The last week of July has been some sort of hell on earth. The temperature has maintained in the upper 80s, feeling like the mid-90s. I’m not usually one to complain when it gets hot, but when this is the week you’ve chosen to move from a second floor apartment to a nicer third floor apartment, you get a little cranky. By the time the last piece of furniture was in place, I was covered in bruises and full of aches and the sweat I lost could fill a tub.
But I must go on, I must live my life—most of all, I could not miss Gathering of the Vibes. For one, I actively sought to cover Gathering. For so many years I’ve kicked myself for not going. Being from Connecticut it is/has become the “hometown” festival, taking place at Seaside Park in Bridgeport. It is also celebrating its twentieth year, making this a special year for the Gathering.
For the uninitiated, Gathering of the Vibes is a jam band festival conceived after the death of Dear Leader, Jerry Garcia. Among the Vibe Tribe as they call themselves, Garcia is revered as you might expect the leader of a cult, an LRH if you will. For the Vibers (as I like to call them), it was a way to gather bands in the spirit of the Dead. In the twenty years since, it has broadened its scope, legitimizing itself as a general interest rock festival that anyone could go to and enjoy with artists like Elvis Costello and Jane’s Addiction headlining past years.
Aside from the lineup, they have done little to erase their roots. Walking the grounds, one is barraged with so many images of the Nine Fingered Icon that the Catholic Church might think it gaudy. Other than dancing bears and lightning bolts and skulls, the vendors were selling a vast array of tie dye, drums, hula hoops, rocks, and customized sandal footwear, which for this crowd was too much shoe and bound to be taken off anyway.
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Despite the redundancy of merch, the singularity of message was refreshing. It’s strange to find an entity such as Gathering so dedicated to the ethos of peace, love, and good vibes as they were. It seemed as if they truly tried to effect some positive change in the festivalgoers. Tents were set up for Oxfam, Save The Sound (a Long Island Sound advocacy group), New England Organ Bank, and World Peace Sanctuary—they are the Peace Pole people (I’m sure you’ve seen them, they say “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in a few different languages).
In between acts, M.C. Gordon Taylor would come on stage, reminding people to stay hydrated, to stretch, and to try to leave the festival grounds cleaner than when they got there by picking up not only their trash, but trash that had been left behind by others. Cleaner than when they came.
The hard part was, as it is always, getting people to follow through on the request. Throughout the three days I was there—I missed the first day due to torrential downpour—I saw piles of trash collect like any other festival. But I also watched as a few people walked around collecting the debris others had made. Not workers, just random attendees. One man specialized in cigarette butts, one young woman I saw get down to her bathing suit to collect trash that had collected along the waterfront. The efforts of these super-motivated people was no match for the crowd-at-large, and if that’s not a metaphor for humanity, I don’t know what is.
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Don’t let me lead you to believe that it was all merch and trash though. There was music. Lots of music. Over the course of four days, so many bands played that you couldn’t negotiate a way to hear all of them if you tried, or had the endurance. That’s because some of the bands played until five in the morning. Being that this was my first Gathering, I decided to stick mostly to the main stage.
The first artist I caught on Friday was Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. I was excited to catch this show mainly because I had never heard them before. I know who they are and what they do, but I never actively or passively consumed their music. I don’t know why, considering that I knew I would be bound to like them.
I think the easiest way to put how their show was would be to say that it was too damn hot to listen to them. They lit the stage on fire. The band came out first and introduced us to what we would be hearing over the next nearly two hour set (for an opener!) a la “I Can’t Turn You Loose” from the Blues Brothers movies (as opposed to Otis Redding’s original). The Backup singers Saun & Starr came out and did a few songs of their own from Look Closer to get the crowd pumped for the main act.
Words can’t possibly described the intensity, the fire with which Sharon Jones performs. She encapsulated the entire Motown/Stax records discography, at times doing impersonations of Gladys Knight and Tina Turner, but fully engaging her whole personality to sell you a good time. At one point she began teaching the crowd a few dances, asking that they follow a long, by the end even the most ardent stiffbody had at least a foot tapping.
The most heartwarming moment came when she talked about her cancer diagnosis. She stopped the band for a moment, and asked; “do you know why I scream? Do you know why I scream.” She asked again, building up anticipation, “do you know why I scream?” It took her a while to answer, but she finally said with a deep breath, “It’s because I’m alive.” At that point we were ready to go anywhere she might want to take us.
It took a while for me to catch my breath; I had to go sit next to the beach and just sit. I was hardly ready for the Tedeschi Trucks Band who came out next. Overwhelmed by what I had just witnessed, I only heard the first song on my way back to the main stage.
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Tedeschi Trucks did not disappoint or let down the reverential spirit. The husband-wife team of Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks is so talented, you have to stand in awe. I’d hate to pin it down on the fact that they are married, but what else can it be between those two that they have such chemistry together on stage? Both supremely talented artists, they just click onstage; holy matrimony.
Their set-list also leaned heavily on the R&B side, but third generation R&B, meaning that they covered songs that were already covers to begin with. Two of them were songs that Joe Cocker did. Their finest example was “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” which made sense considering the company they were in, although they did risk the crowd taking the provocation too serious (“hey, that’s not a bad idea, we should get stoned!”).
They nearly killed me at the end when they brought out most of Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings to play a massive rendition of Sly & The Family Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song” into “Let Me Take You Higher.” Apparently, the cover is common for Tedeschi Trucks (they even performed it at an earlier Gathering), but the one/two punch really knocks you out.
On Friday, I had only stuck around for one more artist, Gregg Allman, because the heat was making me tired. They don’t offer much in the ways of seating, they expect you to have brought that on your own, and the grounds don’t provide for much relief from direct sun as the stage is the only thing large enough to cast a shadow. They at least had water refill stations, which I’m sure prevented a lot of heat stroke.
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For fans of The Allman Brothers looking at this year’s lineup it seemed like the only member of the Allman Bros. Band that wasn’t there was Dickey Betts (obviously, some of the original lineup have died). Jaimoe and Gregg made up the old guard, Derek and Warren made up the new. I think a lot of us left out hope that there would be a jam between the four of them that never came to fruition.
What did happen was Allman played a set that was reasonable, but not cathartic as the previous two artists had been. Perhaps that’s a symptom of having seen the Allman Brothers ten years prior, just after Dickey left again and Warren Haynes rejoined. He played the hits, “Statesboro Blues” and “I’m No Angel” were the opening numbers in his set, and that didn’t leave him much place to go.
The band behind him seemed to be of inferior quality to what Allman deserves. They tried their best to impersonate rather than reinvent the style made popular by Gregg, Duane, and the gang the way that Derek and Warren did. That became overly true when Derek did finally come out to join the band to play “Southbound.” For a brief moment, it sounded like it should. (For those in the know, you know why this particular song might be special a few years shy of the 50th anniversary.)
With “Southbound” behind me I wandered lonely as a clown: the one dude not wearing tie dye, and as far as I could see the only dude wearing full length jeans. It was a stupid move, maybe they were on to something with their shorts. All I knew was that I was tired, and would never move out of this default for the rest of the weekend.
Article: Christopher Gilson
Photos: Kayla Klein
