There were Adventures in the scheduling side of things during the week that made for some anxious moments, but ultimately made for a great line-up. Not one, but two cancellations during the week (one was Friday morning) left me with a new end-of-the-day band and then a last minute mid-day set alteration. Not that it wasn't a pretty great line-up to start with, but some cosmic fine-tuning really polished it up nicely and brought around an incredible flow of music and energy across the stage.
I always completely look forward to and love Truckstop Honeymoon - Mike West and Katy Euliss. I'm sure I've raved about them annually. This year they had a special treat in store, Jake Wagner who used to play mandolin with The Mad Farmers waaay back in the day was in town, and knows them from Lawrence Kansas where they are all living. So he got to sit in with them.
That was great. I also had the priviledge of "wearing" Mike and Katy's one year old son during the set, so I got to multitask, running sound, taking photos, baby sitting. Fun! (since it's been 18 years since I had to schlep a baby regularly)
So then next up was my last minute recruit Peter Wilde, I've already raved about him this year. He had Jake and Mike from T.H. sit in with him. 'Twas Peter that proclaimed it "The Most Beautiful Day of the Year" and he was right. The weather was absolutely awesome, 80 degrees, blue skies, light breeze, aaah. Another amazing set and this time I got video, which I HAVE GOT to get YouTubed this weekend. I'll embed a clip when I have it uploaded. And so that was amazing as well, and then Peter had Laura Kemp sing with him on the last song of the set. The saddest song ever, probably, and it was delicious.
Then Laura played her set and it was beautiful too of course and as always. And meanwhile as all this amazing flow of talent was intertwining and bursting forth, all kinds of people were coming up and telling me their Market moments, like the woman who had just come to town to visit from Kansas and found her sister's next door neighbors, Mike and Katy, playing on the stage. And the guy who posted those 1992 video clips of Market on YouTube who doesn't even live here anymore, but was glad to visit and find things not much altered since then.
And I've completely forgotten to mention the puppet show earlier in the day starring our old friend Monster, telling the story of how stars are born (not Hollywood stars, but real starry stars...).
And Paul Naylor having his first Market Stage set first thing in the morning and wowing and confusing folks with his little chorus pedal that made it sound like there were four folks on stage singing. And Uncle Stumbles wrapping it all up with some sweet Dead-inspired jams.
I hardly got away from the stage at all, but why would I leave? It had somehow turned into a Real Live Big Time Music Festival line-up and I had a backstage pass! Reports from all over the Market at the end of the day confirmed that it was Most Beautiful elsewhere as well, there were visitors from all over the planet, and many Marketeers had great sales days and left the Park Blocks happy. Now what will tomorrow bring? We shall see...
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