By Rosehairy Legs
It all started with house shows. I moved into a garden shed in the back of a large communal house in North Oakland, and we were excited about a lot of things. We’d discuss our creative visions, share epic stories about our favorite alternative forms of travel (hitch hiking vs train hopping vs bike trips) and plot our immersive parties on the front porch over endless pots of coffee and shared spliffs. We decided to host shows once a month, and the everchanging and endlessly creative inhabitants of our home meant we had a lot of connections to musicians within the community and abroad.
Once a month or so our messy collective sprang to life — brooms and rags in action, record player bumping. We’d clean up the yard and the common spaces, redecorating with newfound objects from freepiles, sometimes fabricating props like cottony clouds billowing down from the ceiling. By early evening there were good smells bubbling out of the kitchen from big pots of stew, or pasta and veggies simmering in a cauldron of sauce. Eventually, some time before or after the last hangers-on finally stumbled home, guest musicians would retire into their sleeping bags on the living room floor or curl up on the porch sofa. Perhaps one band member was lucky enough to get snuggled by Sazmo, the sweetest of house cats.
I’ve done a lot of touring with my own bands over the years, making the most of friendships with other musicians. If I follow opportunity there’s always a place to play, a place to stay, and I can provide the same hospitality when folks come through Oakland. These creative connections still feel like my truest form of riches, the epitome of what I love about DIY music culture. You get a view into someone else’s world, what the stars look like from their backyard, what crazy outfits are in their closet, which albums they collect, where they walk for morning coffee. The (deaf?) kitten who likes to hang out inside the kick drum even while the drums are being played.
These days I don’t do as much band touring anymore, but I still find myself plotting adventures with brave friends. We travel by bicycle, and living in California gives us the opportunity to do so year round. I have a solid crew: a motley assortment of young and old bicycle riding weirdos, staunch outdoorspeople and lifelong wanderers, fearless of the weather.
It was on a bicycle trip to Angel Island about 5 years ago that my life took a turn. Angel Island is a place that you may not have heard of, since many residents of Berkeley and SF don’t even know it exists. It sits in the middle of the bay not too far from Alcatraz, across from the chaos of San Francisco’s bustling waterfront and North Beach neighborhoods, yet somehow entirely remote. What makes this place special, besides a little endemic mole and many strange abandoned buildings from bygone eras, is its complete inaccessibility to automobiles. You can take a ferry there, or a sailboat, or even a kayak, but no bridge spans from the mainland to the wilds of this mysterious place. How raccoons, deer and, more recently, coyotes got there remains a bit of a mystery — I like to imagine they came on tangled rafts of floating trash.
We had camped out at kayak camp, a 20 person site down a muddy hillside, and as the fog rolled away we went out to ride around the island and explore. We found a military battery, doors open, dark passageways that once held ammunition now littered with driftwood and pinecones. The battery was perched near the top of the mountain facing San Francisco, flanked by 3 campsites and not much else. As we surveyed the multi level ramparts, the strange passages, odd staircases and plateaus of concrete, a sweet adventurous friend of mine, a retired librarian, turned to me and said “Wouldn’t this be the best place for a music festival?”…and I had to agree. It didn’t take long for our excitement to spark like the cracklings of a fresh campfire. What could be more fun than exploring the world, sleeping outside, communal meals, evenings full of music and mornings full of coffee and sunshine? Sharing all this with our not-yet-bikey friends! And inviting bands!!! We had to try it…
The trickiest part about creating a multi-day DIY music festival campout is finding community to collaborate with. Lucky us…we have just that. My bike camping crew is family. We cook together, we eat together, we climb mountains together, we draw arrows on the ground in chalk so that no one misses the turns. When someone’s got a flat, we sit down with them while they fix it, offer them whiskey and make up a silly song. We dry our socks over an open fire, teach each other crafts and wilderness skills. We swim naked under bridges with the swallows and the bats.
And now I’d like to share the newest skills we’ve acquired, the ones we use to book music festivals…
You can find out how to book any campsite by checking online. You do have to plan ahead — sometimes as much as six months in advance.
