Hardly strictly the best-kept secret in SF

You may remember Hardly Strictly Bluegrass from last year when Eric and I had to hang our bikes from a tree to lock them up because it was so crowded and there were so few places to put bikes.

To give you a sense of how much more crowded it was this year, we got there relatively early and we had to lock our bikes hanging up in trees three blocks away because the trees, benches, signs, everything was so covered in bikes. It resembled a pestilence of some sort, actually. An example:

The festival lineup gets more and more impressive every year and this year was no exception. We saw Gillian Welch, Earl Scruggs, The Del McCoury Band, Aimee Mann, Doc Watson, and others and the artists love to bring each other up on stage, so we also saw cameo appearances by Emmy Lou Harris and the Old Crow Medicine Show. (There is an even longer and even more impressive list of people we didn't see.)

One thing that felt different this year from last was the crowd. San Francisco crowds are always completely weird (par for the course: we saw two people, not together, wearing red clown noses) but there was something a little off about the crowd gathered this weekend. A little crazier, a little edgier; more than a few of them really seemed like they could be running meth labs somewhere in the outskirts of the city. For example, the people we sat next to today included a guy they all called Roach who was twitchy and kept trying to sell us cans of Budweiser for $2, a skinny bald guy in cutoff shorts and a hoodie who brought not one but two plastic bottles of Dawn to fulfill some ill-conceived bubble-blowing vision, and a woman in her early twenties with pretty blond hair and too few teeth for someone of her age.

They got to be tiresome neighbors after a while, and we were in the shade which was easily 15 degrees cooler than in the sun, so we left those creepy tweakers behind and moved to a sunnier spot, ate some pizza, and enjoyed the show (both of humanity and of music).