The second Marilyn's night brought a rock-n-roll flavored second set with a solid first set to lube everyone up. Saturday night was great having 5 Eyed Hand open and join us for a sick end of the weekend jam.

The Jamiroquai cover during the second set was hot and Kaleidoscope sounds better and better each night. The second set got rockin with a Welcome To The Jungle opener, which got a second look since Lehe's guitar cord failed him the first night. Oh he ripped it up! The Egypt, I Can Stand with a sick ass jam, Sing Me Something was ridiculous and made people stick around for the remainder of the night.

The 5 Eyed Hand guys joined us for a end of the weekend breakdown that included some incredible spoken word by my man Sam Flot. Murph laid down some sick jungle beats and the others rolled with it.

set one:
Run Through The Jungle* (Credence Clearwater Revival cover)
In The West
War Song
Swimming In Your Rain
Wind Up, Wind Down
Kaleidoscope
Little L* (Jamiroquai cover)
Beauty In The Journey

set two:
Welcome To The Jungle
Bittersweet* (Lehe)
Egypt
I Can Stand ->
Bamboo Groove Jam
Sing Me Something
Raindrop

E: Thrilla Gorilla Jam**

*first time played
**w/ Chris Zanardi, Derek Bodkin of 5 Eyed Hand and Sam Flot with poetry readings

Sitting atop a bus staring…

Sitting atop a bus staring at the coral looking art piece built to about the size of our bus and covered in multi-colored lights will bring about many elevated thoughts. It seemed as if our quad was the metropolitan of late night high sierra madness and cool, creative culture. The campsite we were parked in was surrounded by the late night sets of Dumpstafunk (the neville's) and Keller Williams, and in the center of the parade was a show of fire dancing and fire drumming.

Yeah, Rothbury had nothing on this scene, and in times like these being with a few friends can also help a little. In fact, one of the female's in our group had an ever growing desire to get one of the female's walking below us to expose a nipple and it's surrounding flesh, and this desire was growing more apparent as she began screaming from atop our bus, "show us your titties!"
"No, no!" I said. "I don't want to be that band that sits on top of a bus in the primo spot of the late night scene at the festi and starts screaming at girls to show titi." Visions of Snoop Dogg's girls gone wild pop into my head.

"It's cool man," the girl says. "You're not responsible for what we say up here."
"We're all responsible for everything that goes down here, which is why High Sierra is such a tight festival," I proclaim. I mean, I did feel a little cheesy saying it but it was time for the law to get laid down and for my personal vehicle that was the right thing to say. But, there was an unwarranted silence after that in the midst of the party, and I did appreciate the girl's balls if not extremely tasteless in her delivery (I later on guessed out of the blue that she was an Aries, I got lucky), so I said,
"Just ask someone nicely who walks by and looks like they want to do it."

She quite easily and willingly got a beautiful woman in a black cat costume to comply and we all celebrated. Even the participant screamed out with us in High Sierra glee and dancingly strutted away back into the night, back into the freeway of passerby's of our bus and the crowd of fire-dancer watchers.

Our Thursday set got the festival started off right, by entertaining a crowd of 300 at the Shady Grove stage; a warm welcome indeed as Sidd passed out 250 free Izabella shirts to the folks. Walking around later with a friend only made everything that much cozier as we explored the city of tents over by the… man I can't remember now! It was my first High Sierra you must please forgive me. As we walked down the path we ran into some friends from a show in Reno that we'd met the week and a half previous. They invited us onto their front porch to enjoy some homemade jalepeno margaritas and a cooling off session ... so many beautiful people at this event, and in this group alone the shades of everyone's clothing and skin against sunglasses and the carefully organized Feng Shui of the colorful tent palace, reinforced my thought that this quite possibly may be one of California's finest sites.

My personal favorites of the festival were Sambada (who we happened to be camped right next to), Dumpstafunk, Bassnectar and Trombone Shorty… who had the crowd in the palm of his hand. I mean like between his fingers, and then at one point he dropped everyone into the palm of his hand. Energy was way past 10 and the good times were racking up and pushing old one's off the shelf. This young dude, 22 to be exact, and his band were on fire. A stellar musician from New Orleans who sings and plays trombone and trumpet was more memorable for his showmanship, but this outfit was some of the funkiest live music I've heard and all the guys on stage were clean and edgy as hell in their playing. They were the only band I saw all weekend that got demanded back onstage for an encore. That's exceptional considering that the schedule at High Sierra is so tight and everyone wants to see their band come back on. The festival MC could not refuse the rabid audience and even screamed into the mic as the roaring continued, "that's what the f*%# I'm talking about!" and brought Trombone Shorty back on!

As the late nights continued I slept 2 out of the 4 days we were there. I got almost 3 hours of sleep on saturday night, which was just enough to charge me for our Sunday morning set at 11:45. By that point I needed some church and it was a special gift to be able to provide it! a crowd of 400 or more assembled at the Shady Grove stage and we all washed our souls together for the final day and night of festivities. Sunday was my most relaxed day and if you know how it is to be finally marinated into the festival soup (you probably do) you'll understand when I say this was my favorite day.

Every friend has now become family, the meaning of every conversation is now obvious, and everyone has found their place and wants to share like mad. One of my favorite moments of this last day at High Sierra was the time I spent talking to 2 young fans named Nathan (6th grade) and Cody (3rd grade). Nathan came running over to me and said, "my CD was stolen can you please sign this new one?"
Of course, we launch into conversation of manifestation, thought, music, time as a fallacy, being on the road, festivals, and eventually they showed me their juggling routine they'd learned together four days ago when they met. They told me it was practice for their fire juggling routine. They thanked me repeatedly for spending time to talk to them and I was thanking them for showing me what a sharp young mind of our time is capable of grasping- challenging and pleasant company indeed.

I apologize to anyone who came to our late night renegade stage and thought I looked tired. I was dead by that point! The jam comprised of members of Five Eyed Hand, Sambada, Gamelan X, and Izabella was communally named by poet Sam Flot as the "No Pressure band"… so I guess I shouldn't worry too much about my appearance at that point in the night. To everyone else who wasn't there, we just set up our equipment and lights right in front of our bus on Sunday night and rocked out for 45 minutes or so until "they" stopped us.
About 150-200 people showed up and danced about 3 feet in front of us and out into the quad. For me, that performance was like the sun going down behind the ocean in the distance. After packing up, I dutifully passed out on the bench seat on our bus with my jeans on and contacts in my eyes. What a weekend!

Thanks for reading everybody, we love you and we'll see you next time!
-B