About 2 a.m. Thursday, a heavy fog rolled over Marvin’s Mountaintop in Masontown, W.Va., the site of the 12th annual All Good Music Festival. And although the fog lifted by sunrise, the proverbial haze lingered from set to set throughout the entire festival.
Few performances stood out, as it was business as usual for the jam-heavy crowd. Generally a sit-in friendly group of musicians, most performers opted to play their set and only their set. Even festival and sit-in favorite Warren Haynes of Gov’t Mule was nowhere to be seen during his associates’ sets.
The only notable guest spots came from Derek Trucks and Jimmy Herring, who each sat in during each other’s sets. Herring, a former guitarist for Friday’s headliners Phil Lesh and Friends and Widespread Panic’s current lead guitarist, stepped in during Trucks and wife Susan Tedeschi’s Soul Stew Revival for a cover of “Hey Jude.” Trucks and Tedeschi returned the favor, along with percussionist Yonrico Scott, for “Angels on High,” a highlight of Panic’s Saturday headlining set. Trucks then stayed on for a spacey reading of Panic’s “Ribs and Whiskey.”
All Trucks and Herring interplay aside, catching most bands was like catching them on a tour stop – only with a shorter set length and an obtrusive sun beating down during the day shows.
Even the bands giving their all had an uphill battle at the festival. The smaller, Magic Hat stage – located inconveniently next to the main stage – housed the tweener sets. The non-stop music works well in theory, but during the down home, Friday afternoon set from The Wood Brothers, the band competed with tune ups from MJ Project’s set on the smaller stage.
Baltimore’s favored sons The Bridge played two Saturday sets, the latter of which Mike Gordon (the onetime Phish bassist, who played an experimental daytime show) sat in on. But unless you managed to fight your way to the front of the Magic Hat stage in between Widespread Panic’s and Dark Star Orchestra’s sets, the sound barely carried halfway up the hill to a large portion of the audience.
Worse yet, it seemed like no one really cared either. From start to finish, the All Good attitude tended to prioritize various recreational activities over the music.
And maybe it wasn’t completely the audience’s fault. Technical issues aside, the Magic Hat stage offered the weakest performances of the weekend, especially during Friday’s two prime slots leading up to Lesh and Friends and Mule.
Lettuce, which preceded Lesh, brought the funk and horns strong enough, but its front man Nigel Hall capsized the set with his non-stage presence. Then, before Mule took the stage (40 minutes late), Soldiers of Jah Army offered a bland take on modern political reggae.
While Widespread Panic and Phil Lesh and Friends are both formidable headliners for a jam band festival, All Good faced one problem: If you had already attended a festival this summer, chances are you already saw both in similar slots. Panic and Lesh both played last month’s Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and last weekend’s inaugural Rothbury Music Festival. And while Lesh’s set was solid, it couldn’t compare to his late-night slot at Bonnaroo.
There, Lesh played a ripping, nearly non-stop three-hour set. At All Good, the band played two measly one-hour sets. While both sets were entertaining, neither captured the full energy this incarnation of the band has to offer.
Closing out Saturday night, Dark Star Orchestra had the unfortunate circumstance of playing their note-for-note Grateful Dead renditions after Lesh had already brought the real thing the night before – a glorified, talented cover band is still a cover band. Someone loftier could have filled the other late-night spot.
But not all was lost at All Good. Even some of the more seemingly standard sets were full of energy, especially Friday and Saturday’s pre-sundown sets. Equal parts sultry and rocking, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals gave one of the weekend’s more fulfilling performances. The hands-down, All Good standout though was the aforementioned Soul Stew Revival set.
With a little more restraint on his leads, Trucks led an augmented version of his band (everything sounds better with horns) side by side with Tedeschi, touching on each artist’s respective songbooks. To much delight, the band bookended their set with two covers from The Band, opening with “Don’t Do It” (originally performed by Marvin Gaye) and signing off with the quintessential touchstone of rock music, “The Weight.”
In a close second to the rousing Soul Stew show, Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood conjured up the spirit of 1970s Miles Davis in a blistering Friday sundown set of off-the-wall jazz fusion.
As gas prices climb throughout the summer festival season, concert goers really do not have the time for a festival that does not deliver the goods 100 percent. Sitting in line for four hours to get in to All Good and another four hours to leave proved to be an incredibly frustrating and stagnant process but was to be expected. What was not expected was the somewhat frustrating and stagnant process within the festival gates – the music itself.
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