Bumbershoot

I have been going to Seattle's Bumbershoot festival every Labor Day weekend for the past four years. Since 2011, I've granted myself a reprieve from the late Georgia summer to listen to some of my favorite bands with a hundred thousand or so of my closest friends and to discover cool, new northwestern bands in the cool climate of the Pacific Northwest. 

Admittedly, Bumbershoot was really only a warm-up to me for Portland's MFNW (RIP) the next week.  After Bumbershoot wrapped up on Labor Day Monday, I'd take Amtrak the next morning from Seattle to Portland and then participate in the main event, the five- to six-day orgy of music that was the old MFNW.

But in 2014, MFNW scaled itself down from an almost week-long, multi-venue festival featuring scores and scores of bands to a two-day event at a river-front park with only about a dozen bands. MFNW 2014 featured a good if limited lineup, to be sure, but the dates were also changed so that it didn't immediately follow Bumbershoot.   So that year, I flew cross-country from Atlanta to Seattle for Bumbershoot and Bumbershoot alone, and since it was always the lesser of the two events, I vowed even before I left that it would be my last Bumbershoot.

Funny thing, though: it turned out to be my most enjoyable Bumbershoot yet.  Cool, wet weather kept the crowds down to a manageable level, and I got to enjoy some incredible sets by the likes of Kishi Bashi, Pickwick, Jonathan Richman, Real Estate, and even Negativland, not to mention discovering Dakha Brakha.  I had a great time, and found myself wondering if I wouldn't, in fact, return.

Well, another funny thing: it turned out the cool wet weather and low turnout spelled economic disaster for the festival organizers, and they very nearly went bankrupt late last year.  For a while there, it looked like there wouldn't be another Bumbershoot for me to attend whether I wanted to go or not, but then a white knight appeared out of somewhere and bailed out the organizers. "Bumbershoot will return" their web site announced all winter, and today, they finally presented the lineup for Bumbershoot 2015.  

Oh dear, this is disappointing.  There's maybe enough good bands in there to count on one hand (Cave Singers!  Motopony! Devotchka!) but that's about it.  It looks like the undercard of other festivals, with all the headliners and crowd favorites removed.  

So unless things turn around in 2016, it looks like 2014 really was my last Bumbershoot after all.  I had a blast while I was there, and now I'm free to explore other travel-and-music adventures. I can't get myself too worked up about this year's Pickathon lineup, but when is Glastonbury?  For some reason, there seems to be a lot of festivals in Croatia this summer. And what's going on in Rio?