The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival was the place to be last week-end: Golden Gate Park, indie/old country/folk/rock with names like Joan Baez, Conor Oberst, Patti Smith or Richard Thompson … And all that for free ?!!!

I love California =)

And to the little  French girl that I am, this was the big  Californian thing, a cliche you think is impossible but in movies.

I had gone to see Conor, the broken-hearted dark and smart singer of Bright Eyes, discovered four years ago thanks to an American friend, a writer, my first true experience with American indie music — needless to say, I fell in love. To me Bluegrass was just a way to go back to my teenage days, when I would sing my lungs out to the sound of my friend’s guitar, longing to one day see America. I didn’t know it was going to be much more than that.

We arrived in the San Francisco fog, cold but excited, me jumping all around when I saw the “Welcome” sign.

And there it was, right behind it, the great Californian dream: kids and parents with blankets and coolers, beers and hot dogs, the smell of food in the air, greasy and grilled, and something else, a warm, peppery smell any teenager in France knows too well.

And so there they were, the very same people who yesterday were scared to cross the street when the light was red or there was no crosswalk, were so serious about alcohol laws, and despised us for smoking cigarettes, here they are in the middle of the day, with families around, and weed is illegal, but they are all, all smoking — from the old hippie sharing his pipe with us, to the tall blond cow-girl dancing in trance, and the long-hair sweet-looking guy wishing he grew up in the 60′s, back in his parents’ days, Woodstock. And so do we.

Bluegrass is more than music, it’s an experience, a time-machine.

The music was great, from the old country banjo to some ragtime, Richard Thompson who kept us dancing for half an hour, Conor Oberst who had me faint, The Dukes who warmed us up in the freezing late afternoon. I heard Sunday was incredible: Patty Smith and Emmylou Harris. But this is Berkeley life: papers get in life’s way and you have to sacrifice some extra fun and a good night’s sleep in order to get everything done.

Sunday night in Mainstacks, lost in Proust and Woolf, trying to make sense of words on the page, I looked up for a moment at my friend Kristian, yesterday my dance partner, today my writing marathon companion, and I knew that he too, despite the silence of the labyrinth we were in, still had the sound of a folk guitar playing in his head.

When we finally emerge at 2 in the morning, tired but relieved, I put my headphones on, look at the Campanile and smile, start walking South, my boots knocking on the pavement, and let myself sink slowly into the night, with the broken voice of Conor.

Trending Articles: