West Virginia is All Good, all weekend

Editor’s Note: This summer was a great one for music in the Pittsburgh area. Here, check out… Editor’s Note: This summer was a great one for music in the Pittsburgh area. Here, check out one of the region’s biggest festivals through the eyes of two of The Pitt News’ editors.

As thousands of people rubbed the hangover out of their eyes and wandered around the huge campground of the All Good Music Festival in Masontown, W. Va., Bill Remington sat alone in a chair, his back upright, seemingly prepared for the day.

‘I feel wonderful. I’m relaxed, I’m chilled. It’s been good — it’s been all good. I’ve no plans of when to leave. Maybe today, maybe not,’ he said. ‘I’ve come for four years by myself. I always run into people I know. We’re a very strong community, tight-knit. We’re alike people, no matter how old you are.’

Remington was at least 55, with a gray beard, square face and calm, almond eyes scanning the scene behind his sunglasses. He grinned peacefully, knowing, it seemed, that everything was in its right place.

It was two days and two nights after I’d arrived at the All Good Music Festival, a huge, non-stop collective of experimental, improvisational rock and funk and electronic and bluegrass bands from all across the country. I’d seen and experienced so much, felt and heard so much more, that I might as well have been in an entirely different world.

And for the 20,000 people camping out in veritable tent cities around the beautiful Marvin’s Mountaintop site, that was exactly the point.

The scene was surreal. The same masses, which, the night before, had been wildly flailing, dancing impossibly fast to the musical labyrinth that blared from the stage, were now subdued, walking around like me, half asleep and half wondering, ‘Did that all really happen?’

But Remington’s tone was calm — his low voice and his unfaltering grin brought me back down to earth. The weekend — the madness of 20,000 bodies dancing and singing and talking and smoking and flying higher than the mountain itself — was, in fact, real. Though it was newer to me than to most people, it was no less a tear in the fabric of reality — a break from full-time jobs, taxes, television, problems and worries. But for people like Bill and the community of, for lack of a better term, hippies who travel far to see live music like this, the real world and the All Good world have melded into one.

On Friday, July 11, two hours after leaving Oakland with a car full of supplies — a tent, beef jerky, notebooks, cameras, a few items of clothing and some apples — my photographer compatriot Mike and I were driving on an unpaved road deep in the woods without phone service and with, instead of a shoulder, a several-hundred-foot drop into a riverbed. Welcome to West Virginia. We soon resigned to turn around and, 15 minutes later, saw a woman getting out of her Confederate flag-adorned pickup truck. Thankfully, she couldn’t tell we were from the Union and helped us with directions. Two miles uphill on another unpaved road and we’d made it.

We parked, grabbed the necessities and began to walk. And walk. And walk.

After a near mile of trekking with supplies in hand, having gone through the stage and crowd area, through the vendor alley, up a dusty hill and through the main camping area, we settled in a small grassy patch next to some mud. Home sweet home.

We quickly set up the tent and ran off to see Phil Lesh, Friday night’s headliner. Lesh, formerly of the Grateful Dead, has one of the biggest cult followings in music, and it seemed most of them were at All Good. Once I overcame the initial shock of seeing 20,000 fans spread tightly across the open field and up the side of the mountain, I tore through the crowd toward the front of the stage with only a tablet and pen in hand. Mike, carrying two cameras, was quickly left behind.

I soon realized that I was alone in this huge mass, and yet everything seemed just fine. The music of jam-band godfathers the Grateful Dead was soothing and rhythmic. I was quickly at ease. I’ll find Mike, I told myself, sometime ‘hellip;

As it often happens at shows, I bumped into some guy, and then we became friends. Though I didn’t catch his name, he was 25 and wanted to be either a journalist or a chef, because ‘both of them sound fun.’

‘I’d be so blissed out if I made the paper!’ he exclaimed when I pulled out my pen and began asking him questions. I continued toward the front.

I managed to find my photographer as well as a blond girl in the middle of an acid trip with whom we talked about third nipples (‘It’s simple. You’re either born with one or you’re not’). When she told us her name, I replied that she looked more like a Lucille.

She agreed.

‘I am definitely a Lucille. At all times.’ At the front of the crowd, we met Greg Boylan, 38, from York, Pa. He works as a plumber and construction worker. And he loves it.

‘I couldn’t convince a 16-year-old to want to do what I do, but there are certain days when being a construction worker is perfect,’ he said. ‘No one sets out to be a plumber. We become one by accident. I mean, I’ve been to 50 Grateful Dead shows, and suddenly I’m a plumber?’

He spoke with a frankness that was a common thread among the thousands who paid more than $100 to spend three days in tents. They were normal people, and they were doing what they love.

Overwhelmingly, they weren’t lawyers, they weren’t doctors. They weren’t putting themselves through that stress. They were painters, farmers, landscapers. They worked with their hands and made money to escape on the weekends, to float away to a festival like All Good, where the biggest quandary they could face was choosing which band to see next. And come Monday, they’d be back at the grind, ready to float through the week and land at another show in another tent for another chance to escape a little further.

Back at the tent, nearing 5 a.m., we passed out, exhausted. The first day was over.

Three hours later we were awake and exploring the campground. The mountain site was vast, with several tent metropolises covering acre after acre.

‘All Good is like Bonnaroo’s [arguably the country’s biggest music festival] little brother, except he’s way cooler, and he was never corrupted. But he’s pretty badass in his own right, and he can do a mean karate kick,’ said John Walsh from Alexandria, Va., a friend we met while exploring the creek that ran through the festival site.

And he was right. With its self-contained feeling, All Good is one of the last festivals where the community is very tight, without those on the fringe who, at Bonnaroo, might have just showed up to see Kanye West’s set or to rock out with Metallica.

We spent the day meeting folks: lost souls, found souls, college kids, grown-up kids, curious locals and even full families.

‘I was following the Dead around since ’91, my husband since ’87. We’ve been in the scene for a long time,’ said concert-goer Christi Griner. ‘Once we had kids, we didn’t see why we should stop going — we just have to bring more stuff.’ Her two children sat nearby painting.

We saw Hot Buttered Rum tear through a blistering bluegrass set. We saw Keller Williams, the popular guitar virtuoso, cause the entire audience to bounce with his staccato rhythms and unbreakable funk beats. We saw Bassnectar, one of the festival’s only electronic acts, challenge the rules of physics by pushing his speakers to near combustion.

Saturday night’s late show, Dark Star Orchestra, blew at least 19,500 minds from 2 to 5 a.m. (there had to be a few people already asleep), bringing the elation of the crowd to a boiling point, thousands of glow sticks thrown up in the air with every note creating a set of neon stars just feet above the spastically writhing bodies, heads bobbing, knees bending, limbs loose like paper blown by the wind.’

But while the music is the obvious centerpiece of such festivals, it is the sense of community that makes them so much more than just a concert at an arena.

The Massachusetts hippie collective camped next to us was the perfect example of the scene’s very backbone.

Sitting in their tent Saturday afternoon before Widespread Panic’s three-hour set, we spoke of what it means to be in the scene — to really believe in something, in anything.

‘People have church, but this is my church. This is my spiritual release,’ said one person, a thick joint dangling from his thin lips and his face framed by frayed light brown dreadlocks. ‘After I come out of a show, I feel like a new person. This is a culture — if someone asks my religion, I’d say Deadhead.’

He looked around at the six others sitting in the tie dye-laden tent. He smiled.

‘All these kids — they’re family to the bone. These are people you really connect with over the music. You know, I used to be a punk rocker, a hardcore kid. But then I heard this music, I got spun out and went to my first show. It blew my mind. And here I am. I’m home.’