Well folks, that's a wrap. And it was surprisingly kick ass! I was kind of down on the lineup this year, as most of the headliners and sub-headliners weren't my favorite, but in the end, we found a ton of very fun stuff to check out.
I was a little unsure about my path forward here on this second Sunday, being that I had seen a lot of my favorite things the Sunday before. So I had to decide whether I was going to choose bands for my wife and kids, or take them to the things I had liked last week. We ended up doing kind of both.
First, Calder Allen was pretty great. I still think it is super weird that he got a festival slot, over loads of other bands, without any published music or videos or anything that I could find. But I guess being Terry Allen's grandson has its perks! He had Charlie Sexton on guitar and a Dixie Chick on fiddle up on stage with him, so he's making it happen! One weird thing, there was a dude near me in the audience who knew every song. I should have walked over to ask him how he knew the lyrics to the mystery songs, but I was lazy.
We tried some KennyHoopla, and it was honestly terrible. He was barely singing, and his hype guy seemed more pleased to be there. After about two songs everyone else wanted to leave so we wandered over to see Noga Erez. I had told the girls that she was like Billie Eilish and so their interest was piqued. A friend hooked us up with some VRBO side stage action, so we got to go stand side stage for a few songs and watch her jump around. She was legit pretty good, although it was hard to hear her lyrics over the bass.
Next, the girls had been excited about Tate McRae, because they had actually heard of her through YouTube. Her show was pretty awful. I liked her two backup dancers, but that is about the best I could say about it. She was all sorts of breathy and pose-happy, but the music was bad and no one enjoyed it in my crew. So I took them to check out AG Club again - they got promoted to a bigger stage this week! We spotted my teenager son and his delinquent friends over there, and I swear my boy was set up as the lookout for the group. He spotted me from a ways off and I saw him tell the group - hey, my dad's coming! I'm the narc, kids! I thought AG was fun again. The boy said they were too loud, and the youngest seemed mortified when I danced and jumped around with her. Being a dad rules.
We tried a few songs of Superfonicos (really fun, I think), but the rest of the crew wanted more free food and drink at the VRBO stage. So we watched some Cam from there. She's fine. Killer voice and all, but just not my style of preferred music.
Around here, we managed to shake the pesky children off on friends and so the wife and I went to see Band of Horses and Greta Van Fleet again. They were awesome, yet again. Loved both of those shows, even though I had seen them both last week. The kids went to Polo G, and their descriptions of it were amazing to me. Boy, 15: He sucked. He didn't even come on for 30 minutes, he only did a few songs, and then he left and his DJ played tiny bits of other people's songs. So annoying! Girl, 13: That was my favorite show! He was terrible when he tried to do his own music, he couldn't even rap, but when the DJ played parts of fun songs, we went crazy and it was sooo fun. Girl, 11: I liked his little ponytail!
Instead of going to one of the shows that I wanted to see here, I made the "HERO DAD" sacrifice to take the youngest and her little friend deep into the crowd for Tyler the Creator. I didn't care to see him, but was prepared to make it happen for the girls. We fought our way up in the crowd and I made some space for them like 50 feet from the stage, which lasted all of about 8 minutes before they got bored, realized they had to wait like that for over an hour, and asked to go somewhere else. Ugh. So, we battled our way back out, realized we wouldn't see much of Tierra Whack or Jon Batiste, and just got in a spot for Duran Duran. Slightly annoying, but this is the deal with being having kids, right?
Duran Duran were fabulous again. My favorite part was definitely when the highly drunk lady next to me started screaming, as the band kicked into "Rio," that this was "THE WOLFES! YEAH THE WOLFES!" and grabbed my wrist really hard. I yelled over that they had opened the whole show with "Hungry Like a Wolf," and that this was "Rio," which made her run away from me and go dance violently somewhere else.
I gotta say, really fun day. I had to back off some expectations, and help the wife back off some timing and simplicity expectations as well, but we ended up having a really fun day.
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