One of the things I have not been able to explore as much as I have wanted to is the local music scene – both what’s up in Boston as well as all the weird and unusual things going on in Vermont. Problem is I don’t like going to these shindigs alone (for reasons of safety) and none of my local friends are uh… as enthusiastic as I am about avant guard music. Soooo…. when I learned that a band I actually really adore out of Boston was showing up in Fitchburg for an open-air gig in the park I couldn’t say no.
If I’m honest it’d been a tough week for me but that made me all the more determined to get out there and enjoy this. Problem is there was pretty much no information anywhere. All I could find is it started at 4PM and tickets were $10 online (with no link to buy them) and $15 at the gates. Oooookaaaay. Right from the get-go I thought 4PM sounded weird as fuck for such a thing but whatever… I can still roll with it.
And I showed up at 4PM to a pretty empty park. In fact it was so empty that I wondered if I had the right park! Turns out I had accidentally bumbled into it from a rear entrance. And it was soooo Fitchburgy. To one side a plaque read about how this park was here because the river was soooo beautiful that it was determined it must be a park. And indeed there was some pretty impressive masonry holding up a flag whoosing over… a VERY overgrown and completely unkempt riverbank. Even hiking into the middle of nowhere I hadn’t seen a thicket of weeds so ferociously thick. I took a photo – and then was asked by a man if I was a volunteer. No? He told me to check in and pointed frantically towards the other side of the park. I shrugged and did as I was told.
Approaching the ticketmaster I asked what was up today, pretending to play dumb for a moment. She told me it was a Steampunk Festival and that there were vendors, food trucks, beer from a local brewery, and live music but they wouldn’t be starting for an hour. I knew 4PM had to be wrong! She didn’t even have tickets or anything so I bid her adieu and wandered the streets like a common urchin for a while. Until I got tired, found a bench, and just sat people watching. Problem is there seemed to be just as many people watching me, including a shuttle bus driver who kept passing and giving me the dirty eyeball. WHY? Is it the orange hair? It’s the orange hair.. or perhaps my general ne’er-do-well appearance. Two parked cop cars were also watching me sit idly by myself. I promise I wasn’t dealing. Seriously. Just minding my own!
Eventually 5PM rolled around so I got off my duff and wandered back to the park, said hello again to the ticket master, and gave her exact change because she didn’t have a change box yet. I did however learn that this whole event was an attempt to raise money to buy the park a permanent stage. There’d been a folk festival the month before (which I wish I knew about) and next month they’re holding Fiesta Latina (Saturday 9/14/19 from 5-9) I could feel good about supporting such a cause. Music and art are a wonderful way to vitalize a community.
I wandered around looking at the vendors for as long as I could muster, said a happy hello to them, but really… there was one guy signing people up for a raffle, the beer guy, and two craft vendors. The food trucks were still amiss. I felt bad for the two crafters, this was the saddest turn out for such a thing I had ever seen. Obviously this meant I needed to shower one with praise for her art (which was actually nice, mind you!) and stop to get a Henna tattoo from the other. I’d always liked the idea of letting someone doodle on my skin… I mean this isn’t quite as involved as checking “volunteer sorry carcass to be full body painted” off my bucket list but it was close enough. Did you know Henna smells really weird? It smells like a head shop. I wasn’t real fond of it and kept smelling myself the rest of the day. SIGH. I did however listen intently to the care instructions – should last 24 hours before starting to fleck off leaving a stain. Don’t bash it against things. That last instruction may have been too much for me – someone who has consistently failed at being refined and dainty since birth. And yes, I saw the exasperated look the artist gave me as I then wandered off and sat on the ground in what I can only guess was the least feminine manner possible. Shockingly I did not smudge it in the grass! I did however pick it all off later that night because it was driving me nuts. Can’t win them all. TO NEW EXPERIENCES!
By now I wasn’t the only one in the audience but I was pretty damn close. A row of local older hippies sat in camping chairs up near the front. Damn! I had two of those in my car if only I had the audacity to lug them through Fitchburg and into the park. Nope, nevermind. I’m nutty enough a scene without a damn chair. I plopped my ass down a little behind them and off to the side.
AND SO THE SHOW BEGAN! First up was The Dirge Carolers. To me they had a typical steam punk sound mixed with a lot of murder ballad type lyrics. I relaxed. Gallows humor will always be a hit to me. By now some people were filing in and out and I was starting to enjoy the people watching. There were a lot of costumes, corsets, top hats, bustles, goggles, that sort of thing, and flashes of unnaturally colored hair abounded. I was home here. However this was not the feeling everyone got as I witnessed one old black dude just wandering aimlessly, staring wide-eyed at everyone with an unmistakable impression on his face, “Uh-oh, the crazy white people have taken over the park again.” He wasn’t wrong.
I was sitting directly in the sun which was glaring in my eyes bad. I couldn’t see a damn thing but I knew the stage was probably populated by oddly adorned individuals – how? Well by the amount of amateur photographers who seemed to be floating around taking snaps with great glee – captive bizarre human subjects!! I’ll admit, I had thought about doing the same but I didn’t bring my camera, just my phone. One particular photographer was college aged, seemed to think a lot about each capture. She kept circling me, taking photos of everything around me. And then she worked up the nerve to take a photo of me, just me. There was NO WAY she could hide this so I just looked up from my reclined position on the grass and smiled broadly. Sorry. Better luck next time getting a natural shot of me. She seemed embarrassed. I just laughed and nodded.
As the band continued to play the most Fitchburg-y thing happened. A train rumbled through right behind the stage completely blocking out all music for a good three minutes or so as it dragged car after car after car behind it. I thought it was a terrific piece of ambiance for a steampunk festival! The band played on like they were on the goddamn Titanic. That’s dedication there. They eventually left off with some song from a B-rated horror movie they wrote it for, sullenly leaving the stage with this odd lamentation, “Sorry, no Zombie Llama today.” Though I’d never heard of this band I suddenly wanted to hear Zombie Llama.
