Uncle Jerry’s Bands
A psychedelic Saturday at the Gathering of the Vibes
Fun fact: Bridgeport, Connecticut is the only city in America where Hula-Hoops cause more accidents than cars do. At least, that’s how it is once a year, at the sprawling fiesta in Seaside Park that is the Gathering of the Vibes.
This four-day music festival started in 1996 as a memorial party for Grateful Dead band member Jerry Garcia, who had died the year before. True to the community-building ethos of Deadheads everywhere, the assembly kept meeting, and growing, until it became an annual music, food, and crafts extravaganza. The location of the gathering has changed over time, but Bridgeport has hosted it since 2007.
Saturday’s Hula-Hoopers weren’t screwing around — they had been practicing for the chance to dance at this tie-dyed, starry-eyed blowout since the end of last year’s festival, and they hooped like their hips are the energy source of the future. It was mesmerizing to watch them practice their twirling and whirling while they walked, talked, drank, and danced around the grounds, which boasted three stages, good food and drink, and the chance to cool off with a quick jump in the ocean.
I took a Hula-Hoop to the face around 2:30. It was my fault, really — I tried to cut through a small grassy park on my way to the Green Vibes stage, but I didn’t make it through the gauntlet. My face was still stinging when the Brooklyn jazz fusion band Moon Hooch started their fun, loud, very weird set. Twenty minutes into their crackling, systematic deconstruction of all things harmonic, I could feel the deep dubstep and saxophone riffs reverberating in my teeth.
Most musical acts in the Vibes lineup weren’t as out-there as Moon Hooch, but they did all seem to think outside the box. Saturday’s program showed off a great breadth of folk, rock, soul, funk, and jam bands. Wilco — Saturday’s primetime act, and always a great live group — has been on the go since 1994 making albums that blur the lines between folk, rock, pop, and country, and electronica.
And I’m kicking myself for not booking the whole four-day experience, since it means I missed some inventive and quirky acts like Dark Star Orchestra, The String Cheese Incident, Weezer, and Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals.
But the lesser-known acts on Saturday pretty much killed it. Trevor Hall, a rock-reggae singer with an acoustic guitar and an aw-shucks demeanor, led an upright bass player and a percussionist through a rich and layered set, finding some unlikely orchestral grandeur along the way. The Gaslight Anthem gave the crowd an enthusiastic blast of full-bodied power ballads. Turkuaz delivered a thundering avalanche of high-octane, big-band funk rock. Northampton-based The Primate Fiasco played their signature “old-timey steamfunk sidewalk brasstronica” in the morning, then wandered the grounds later in the day, rousing scores of blanket-sprawled sundozers.
Music aside, much fun goes into people-watching, and at events like this it’s practically like being on safari. Behold: the mighty surfer bro whose fake-tribal patterned swim trunks match his arm tattoos almost perfectly. And look, further down the beach: a guy in a Fishbone T-shirt and a bright red velvet fedora carrying a six-foot-tall inflatable bottle of Fireball cinnamon whiskey. Majestic.
And, wait a minute — is that Jerry Garcia? No, sorry, it’s just 400 guys who look like him.
If the scene here sounds whiter than brunch at James Taylor’s house, that’s because it was. The lack of racial diversity among those in attendance was borderline uncomfortable, although it’s hard to fault anyone in particular for that. But the age range was delightful — small children were frequently spotted having a blast. And, really, you can’t expect everyone in town to come out to a shindig where the vendors have names like “Dancing Hands,” “Third Eye Pinecones,” and “Sunshine Octopus” (those are all real).
At its core, though, this festival caters to that simple human urge to see friends, jam, relax, and look out over the water. By now, it’s a well-tuned operation. What’s that lyric by the Dead? “Come hear Uncle John’s band by the riverside/ Got some things to talk about, here beside the rising tide.”•