Here, we have multiple group campsites that can host between 35 and 300 people depending on the price. These are sites that anyone can book if they call in. But you’re up against a lot of other boy scout troops, church groups, schools and other well-organized normies, so it’s best to have a team of at least 5-10 people to call in on the appropriate morning in order to secure camping. For our events, we pick a first choice of dates and locations, and try to have our second and third choices planned out as well, since there’s no guarantee that we’ll get what we want even with multiple folks calling in for several hours on end. At some parks, we find that we need to reserve 3 or more sites in order to avoid sharing our sonic space with other campers who might be seeking a quiet time in nature, not a bunch of bands.
This brings us to another necessity — site visits. The more people you can get to visit the site ahead, the better understanding you’ll have of what your event might be like. Folks start to get excited when they see a space and can imagine the possibilities. Some campgrounds have cool structures that can provide shade or shelter in inclement weather. Some allow fires, some do not. You might find location specific ways to install art or deco, and visualize how to add lighting for utility and ambiance.
What do you need to make a music festival? If you’ve never done an event like this before, try it on a small scale first. Our very first music campout, our practice run before Angel Island, was a 35 person campout at Pt. Pinole.
We loaded a few vans with an excess of music gear – drums, battery powered amps, mics, stands and a small piano. Acoustic pianos once inhabited every well-to-do parlor in the country. They’re free on Craigslist, but someday even this seemingly endless resource will disappear. We treat our pianos with love, passing them to good homes and even installing pneumatic wheels on our main set of ivories so it’s fit for adventure. If you need battery powered music gear, Guitar Center has a great free rental policy – Buy stuff, save the box and receipt, and return within 45 days for a full refund.
As experienced campers, we knew to bring a lot of firewood and a lot of beer to Pt. Pinole. Over the course of our four day weekend we set up camp, adorned the stage and kitchen areas with lights, deco and tents for shade, and enjoyed the good vibes as 12 bands serenaded each other, plus a few lucky guests. Really it felt like everyone there was participating in the art in some way. Some people were making food. Another person brought battery and solar powered lights that proved indispensable. Others brought cargo bikes and helped musicians move their gear from the parking lot to the site — a hefty 1.5 mile trek through forested hills and grasslands along the bay. Seal Pup Fest went very well. As we stood on the hill watching the sunset and hearing the music waft up from our little pop up village below, we knew we could do it again. And that we wanted to.
What about food? Well, it depends on your style and resources. We love to feed people, and our lead chef has a determination as big as his heart. A few heavy duty portable propane stoves, a big cast iron griddle for frying potatoes, a giant tea kettle, large coffee filters and insulated carafes, and a heavy duty fire extinguisher have all become part of our arsenal. Buckets upon buckets of vegetables get chopped at home and hauled out so they can go into the stir fry.
How do you communicate about a music festival? Well, I’m old fashioned and I like email. I send emails to plan in-person picnic meetings, online meetings and group bike rides to visit proposed event sites. We have an email account just for our event series, which was annoying to set up but very useful — it means the communication stays separate from my personal affairs. It also means we can have multiple email moderators (also a bit tricky to set up, but worthwhile). We use multiple email lists for volunteers, core volunteers, and campers. We try to remember to use b.c.c. — and just in case I screw it up, my sweetie helped me set up the “undo send” email function, which has saved me from tears. There might be ways around this, but we also use many of google’s free services such as sheets, docs and forms.
We’ve turned to using forms as an easy way to aggregate the info we collect. Not because we’re monitoring whether or not people chip in funds, but because we need to understand our numbers so that we buy enough food, and have enough parking. It turns out that cars are by far the biggest hassle of a group campout. You can (often) fit a lot more humans into a campground than the technical capacity of the site, but if they each drive their own vehicle you’re fucked. So we encourage people to carpool, or better yet ride a bike! Heck, we’ll bring your camping gear to the site ahead of time if you wanna join the group ride. Or if you want to try bike camping, strap a rack on your steed and hit the bay trail with us. There’s some fabulous bike camping opportunities for beginners all around the bay, keeping to the flats and the bridges. And there’s mountains here that will kick your ass and prepare you for bike touring anywhere you want to go in the world.
How do you finance a music festival? This one is tricky. If you need a starter fund to pay for food and camping, you can throw a few fundraiser house parties. This can also help spread the word about your endeavor and recruit more movers and shakers to participate. If folks like the idea some may be able to pitch in out of pocket. And we’ve always found that when a lot of people are doing a lot of quality work for free, it spreads a sense of goodwill that inspires folks to be generous. Our events are never advertised or ticketed, they are notaflof and the costs are covered by suggested donation. No one gets paid to work — it’s a giant labor of love. When we collect funds that exceed our expenses, we offer thank you stipends to the bands.
How do you advertise a DIY music festival campout? YOU DON’T! At least we don’t, because we don’t want the cops or the park rangers to shut us down. Our events are not technically festivals, they are Family Reunions, a point that we reiterate over and over in our email communications. We encourage our community to forward the email invitation to their friends, to help the community grow, to keep bringing in new artists of different genres. But we draw the line and say NO POSTING ON SOCIAL MEDIA. When bands mess that up, as touring bands sometimes do, we ask them to take down their posts so they don’t jeopardize our events. Amplified music is technically not allowed in regional parks, but rangers tend to turn a blind eye because they appreciate what we do. State Parks are trickier — be aware that state park rangers can have a stick up their ass about the rules, and they may shut down your event. It’s happened to us.
How do you book a music festival? Well, start small. Book your own band, and a few others that you really know. If you don’t know bands, investigate the DIY scene where you live. Look for the house parties, the cafe shows, the park shows, the anarchist collective shows, the underground parades. Remember that you can’t quite control what you create if you aren’t offering people cash dollar capitalist compensation, which is cool. Real DIY community isn’t one person’s dream, it’s a group effort, organic and alive. People have to want to join for the love of it, and for that they need the freedom to influence it as well. Once you make friends with a few really rad bands, once you show people hospitality, appreciation, hard work, quality art…the reputation that your events are fun will ripple across communities. Pro sound people will offer their time and their gear, because they know they can enhance the experience for everyone. More people will want to join, to help, to bring their ideas and talents. Through word of mouth, we’ve recruited large interactive musical installations, epic sculptures, bike-powered carnival rides, homemade ice cream pop-ups, live screen printing of fresh designs for events, and pedal-powered sound systems. We’ve enjoyed performances by bands spanning from punk to hip hop, folk, jazz, blues, rock, brass bands, balkan music, choirs, ambient and noise music, touring bands, and many artists with unique and undefinable sounds. Our strength lies in our diversity and open mindedness. Brave visual artists have installed works perched above poison oak groves, with hammocks for restful viewing. We’ve been asked to remove swings installed high in trees, we’ve followed dancers on interactive journeys through the forest, and heard the power of live music in dimly lit, reverberant spaces. We’ve had pillow fights and cuddle puddles and climbed trees while epic bands serenaded the crowd. We’ve enjoyed morning qi gong. We’ve vacuumed scores of dusty rugs, and adapted our living spaces to store all kinds of weird gear. Trashy treasures that get pulled out and appreciated at least a few times a year, by a few hundred happy people.
Looking back over my story, it may seem like my friends and I live in a perfect world where everything goes smoothly. It’s not. You can’t make everyone happy, and you can’t insure against catastrophe. Vehicles break down at inopportune times, bands show up too late to get into the campground. Equipment gets forgotten, and hopefully people are forgiving. You might find yourself setting up the floor tom on logs and rocks because you forgot to bring the legs. You might find bands and audience cold and disappointed because the music is running hours late, and you might regret having said yes to so many performers, and creating a schedule that is impossible to uphold. You might learn the hard way NOT to bring someone into the fold in a high-stress volunteer position unless they have already attended an event and seen what they are getting into. You might train a small child against the dangers of poison oak and days later, find that you squatted in it yourself while peeing in the dark. Hosting events can be really stressful, and I have repeatedly ended up with bathroom issues while at our music campouts — a problem I’ve never faced before. Sometimes I wear down my immune system by working too hard, aiming too high, partying too much to cope with the stress. Drink lots of water! Try to get some sleep! Be kind to yourself and your friends, and remember that just doing something big and communal is a success in and of itself, even if there’s hiccups or failures. Making mistakes is unavoidable, but also it’s the best way to learn, or to remember how to do things better. One thing I have been working on is learning how to delegate and ask for more help, since burnout is real.
I hope these anecdotes have proven entertaining. And I hope they can inspire you to bring your friends together, to share the music and art that you make with each other under the open sky, away from the confines of buildings, cars and busy city streets. Wherever you live, we welcome you to explore the beauty of nature and witness your community feasting and reveling in musical celebration for its own sake, whether it’s a few hours drive out of town or better yet, just a bike ride away, in the lush wild corners of your own backyard.