Arise and Shine

The Owl

It’s been a little over three weeks since I’ve had my mind and body rejuvenated, reinspired and reawakened by Arise music, yoga and art festival at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO. The fact that I won't be able to take part in another sacred fire ceremony in the foreseeable future has begun to set in. As Nandhiji, the main yogi who lead those fire ceremonies would say, “We must continue to reach for the stars and live as the infinite, infinite, beings we are”.

Arise Music Festival wasn’t your typical music festival with mainstream bands playing for crowds hyped up on designer drugs and neon glowsticks. Instead, the festival takes a much more conscious approach to the music they play, the food they sell and the activities they organize. It’s also heavily impacted by art done by local artists, from the metallic sculptures spread throughout the grounds (see the owl above), to wooden structures built by festival goes and hand drawn masterpieces painted during the shows.

Another aspect being present at Arise did for me was re-instilling the value of community. It’s important, probably the most important thing that makes wherever you live the place you live. The special thing about music festivals, especially smaller scale ones like Arise, is that the festival creates a community within itself. There’s much more than just music listening and supposed drug use happening at gatherings like Arise. Do you like doing yoga? Wake up before 11am and hang out with some of the coolest yogis around the area. Like playing music yourself? You can learn how to play the djembe from a native drummer. Maybe you’re into holistic wellness? Come to a workshop with Brigitte Mars, a lady who’s been studying herbal remedies for over forty years.

If you really want to feel impacted, you could also take a walk around the “wisdom village”, where the sacred fire is tended to for the entirety of the festival and a healing labyrinth is laid out. Arise even had a mini children’s village located on a grassy knoll just outside the main festival area. It also helped that the ranch was surrounded by red rocks jutting out from the top of the hills with a gigantic reservoir out in the distance. This festival was also at the top of my list for best food vendor selection I have ever seen, hands down. You could find everything from vegan falafel meals to bison burgers and sweet potato fries, not to mention a separate outdoor tea and coffee café.

Loveland Landscape

While the non-music side of Arise was nothing like I’d ever seen, the lineup at arise wasn't the kind to draw in mass amounts of people from out of state like Bonnaroo or Coachella does, but that only made  room for more local bands to shine. That included Colorado bands like The Magic Beans from Nederland who played main stage and the Jaden Carlson Band from Boulder, who played at the smaller speak easy stage.

I can't possibly touch on every one of the fifty plus bands that came out, but I can say that every genre from jazz funk to folk rock was played. The heavy hitters included Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros and Trevor Hall closing out the final night, along with Polish Ambassador, Emancipator and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead headlining the first two nights respectively. The Human Experience, an experimental solo Dj, also closed out one of the late night sets. There was also a stage solely designated for EDM music that played during and after the late night sets.

The common thread to all these performers was they ether all make super funky beats or they perform music with conscious lyrics, sans all the fluff we hear in today's mainstream music about trap queens making pies in the kitchen. I actually had the opportunity to meet a few of those artists during my last shift volunteering backstage on Sunday night.

Before I got backstage on Sunday I attended a panel discussion on how social and environmental change are affected by music. The panel included Josh Fox, director of the Gasland documentaries, Alex Ebert, lead singer of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Peter Yarrow, an activist who famously wrote “Puff the Magic Dragon”, along with his daughter Sarah Yarrow and a final speaker by the name of Lyla Johnston, a Dine tribe native who graduated from Stanford University and is a member of the black hills initiative, a movement to return the sacred lands of the Black Hills back into the hands of its native tribes.

Unify

The panel was an intriguing discussion on how music is so intertwined within our society, to the point where “the earth spins to the tune of A minor” as Ebert said. During much of his talk he explained how only the most courageous music has the ability to change us, and that those who aren’t putting their realest stuff out there are doing a disservice to themselves and the industry.

The environmental film director Josh Fox discussed his third documentary he just completed after visiting every continent (except Antarctica) to gather information on the impact of fracking. Peter Yarrow sang a bit for the crowd and talked about his time with Pete Seger protesting the Vietnam War, adding that our government still has not made a formal apology for the ramifications of that war.

Peter Yarrow’s daughter, Emma Yarrow, talked more so on the spiritual impact of environmental travesty’s going on around the world, mostly due to fracking. She explained through a metaphor of the land representing our mother how we are injuring and polluting her through these devastating practices. She went on to sing a native song a cappella that was beautiful and moving. Soon afterwards Alex Ebert sang an original song titled “Mother”, which was seemingly written about his own mother, but applied perfectly to what the discussion was about.

The final speaker, Lyla Johnston, discussed her role as the lead organizer of the Black Hills Unity Concert, a three day music festival seeking to bring awareness to the plight of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Most people aren’t aware that the heart of the Black Hills are uninhabited because the land is so sacred that it remains a place for prayer and reflection only. Today the government controls 90% of the land and is seeking to mine the hills for gold. These detrimental mining practices, much less in a sacred place, has called for people like Lyla to rise up and spread awareness. This unity concert is just another example how music has the ability to bring people together for a common good.

The talk that afternoon closed out with a Bob Dylan original lead by Peter Yarrow called "Blowing in the Wind”, The chorus of that song repeats, “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind”. It only took a minute for everyone in the crowd to stand up and begin singing the chorus together. Each one of us locked hands with the person next to us and began swaying from side to side. You didn’t have to look far to find a few tears in the crowd; it was easily one of the most moving experiences of the whole festival.

Oatmeal for Baby Wipes?

At the end of that panel discussion I tried to go up to Lyla because she said earlier she grew up in Taos, NM, and that was to be the next stop on my road trip. However, she was looking super busy and I was already mildly star struck by her speech and her presence with the other artists/creators on the stage, so I bailed. I didn’t have any problem going up to Alex Ebert however, who I dapped up in Iowa while I was sitting in the staff/volunteer lounge at Hinterland. I asked him if he remembered me, but he couldn’t even remember playing in Iowa (they played six different shows between these two festivals). He eventually remembered after I reminded him of the stage set up, “..Big amphitheater style surrounded by trees at the bottom of a hill” I said.

“Yeah, yeah that’s right. Ok, I remember you now, you were sitting at a table working, but not really working?”

“Yup that was me. (I had just gotten finished my shift and was waiting for my friend to get out of the bathroom when the band walked in.) When’s the new album coming out by the way? I heard the set at SXSW" I asked.

“It’s coming. I can’t give you a date, but you’ll start hearing stuff. I need to finish some mixing when I get home.”

Although Alex couldn’t give me anymore info on the new LP, I read somewhere that he’d relocated to New Orleans not too long ago so I asked for some good spots to visit once I got there. One he recommended was the Spotted Cat, a pretty well-known bar/venue on Frenchman street that requires the purchase of a single drink in order to become a lifelong member. Another place was Frady’s, a tiny corner market in the Bywater that has some of the best po’boys you will find in NOLA.

Later that night upon showing up for my final volunteer shift I was told my post would be at the backstage gate entrance. This was a first for me and I got thrown right into the mix when Lyla approached my coworker and I asking if we would help pass around buckets in the crowd to raise money for the Black Hills Concert after she made a “speech”. Her speech turned out to be a free style poetry jam and my coworker and I used the buckets to pound out the percussion as we sat on the ground just below the stage. After her speech we hopped the fence and made are way into the crowd to collect gratuities. 

Once we got backstage again we set the buckets down and removed the small lights we taped to the sides of them. One of the lights fell and rolled across the grass floor right next to a man with a shaved head wearing beads around his neck. It was quite dark and I didn’t see him until I literally bumped into him and realized it was Trevor Hall doing his vocal warmups. I apologized for bumping him and he just looked at me like I had three heads as he continued milling about in circles making these strange, ghostly humming sounds. I was still a bit awe struck as I had never met the man before, but I eventually did a few minutes later and hooked him up with a nice yellow and green offset spiral tie dye.

Trevor Hall would be the one to close out the festival on the main stage that night with a few other bands playing afterwards at the smaller stages. On my way back to my tent that night I couldn’t help notice a ring of caution tape in the middle of the main path leading back to the campground. In the center of the taped off area was a box propped up above a hole with the words “DO NOT MOVE, MOLE HOME” written on the outside. Apparently there was a whole slew of baby moles running around earlier in the day. The hole was originally surrounded by a ring of rocks and eventually evolved into the picture you see below.

The protection of the mole hole for me represented the compassionate nature and respect for life in all shapes and sizes by those at Arise. It’s also a pretty funny that people would go to that extent to help out a fellow creature. At the end of the day, it just goes to show that loving each other, our land, and our animals, is sometimes the only thing real. 

Mole Hole