By: David Rachac
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From the time I first heard of it, I had questions about the Wild River Festival. I couldn’t quite see the link between music, film AND comedy that would make it a cohesive festival concept. I wondered about the drawing power of a lot of the bands that were involved, especially for the price that was being asked. And throughout the summer, I just didn’t hear a lot of chatter about it – I was hoping that enough people would stumble across it to make it a viable event for years to come.
So reading in the paper about a relatively good crowd for the Taj Mahal/Rev. Al Green show on Saturday at Harriet Island, I was a little more optimistic that things were going to work out well. With the Experience Hendrix Tour (with original Band of Gypsies bassist Billy Cox and Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid) and Nickel Creek (who just announced they were going on hiatus after the tour) playing on Sunday, I hoped there would be another nice-sized crowd that would continue the good vibe.
But as the morning progressed, the feeling grew that I was going to be in for a rough day. Saturday night’s weather report predicting “chance of sun” became “overcast” by Sunday morning and turned into a full-on “mid-50s and drizzling” by noon – surely, not the words that the organizers of the Wild River Festival wanted to hear. And sure enough, within about five seconds of me pulling out of my driveway, the cold rain started and would continue off and on through much of the afternoon. I had hoped to spend a little time checking out what other kinds of ancillary things might be on the festival ground before the music started, but as I got near Harriet Island, the rain started coming down harder, and I wondered if it was going to be a total wash-out.
Rather than allowing myself to get drenched before the show even started, I decided to grab lunch at one of the local restaurants and try to time it just as the music was scheduled to start. As I headed back into St. Paul, I drove by the entrance gate of the festival and saw only three people waiting to enter – and this was only an hour and a quarter before the music was supposed to start. People might be showing up for Nickel Creek later in the evening, but it looked like they were going to wait out the storm for as long as they could. Returning to Harriet Island shortly before 2 p.m., I came across only three other groups of people on my way to the show– all of whom asked if I was looking to buy a ticket. I guess the moral of that story is not to buy tickets for friends who are going to stiff you if the weather goes bad.
Upon entering the grounds, I was a little surprised at how empty it was, and not just the lack of people, but the small number of food booths and vendors. There were a couple of beer and wine stands, a soft drink stand, a couple of food booths, and that was about it. As far as vendors go, there was a Wild River merch booth that shared space with the Experience Hendrix merch, three or four non-profit booths, a couple of people doing chair massages, a guy selling sunglasses (not ideal on such a rainy day) and a few other groups, including the Current, City Pages and the MMA.
The area that was gated off for the Festival is about half of the island, basically everything west of the Showboat – but the area that was actually used by the Festival, including all of the booths and Porta-Potties, only filled about one-third of the allotted space. A huge area of space, including the permanent stage, was left unused. Although there are probably good reasons for it being set-up the way it was (for instance, if you put the fences too close to the stage, people could just stand outside the fence and listen to the music without paying), it just reinforced the feeling of emptiness, and that the organizers either overestimated what they needed or wound up downsizing from their original intent.
When Robinella and Cruz Contreras finally took the stage twenty minutes late (understandable, with the rain preventing the crew from setting up), there were just 60 people watching in front of the stage. Although they certainly put on a professional show and showered the audience with sympathy for coming out on such a dreary day (at one point, Robinella cooed “Let’s sing love songs and pretend it’s romantic sitting in the cold rain”), her understated Rickie Lee Jones-meets-Norah Jones fusion of folk and jazz got kind of lost in the cold and the rain. And because the weather pushed back the starting time, their set time was cut down to about 35 minutes, a trend that continued throughout the afternoon.
The MMA did a cool thing by having Minnesota Music Award-nominated bands play short acoustic sets at the MMA booth in between bands on the main stage. Over the course of the afternoon, I saw STOOK! (who didn’t let a little thing like a broken string prevent him from giving it his all, saying “A guy doesn’t need all six strings anyway”), Bill Mike (who talked humbly about Minnesota being, “the land of 10,000 bands,” then proceeded to shred on his acoustic while throwing down some serious distortion) and Martin Devaney (as two guys walked by me, I heard one say to the other “Yeah, and he SOUNDS like Dylan too!”). Although there weren’t a lot of people who stopped by to watch these local musicians play, I thought it was a nice diversion from the elements and the time in between bands.
I was a little surprised how long it took in between bands to get the next band out, but again, I imagine that the weather had a lot to do with it. I will say that I thought the sound was clean and crisp – quite unlike many of the Taste of Minnesota shows I have seen, where they seem to divvy up three PA set-ups across five stages and overblow everything to kingdom come. They also had three camera people shooting each band and projecting it onto a large screen next to the stage, which was a nice touch. Even though for the bands I saw, I could have stood close enough to the performers to get a picture as big as the one on the screen, I am sure it was nice for the people in the back of the crowd at the Rev. Al Green show to be able to get a closer view.
The hybrid-bluegrass band The Greencards came out and injected some needed energy into the crowd, with a mostly up tempo mix of songs that highlighted individual band members’ performances on violin, mandolin and acoustic guitar. Musically, the Greencards were the closest in sound to the headliner Nickel Creek, but several people I talked to remembered them from when they toured with Bob Dylan last year. They got a nice response to their set, with the audience taken in by singer/bassist Carol Young’s outgoing personality and charm.
After another longer-than-expected delay, singer/songwriter Mindy Smith followed, playing guitar and accompanied by Lex Price on mandolin. Again, it was hard not to lose an acoustic duo in the cold mist, but they did play a couple of songs that some in the audience recognized, including her Cities 97 hit “Come to Jesus” and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” But their set was also cut a little short in order to get the Experience Hendrix Tour up on stage.
By this time, though, I was done. The combination of the cold, the wind and the drizzling rain had taken a lot out of me, and the lack of other things to keep me engaged got my mind wandering to anywhere but the Wild River Festival. As I was walking out, blues guitarist Bernard Allison was starting, and there looked to be only about 700-800 people in front of the stage, and I hoped that the bad weather and low turnout on Sunday didn’t put an end to the Wild River Festival before it even had a chance to really get going.
Location Info:
Harriet Island
Artist Info: Bill Mike, Martin Devaney, Mindy Smith, Robinella and Cruz Contreras, Stook, The Greencards
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