The first intermission was fun. The park was still pretty quiet. There were people around but it seemed like they were just here for the food truck (ouch.) I considered getting up and buying myself a nice shwarma but I’d been struggling with bad nausea all week and wasn’t really hungry. Maybe in a bit. In the meantime I was being kept well entertained by a human blockhead running around with a long nail and power drill – an act I have seen many times before but this one was way more fun because the audience he was playing to – those nice old hippie ladies- were WELL GROSSED OUT, turning their heads in abject horror and audibly gagging. Sorry bud, it’s just not your day. He wandered off a smidge sullen.
Once everyone settled back down with their assorted dinners the second band went up to bat. They were the Busted Jug Band a strange assortment of heavily costumed, utterly bizarre, peoples carrying rubber chickens. And some instruments…. which were very… DIY… They also introduced every one of the members, not by name, but by aggressively odd nicknames which I am not entirely certain weren’t made up on the spot. My favorite was Root Boy which just… brings up SO MANY QUESTIONS. Like what kind of root? And whhhy? Do you aspire to be a turnip? Because you’re giving me a root vegetable vibe. Even better one of the other band members was wearing translucent angel wings… which during the last intermission freaked me the hell out because all I could see through a halo of sun glare was a top-hatted silhouette and angel wings. For a second I thought I might have died. No such luck.
But anyway, the music from this band was… different for sure! And perhaps a bit familiar? I think I may have seen them before… This had a much more silly feel to it. No one up there was taking their life even the tiniest bit seriously. And of course that intense whimsy was all the more adorable to me. I was pretty happy on my little patch of grass though my knees and back weren’t so much. I contemplated lying on the ground and staring at the sky for a while. I could always tell people walking by I was on acid and watching the pretty clouds (there were no clouds) as I knew in this crowd that’d be a perfectly acceptable thing to say… I held it together.
By the time the second band finished up I was just really loving the vibe of everyone here. The old hippies were randomly getting up, wandering, and dancing, and hugging each other – I’m not going to lie, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were on acid. They were warm and lovely bunch. Most of the lookee-loos had wandered off but more and more steam-punky looking people were showing up and I’ll be damned if that old black dude didn’t pull up a chair behind me with his daughter and her friends. Shout out to all the cool dads out there who don’t get their kids hobbies at all but still support them! I can’t tell you how much I respect that. His daughter and her friends were in the maybe 12-14 age range. She was sporting a dark purple mohawk and was giving me some strong Aspie vibes but I couldn’t be happier with that. Be your weird self. She stuttered to me that she liked my hair. I told her I liked hers too and then she blurted out, “But it BURNS!” What? “Bleaching it! It burns so bad!” Ooooh, I don’t think you’re supposed to keep it in that long… “TWO HOURS! AND I CAN’T HAVE MY NAILS DONE EITHER!” Why? She held up her nails, two well done fake nails still remaining with all the others hacked the hell off. I grok that. I held up my own in solidarity and laughed. She asked if I liked music. I said all kinds and asked what she liked listening to. She listed a bunch of 90’s bands and I suddenly felt really old. I felt only somewhat better when I recognized the one modern band she did mention – Panic at the Disco – but if I am brutally honest I only have heard the name in passing. I haven’t the foggiest idea what they sing.
Meanwhile as this intermission dragged on the human block head came out with fire. Ah, fire eating. How dual purpose. But he wasn’t having a great time with it. No one here seemed impressed, the kids were vocally not entertained, and eventually when he couldn’t get his last trick to go right he gave this exasperated expression and wandered off, leaving the stage to a chick who worked at the local eatery across the street. Her fire came attached to hula hoops and she wasn’t fucking around. I was actually quite impressed! We’d see her intermittently for the rest of the night doing different acts – all with various things in flames. It was probably at this time one of the girls wandered off and cornered the blockhead/fire eater and somehow elicited his entire life story from him. I got to hear all about it a few minutes later and had to struggle really hard not to laugh. I’m not eavesdropping, no siree.
The last band up was the one I came for: Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys. They were having some issues setting up with unwanted feedback loops and were taking awhile. I had already seen them perform two or three times before – never thought I’d see them again. That last time I went they didn’t come on stage until the establishment was nearly closed. The pamphlet said they were unpredictable and I had heard rumors that they were hard to work with because of these issues but even with all that they have to be one of the best experiences of my life. They really truly believe that art, love, and music can cure all the world’s ills and their audience is so vibrant, creative, and accepting that in each of those instances I got the hugest contact high just from all the warm fuzzies in the air. That’s what I came for! That and the music. This band… raw fucking talent. And this was obvious when they finally got to singing and the whole audience which had been fidgety and complaining behind me just went, “WOW!” And the grumpy old dad? “I guess this WAS worth waiting for them to set up!”
It had started with sweet sad violin music, not a note out of place, that lulled the audience before walloping them over the head with strong passionate vocals and more traditional instruments. Absolutely amazing. And some of the band members had young children whose birthday it was so they all got up on the stage and danced in a cloud of bubbles as a few songs were dedicated to them. That was certainly different than the body positive burlesque dancers and drag kings I was used to surrounding this act but it was so…. sweet. And seemed so right, all at the same time. Maybe with time everyone grows up – but the smartest among us clutch tightly to the passion and whimsy that brought us this far. I was overjoyed to get one short video of the madness, one of my favorite songs – a cover of I am Sam Hall (Best. Version. Ever.) which I will post below. As the music came to an end I slinked silently back into the night where I found comfort in the darkness and drove quietly home, a smile on my face.