Directors’ chairs at the front for the old folk, standing party at the back. But seriously, what kind of music festival has a barricaded area for seats? Surely one doesn’t sit down to a Rock & Roots gig. And this is the first time we’ve come across a music festival that segregates one audience from another, what with the barriers put up.
But on with the shows. Toots & The Maytals did a good job of warming up the crowd with easy-listening reggae tunes, but we all know who the crowd was really here for. His voice may have been scratched to little more than rough, rambling rasp by time and circumstance, but Bob Dylan is still a living legend, and thousands turned up to see him, just because. There could be no other reason, for most of his songs were barely recognizable through all that rasping and they were sung to a different tune; we had to rely on the backing music to decipher what song was actually playing.
To top that off, the screen went blank during his performance, which left many in the audience no choice but to Google him on their mobiles to see what he looked like right there and then. Others didn’t seem to mind, and were happy to just soak in the atmosphere, some taking turns on the mechanical bronco on festival grounds while he croaked through his set.
Punters who stayed on after Dylan’s hackneyed warbling were not disappointed. San Francisco-based Michael Franti (sans footwear) & Spearhead swaggered onto the stage and immediately broke into their feral and combustible brew of tangy raw reggae, stirringly evocative soul and the boastful potency of socially-conscious hip-hop.
The dreadlocked, heavily inked and massively charismatic Franti clad in a homemade gig shirt broke all the supposed barriers erected in the earlier performance, figuratively speaking, engaging us with a brutal high-octane rendition of “Hey Hey Hey,” “Shake It” and “The Sound of Sunshine” from their latest studio album, The Sound of Sunshine.
The entire crowd was bouncing along to the tunes espousing hope, peace and love, a testament to the impeccably tight musicianship from all of the band.
Everything was blown off the roof when Toots walked on stage for a resplendently intense cameo (if only the two veteran gig goers with us, who denounced him as rusty rasta in his earlier performance, saw this). We were even more stoked when local bluesman Danny Loong heightened the Franticism with a stellar guitar solo. Like a possessed shaman, the ever-grinning Franti bantered with the audience and even sang to Karen, a mother-to-be from Italy who was due in three weeks.
But the early high tempo of the gig tottered off to one replete with mere feel good anthems (we’d wished that there was more than “Yell Fire” and “Bomb the World” to fuel our craving for protest numbers, instead of a list of songs that sounded too similar and didn’t display the vast range that the band is capable of). We were quietly relieved when they belted out a cover of Bob Marley’s seminal classic “One Love” to close the night in sunshiny panache.
