJ sets. He was followed by King Britt, who laid down a sharp blend of house and hip-hop, joined eventually by Ursula Rucker, a fellow native of Philadelphia. Frankly, they would have been fine playing separate sets, but the playful rhythms of Ursula's verse just did not flow well with Britt's dance-friendly and very defined beats, and their collaboration wasn't as sonically or artistically stimulating as I had hoped it would be.
However, Franti, the entrepreneur and mastermind behind this whole great extremist, socialist, pacifist, liberal-to-the-grave affair, turned things right around, coming out and rocking the crowd with a confident and graceful energy suggesting that planning for PTTP hadn't robbed him of a wink of sleep that he wanted to get the night before the event. Starting with "A Little Bit of Riddim," a bouncy number from his upcoming album, All Rebel Rockers, Franti and Spearhead put out groove after groove, all of them immensely more vibrant and harder-edged than anything else I heard throughout the day. However, he wasn't afraid to temper the vibe a bit, such as he did by playing the sobering "Time to Go Home." Songs like "Hey Now Now" helped carry the band on through their hour-and-a-half set with the audience decidedly in their thrall, and Franti closed things out (at least until the after-party later that evening at a downtown club) by doing a high-paced cover of Mungo Jerry's "In The Summertime." Coming right after Cheb i Sabbah's sampling of Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name" at the tent, it provided a fitting end to the day. Power To The Peaceful was, and is about more than simply a trip out to the park to listen to some groovy bands and have good time-- it's about spreading awareness of a multitude of issues affecting a wide range of social classes, countries, governments and economies at the local to international level. But it's still very much about having a good time.
Michael Franti getting the crowd going at the beginning of his headlining set.
And as I left Speedway Meadows and hiked back to catch the bus at Speedway Meadows, I felt very glad that PTTP had come on the heels of Outside Lands and that there was one more festival in Golden Gate Park for me to come see before I had to leave for L.A.. It sounds cheesy and it is a bit cheesy, but where Outside Lands would have just been a great send-off, this last party, which included a cast of characters that I had, up until the day of the festival, been looking forward to getting away from, helped me to fundamentally rediscover this City, physically and psychically at the leftmost edge of the world.
