Searching for old San Francisco at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags Hugo Ferry juggles at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2023.Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATEAt Hardly Strictly Bluegrass on Friday, the lawn in front of the Tower of Gold stage was filled with people clumped together in little pockets of activity, clustered around picnic blankets and hacky sacks. With the fog and the trees hiding the surrounding city from view, it was easy to imagine stumbling onto an artists’ commune in some remote patch of the Pacific Northwest.Founded in 2001, San Francisco’s annual free bluegrass-adjacent festival draws some of the Bay Area’s most enthusiastic (and eclectic) music fans to Golden Gate Park. Friday is always Hardly Strictly Bluegrass’ slowest day. That was the case this year especially, with a thick layer of mist moistening cheeks and shrouding the sun. But “slow” for Hardly Strictly doesn’t mean much. Thousands of people were traversing the park. I came here because I had heard that Hardly Strictly was an event where one could get a taste of “old San Francisco.” The festivalgoers I spoke with seemed to agree. One described the event as “the soul of San Francisco.” Another remarked, in now-familiar phrasing, “It feels like old San Francisco.” A few associated Hardly Strictly with the city’s history of free concerts in the park, which traces all the way back to the Human Be-In sparking the Summer of Love.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adI’m 24 years old, and in my three months living in San Francisco, I’ve rubbed elbows with enough of my elders to hear the phrase “old San Francisco” tossed around semiregularly. It’s always in reference to something missing. I’ve caught glimpses of old San Francisco — I think I have, at least. But I’ve never encountered it head-on. Here’s everything I understand about old San Francisco, after a few months of these conversations:Occasionally, old San Francisco comes out of hiding for things like the Folsom Street Fair, but it scampers away when exposed to too much light. Old San Francisco wears tie-dye shirts but not the ones that you see on the college kids at Outside Lands. It wears leather. Old San Francisco was the ’60s, the ’80s — was it the ’90s? It was before tech, that much is certain, or at least before the dot-com bubble, and before Facebook and Google flooded the city with more yuppies than it could hold. Old San Francisco was Burning Man, at least before it became rich and moved to the desert. It was Jerry Garcia. It was Harvey Milk. It was Heklina and the Stud. It was the raves in the ’90s — no, not those raves, the other ones.When it comes to old San Francisco, everyone seems to agree on exactly three things: There is a city called San Francisco, at some point that city changed, and the change was bad.A thick fog envelops Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2023.Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATEAdvertisementArticle continues below this adAt Lilly Hiatt’s Hardly Strictly set on Friday, one longtime Bay Area resident described the “old SF feeling” like so: “Free but more in terms of being free, as opposed to economically free,” he explained.It’s not hard to see what he meant. I spotted no fewer than three groups of jugglers tossing pins and hacky sacks. Children climbed the tipped pines at the edges of a field. One group set a cutting board on their picnic blanket and began to gingerly cut a baguette sandwich into five even pieces. One man sat on the grass facing the stage, reading the Wall Street Journal while the music played. If a group of rock climbers stumbled into a Dead & Company show, the cohort might look something like the crowd at Hardly Strictly today. You have the younger, sportier, hacky sack types, and then you have gray-haired folks wearing cowboy hats and jackets spotted with Grateful Dead insignias. In the line on the way to the bathroom, I overheard a group of young professionals debating the merits of a mysterious new psychedelic called “unicorn.” AdvertisementArticle continues below this adFree entry and unobtrusive security meant plenty of people peddled wares. On the pathways between stages, two people waved down passersby, offering “free meditation books.” Others sold mushrooms, beer, tie-dye shirts and beaded necklaces. I even saw a man selling Guy Fawkes masks. It was a pleasant sort of free-for-all, which added to the festival’s unmanicured charm.Unmanicured — in a good way. At least on Friday, the most relaxed day, the whole experience was streamlined and free of anxiety. Food and bathroom lines were short. Crowds were sparse enough to easily maneuver from one stage to the next. The port-a-potties were clean. Even the waste in the baskets was properly sorted. I arrived just in time for the sleeper hit of Friday’s lineup, Orchestra Gold, an Oakland band that fuses psychedelic rock with Malian musical traditions. Its grooves were something lifted from a chase sequence, and the horn stabs and Mariam Diakite’s rapid-fire Bambara-language vocals pushed the beautiful anxiety over the edge. In the crowd, people danced with their shoulders as much as their feet.At the risk of sounding like an audio dork: Hardly Strictly might be the best-sounding outdoor live music event I’ve attended. The bass had the thickness of humidity, the guitars were warm and gritty, and the vocals rang through clearly.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adNobody flexed the power of the speaker system better than blues titan Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, whose set was the day’s de facto main event. When Kingfish solos on the guitar, he throws his head back. His solos are lyrical, sometimes deceptively simple, but the skill lies in the execution. He doesn’t just play the notes; he makes each of them croon. Kingfish locks you into a groove and then throws 20 kilojoules of force at you, just as you begin to get settled. You can feel the air pressure differential, the bass touching your skin. With this sound system, the drummer might as well be swinging his sticks at your temples. After Kingfish’s set, an emcee got onstage. “Hey! You guys getting your money’s worth so far?” he asked. The crowd cheered.Festivalgoers listen to Cassandra Lewis perform at the Horseshoe Hill stage at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2023.Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATEAdvertisementArticle continues below this adAt the Arrow stage, Buffalo Nichols cut through the fog with his white-hot guitar tone. Nashville singer-songwriter Lilly Hiatt is also a new favorite. Her music blends folk, rock and country, and her earnest voice brings the songs to life. It felt special. Compared with the Portola Music Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass attracts a wider range of ages, professions, lifestyles and socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s a nice thing to see a park filled with so many types of people — and to see those people all genuinely enjoying themselves. Is this what everyone meant by old San Francisco?But it’s hard not to see a hint of irony in that judgment. On paper, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is a far cry from old San Francisco. The festival began in 2001 and foregrounds bluegrass, which is a style of Appalachian roots music. It was funded by the gift of a venture capitalist — the sort of figure I would lump in with new, not old, San Francisco. In other words, Hardly Strictly is not very old, and not very San Franciscan either, at least in any obvious, traditional sense. Hardly Strictly is, however, fun. Meaningful, fulfilling fun — an event that you leave feeling like you’ve eaten your vegetables.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adSince when did everything good belong to the past? I’m not saying that the city hasn’t lost anything in the past half-century. But maybe we can call a good thing a good thing and give new San Francisco credit where it’s due.

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