Feelin’ good at All Good

story by Justin Jacobs photos by Michael Heater

As thousands of people rubbed the hangover… story by Justin Jacobs photos by Michael Heater

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 already 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, tightknit. 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 over 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 most, it was no less a tear in the fabric of reality – a break from full-time jobs, from taxes, from television, from problems and from 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, two hours after leaving Oakland with a car full of supplies – a tent, beef jerky, notebooks and 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 wound 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