(the intitial 2007 line-up has been announced; updated 3/16/07)
When you see footage or fictional video representations of music festivals in the 1960’s, they’re filled with campfires and camaraderie and creativity flowing from every corner. Close your eyes, and you can almost feel the energy of grass roots movements taking place at such festivals all across the country. This is what the High Sierra Music Festival feels like. It’s not quite Woodstock, but the four-day festival which includes camping out in the Northern California mountains and listening to singers who range from folk guitarists to electronica movement leaders definitely has that back-to-the-basics feel about it. In a good way!
The 2007 High Sierra Music Festival takes place July 5th – 8th and tickets are on sale now. Four day passes are only $128 through February 12th and then prices will go up. Line-up to be announced soon but past participants have included My Morning Jacket, String Theory, Keller Williams and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. See last year’s complete line-up here to get a general idea of who might appear again in 2007.
The music website/blog community has probably been the slowest in the overall, widespread adoption of RSS as a viable form of web publishing. Believe me as I’m somewhat privy to this given my day job…
I’m not sure if we’re just afraid of it or if we honestly think that the only reason RSS exists is to drive visitors to your website, but it’s painstakingly obvious that many sites don’t really use RSS to it’s full potential. Take Pitchfork for example, a site that most everyone interested in any indie and/or DIY-related music and artists frequent. Their RSS feed absolutely sucks. Sure, I get headlines and a few excerpts but the benefits stop there. It’s as if the Pitchfork editors don’t actually subscribe to their own RSS feeds to see how they’re published. If they did, they’d notice that it’s not really readable and therefore hardly usable.
Maybe that’s an unfair gripe on them but it comes with experience — their RSS feed needs some work and as a music fan subscribed to their site, I’m continually finding myself slightly annoyed that I need a tutorial to navigate through their latest news stories. “Wait, what section is this again?” “Wait, that news story got updated, published twice in the feed, but it’s shown only once on the site?”
I can bet that most everyone that does actually frequent that site does so through a bookmark and not their RSS reader.
When I checked on the JamBase RSS feed this morning, I was greeted with a nice surprise — FULL content RSS feeds. Andy and the boys at JamBase are doing this right by allowing the fans of the site to subscribe to the full content as it’s published. From me to you, JamBase — thank you. I’ve always enjoyed your content, and I want to continue to enjoy it in a manner I so choose. Because I’m so special.
You’ll start to see this more and more as RSS adoption continues to take off, especially for the music website publishers that were in the game before bloggers entered the ring…
Snow Patrol is one of those bands that you known for a long time if you keep your ears tuned in to the music scene … or that you’ve known for just a short time if you only stay on top of current trends. The Irish band has been playing since the late ‘90’s but only began to gain real recognition in the U.S. in the last couple of years, starting with their 2004 CD release Final Straw. They showed up in London in 2005 for the Live 8 Mega Humanitarian Conference. And then their 2006 North American tour, supporting their newest CD Eyes Open, sold out in the United States and the fans have demanded that they come back again. They’ll be showing up around the world, with a North American tour from February through April.
See Snow Patrol video clips here.
2007 Snow Patrol Tour Dates:
READ MORE
So I think Scott was right when he said that January must be the busiest month for live music news — our inboxes are all flooded right now with all this good info to get posted and get writing about and yet we’re just so damn flooded that it’s hard to get to it. Here’s something you might have missed — Wakarusa added yet another round of fantastic artists to their 2007 lineup.
Everyone’s favorite music festival to hate on this summer will be Wakarusa, thanks in part by the fact that local law enforcement set up roadblocks outside of last year’s festival to bust people as they went in. It sucks to say but I guess you can’t really blame them for trying to be safe.
Unfortunately, we all know — this usually seems to have the exact opposite effect. People get pissed if they feel too controlled, and a lot of people have expressed sentiment that this is a festival that they are not interested in ever attending again.
That sucks to say, too — look at these artists they’re adding to the lineup…
Wakarusa 2007 Lineup Additions
Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals
Michael Franti and Spearhead
Ozric Tentacles
Split Lip Rayfield
Indigenous
Grant Lee Phillips
Assembly of Dust
Be Good Tanyas
Yo Mama’s Big Fat Booty Band
Shannon McNally
Backyard Tire Fire
Outformation
Kan’Nal
U-Melt
The Bridge
Boombox
Dubconscious
Kid Beyond
Full lineup and comment thread here…
I’m sure it’s still a great festival in spirit and hopefully they can play nice with the surrounding community…
As ridiculous as they may be from time to time, I still look forward to each year’s wild and rampant music festival rumors.
Here’s my favorite Bonnaroo rumor so far…
Ok, I just talked to Mr. Bonnaroo, president of Superfly himself and he has told me that, as long as the moon is NOT in the 7th house and jupiter does NOT allign with Mars, this will be the lineup for Bonnaroo:
Widespread Panic (Friday Night)
Phish Reunion (Saturday Night)
String Cheese Incident (Sunday Night)
The Ghosts of Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and John Bonom jam to the music of James Brown
Tea Leaf Green
Tenacious D
Pearl Jam
Smashing Pumpkins Reunion
Bob Dylan playing with the surviving members of the band
A Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, and Dave Schools Bass Supergroup Jam (w/ John Fishman on Drums)
Jesus and his 12 apostles jazz ensemble
etc…
Whoa, man! Can you imagine if Phish got back together and you had to choose between that and The Ghost Set? Hooooweeee, tough choices…
Thanks to reader Mike for making me laugh out loud…
Hey all –
It has come to my attention that there might be a few issues with leaving comments on Live Music Blog; I’ve heard a report or two now that people are leaving comments but they’re never getting published. I’m not showing the comments in my database here so I could have a misguided template somewhere on the site…
We at Live Music Blog do not filter or selectively decide to publish some comments and not publish others. All that we ask is that you add to the overall context of the post or the discussion at hand and that you do not shamelessly self-promote your own interests. Somehow.
If you’ve dropped a comment recently and you’ve never seen it show up as published, please, please please send me an email right away and let me know. I need to understand how widespread this is…
Sincerely,
Your Friendly Site Administrator
I noticed some new posts on the Tea Leaf Green RSS feed this morning…
Upon further inspection, it looks as though the band has added a slew of merch to their online store, a mega beverage set being one of the new and most notably items. Four pint glasses, a bottle opener, a koozy, and a shot glass — what a package!
Tea Leaf Green is definitely one of the bands at the forefront of the audience engagement movement. Jambands were always engaging audiences from the beginning and it’s only now just catching on across other music genres, even causing new genres to be created on the fly. Surely this is not new news to anyone in these here parts…
The thought occurred to me — not only does Tea Leaf Green create RSS feeds for tech-savvy information consumers such as myself, they create drinking merchandise for the college-student left in all of us. They’re recognizing the old-skool and new school at the same time, and I love it. They’re firing on all audience engagement cylinders and we haven’t even started talking about their music yet…
And believe me, there’s plenty to talk about there. Kudos, Tea Leaf Green. Keep it comin’…
