Keith at the Sawdust Festival -- Wednesday, 10July2013

I've been trying to get into the Sawdust Festival for several years now, but they book it up really early and I've never managed to get my application in on time. This year, I sent it in right after I was reminded by driving past the "Sawdust Festival Winter Fantasy" signs at Christmas. Finally!

They gave me three gigs, one on each of the three stages. This first one was the biggest and best stage, called "The Deck". It's right in the middle, slightly up the hill so it overlooks the whole place. There are benches for an audience, and it's kind of nice to play towards the waterfall. But it's also a thoroughfare to the upper booths, so there are frequently people just wandering right through.

Which doesn't bother me, of course -- I'm used to it from Spectrum and the street corners.

The weird part is the schedule. They're pretty adamant about the Festival being about (selling) The Art, not The Music. So they make the bands play a half-hour on and a half-hour off, alternating between the upper Deck stage, and the two ground level stages ("Tavern", and "Grill"). This has exactly the desired effect of preventing people from staying seated (and not browsing Art) for more than a half hour at a time.

It's a bit annoying, knowing that if you manage to accumulate an audience, it'll be compulsorily broken up at the top of the hour. But I guess that gives you a chance to accumulate another one...

The weird monsoon weather presumably kept a lot of the crowd away, but those that came seemed to like my stuff. In the breaks, people wandering through kept mistaking me for a real musician and asking me when the music started, and promising to come back for it. And they mostly actually did.

I didn't have many people at any given time, but at least a few all the time, and most of them quite engaged. What was really flattering was the vendors all around the stage kept coming over to stand at the edges and listen, and many of them would applaud from their remote locations. Apparently they were glad to have someone on that stage that they actually liked. One artist guy came back again and again to insist on "Over the Rainbow" as my closing song for each shift (which was gonna happen anyway), and to bring in a request from "Dave at the glass blowing booth" for "Hallelujah".

So it was fun. Weird to be there for four and a half hours but only get to play for two and a half. But it's a paying gig, and I made a little more in tips, and it's a very pleasant place to play.