It was a big weekend for music in the San Francisco Bay Area over the past three days. The free Not Strictly Bluegrass Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary, featuring over one hundred artists on six stages in San Francisco’s beautiful Golden Gate Park.
The festival has been paid for (with sponsorship) by billionaire financier and philanthropist Warren Hellman as a gift to the city and people of San Francisco.
A personal thanks from Indie Rock Cafe to Mr. Hellman for all of the great times we’ve had, and plan to have, at the annual festival, which, as its name implies, is not just all bluegrass, and it has become one of California’s largest free annual events, drawing some 300,000-500,000 people annually.
SAN FRANCISCO – Hundreds of thousands of music goers packed into meadows and fields in the western section of the park to see performances from dozens and dozens of bluegrass and country bands, but many of the largest crowds were arguably for non-bluegrass artists like Conor Oberst, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Nick Lowe, Fountains of Wayne, among others.
For last year’s NSBG Fest, approximately 800,000 people attended, and organizers said about the same number came to this year’s festival. For anyone who was there, nearly a million people in Golden Gate Park does not sound crazy, and in typical San Francisco fashion, the crowds were a mix of all kinds of people who came together in the city’s oasis to have fun, enjoy great music and celebrate the beauty and uniqueness of one of the most remarkable cities in the world.
Also over the weekend, there were a number of buzz-worthy concerts, including The Flaming Lips, who played two sold out, back-to-back shows at Oakland‘s historic Fox Theater, and a triple bill at The Independent featuring The Drums, Surfer Blood and The Young Friends.
Friday night’s show was sold out for The Drums headliner as concert goers crammed into the medium-sized, old-theatre-like venue in the city’s center to see one of the hottest break-through bands of 2010, New York City‘s rock-pop quartet, The Drums. The band came out blazing, running through a number of their most popular songs like “Best Friend” and “Let’s Go Surfing”.
Frontman and singer Jonathan Pierce almost never stops moving on stage except when he takes the Iggy-Pop style forward stance, leaning towards the audience before breaking out into another romp on the back of the band’s mainly energetic, catchy sound.