Saw Justin Bond do a small set at Comeback's 5th anniv on Friday. It was an interesting, yet incongruous set. I say incongruent because it was largely acoustic caberet for a post-electroclash set and bordered on freak-folkish. Bond seems to channel some Night-of-A-1000-Stevie Nick's balladeering, which probably would have worked in a different setting. Still - he mentioned something about being involved in the Rad Faeries and immediately I blushed and flashed back to living in Eugene and Ashland in the 90's... Pagans and freaks were the norm, thus nothing really shocks or unnerves me about people and their practices. I dated a Wiccan even, and it seemed to fit in Ashland - we were a small, rural town in a country-like setting - close to the earth and disconnected from big cities. Once i hit Seattle, I ditched the sensibilities and became urbane. I spent time online, in coffee shops and bars. I didn't hike. I didn't camp for the longest time (*I joked that "Blair Witch" was improbable because I would never go camping in the first place)... It seemed a million miles away. Fremont was even like an imitiation of the real thing -- you've not truly met hippies until you've been inside a gigantic hollowed out tree that serves as their quiet space...
Yes, hippie's are truly the last punks because they're the last earnest types that cling to something not commodified and/or shoved into a particular identity. Bond's set was probably too advanced for the CMBK crowd - and gender fluidity is still suspect in the gay community (ask how many gays react to the 'pregnant man' and you start to see the dividing line still w/in the community), and thus, the true rebels are those who continue to defy interpretation.
And yet - I still get impatient around Dead concerts and dreadlock stench is still one of the banes of my existence. Still, I would like to do some kind of 'Return to the Earth' thing when the weather is warmer. I'd like to get a ton of creative types to go into the woods and not necessarily bang on drums, but maybe do some interesting creative shtick. Maybe mate it with fauxpomo sensibilities and a few classical turns, maybe something along this at Fruit Farm that I was so lucky to be a part of last year:
