The Winds of Langerado
camping in a cow pasture and rocking the shit out of the port-o-lets
By Jon Bosworth

The Beastie Boys are gracious headliners.
Just before I-95 hits Miami, Langerado festival goers from Eastern Florida were diverted through “The Glades” (Mike D made the Everglades sound street). We aimed to arrive at Big Cypress Seminole Reservation at 8 pm on Friday, the second night of the event.

As we came closer to the 6th annual four day live music festival, Langerado, we caught up on some of the bands we weren’t familiar with on our iPod and indulged especially in some of the favorites we hoped to catch live. We knew we were going to miss the grass-roots live hip-hop band, Roots, and suspected getting through the gate and setting up our tent would mean we would also miss indie rock stalwarts Built to Spill, but those were unavoidable so we tried not to think on it (although we did pour a little beer on the ground when The Seed by Roots came on the iPod).

From 8 until 9:30 pm we were waiting in an unending line of cars along the dirt road entrance to Big Cypress Seminole reservation. Attendees who arrived on the first day waited twice as long, reports varied from 3 hours to 4 ½ hours (make sure you have plenty of gas). After a superficial search of our car (my Volvo doesn’t look nearly as drug-addled as most of the vehicles pouring into the reservation this weekend) and rigorous interrogation (“did you bring any glass?”) we were moved on into the facilities. Throughout the long line to get in, I complained fiercely about the hippies that organize these jamband festivals, but once inside I realized that it was facilitated brilliantly and smoothly and the long line had nothing to do with the efficiency of the management, it was a matter of sheer numbers.

As we broke clear of the entrance gate, our eyes widened to take in the landscape of tents. It was like a post-apocalyptic city constructed of nylon and lit by enormous sodium lights on towers. There were tents set up next to cars for as far as I could see, and the shirtless people stumbling through the evening paths remained oblivious to new arrivals driving on these paths to get to their campsites. Campsite is an overstatement. Don’t assume you can handle a festival like this just because you “like camping.”

Camping at Langerado is more reminiscent of being stranded somewhere and forced to create a makeshift home for yourself by the light of your open trunk. Except for instead of being alone and stranded, you are in a sea of hippies and you are probably already experiencing a contact high.

As we pitched our tent in the dark we could hear, booming from the glowing light on the horizon, the Beastie Boys playing Shake Your Rump. We scrambled to peg the tent into the swampy ground and lock all of our camping supplies into our vehicle. Then we forged out into the unknown, following the In Sounds from the Way Out through the gypsy-like rucksack village.

The scene was surreal. A fierce wind ripped at all of the nylon tents and canopies and all sorts of hippies, from committed, white, VW bus-driving dreadies to weekend dead heads with their good boy haircuts and hemp jewelry to obviously well-off white middle-aged dudes that landed themselves good jobs that allowed them to keep their wild beards. All factors were well-represented, except one. Where were the panhandling, sad-eyed breed of dirty, devil-stick-juggling hippies? Well, they were there, but there weren’t many of them. A $250 ticket is a pretty effective filtration system, and so only the most solvent of hippies could afford to attend. Many, obviously, came as part of their business model, because drugs and paraphernalia (glass) were being hocked at every corner tent.

Although the usual jam band hippy may have been kept from this particular festival by the lofty pricetag, the dregs of the earth always gravitate toward hippy music festivals. And they are drunk and high and they are camping three feet from your tent.

The Beastie Boys are gracious headliners because we heard them start as we drove onto the complex, but here we were another hour later, coming into the festival grounds, where the stages were, nearly a mile away from our “campsite,” and they were still playing. Playing and jumping and rhyming. I was disappointed that we had missed the songs they played their instruments on (I’ve only seen the Beastie Boys on their License to Ill tour, so they didn’t play any instruments), but was thrilled to see the only single band that forever influenced rock and hip-hop music equally. Not only did we get to see them play for an hour, but we also got to enjoy an encore. They picked up their instruments and played Saboutage. Gracious indeed.


Jamband heroes Umphrey’s McGee and STS9 kept the rock going nearly the entire night, until those fierce winds started to carry in some considerable thunderstorms. At 3 am the remnants of festers still in the festival grounds started their hurried march back to their tents, with us caught in the flow. Knowing we were a mile away from our tent, we all but jogged back, beating the deluge of rain by mere minutes. When it finally stopped, our hastily pitched tent and our clothes were drenched, but our sleeping bag managed to stay dry. We slept fitfully for a few hours.

After the morning hunt for a port-a-let that wasn’t overflowing with feces and an unsuccessful attempt at finding free running water, we were ready to take on a full day of festing and the weather couldn’t have been better (even if our clothes were wet).

The fears surrounding a springtime festival in the Everglades are many. Unbearable humidity, mosquitos the size of hummingbirds, and torrential downpours top the list. The daunting storms that passed over Florida the first days of this year’s festival promised to realize many of those fears, but actually turned into a Saturday godsend. Well, perhaps not for the poor saps whose tents and canopies rolled like tumbleweeds through the rucksack villages at the hands of the ferocious winds, but for most of us the wind kept the sun from feeling as hot as it was and kept the bugs at bay. And the trial-by-rain of the first two days weeded out the weaker music fans, which must have been few in number since there was still in excess of 10,000 attendees.

A popular pastime during the festival seemed to be sleeping in the sun to the tunes of bands such as Railroad Earth, but music wasn’t all there was to do. Members of the Seminole tribe were providing airboat tours of the Everglades. On Saturday afternoon I participated in Shabbat with Hasidic Jew and reggae artist Matisyahu. During this traditional Jewish Sabbath performed in a tent, men and women were separated by a curtain. A Rabbi said a prayer of healing over the names of specific participants that were suffering from illness. Then they read sanctimoniously from the Torah. Seeing Rabbis in traditional dress is odd, but even stranger was seeing the faithful while they were celebrating Shabbat, and then seeing the same guy sans his Yameka dancing to jambands and looking stoned in his tie-dye and cargo shorts.

Headliners such as Beastie Boys and REM are of course also very memorable. For a festival only in its second year of international celebrity headliners (last year was Flaming Lips), Langerado has quickly gained stature as a festival that rivals the biggies, including Bonaroo, Coachella and Lollapalooza.

The festival grounds featured a full sized Ferris Wheel as a centerpiece (rides were $5, but from the peak you could spy the vast landscape of tents in the rucksack village surrounding the grounds) and four of the five stages faced the center, creating a perimeter. The largest stage was the Everglades Stage, which was also the first you came to after passing the Ferris Wheel. The secondary stages included the Swamp Stage and the Sunset Stage. The smallest stages included the Chickee Hut Stage (referred to affectionately as the “Pussy Ranch”) and the Greening Stage.

There was plenty of room between the stages, so there was little to no bleed-over between the bands, but sound is always an issue at outdoor festivals and this one was no exception. What was exceptional, though, was the impressive video work done for the headliners on the Everglades Stage. It was edited together live to bring an experience to viewers that could not get close enough to distinguish the famous members of the bands on stage. Even if you couldn’t get in close enough to see Michael Stipe, the camera work transmitted onto the enormous screens on either side of the stage got you up close and personal with the performance. Even if MCA was too short for you to make out from your distant vantage point during Beastie Boys’ set, the cameras put you into the middle of the party with him.

Far and away the best show of my Langerado was Ghostland Observatory. Admittedly, the bands I was excited about included The Shout Out Louds, Minus the Bear, Thievery Corporation and Pelican. My wife was anticipating Ben Folds, G-Love, of Montreal and Ghostland Observatory. Of my hopefuls, I got to see Pelican. Of her hopefuls she got to see Ghostland Observatory. Ghostland Observatory stole the show out from under every other performance I witnessed that weekend.

Rising from the opaque smoke that spilled from the stage into the audience (which then collided with the pot smoke from the crowd) lasers shot off into space and an electronic dance music took over the night air. In spite of my general cynicism about the return of 70s and 80s pop with bands such as Vampire Weekend and Black Kids (sic), Ghostland Observatory brought a fresh energy to their spectacle of a two man show. They also brought a laser, so, yeah, they win.

The singer of this Austin, Texas duo made a reference to the sacred ground, and when he spoke of it, it dawned on me that his dark, earthy complexion looked like it could be Native American. Also, he’s from Texas. Also, he had his hair in symmetrical braids on either side of his head.

Dressed in tight jeans, a vest, and sunglasses, he alternately strutted and danced to the music piping out of his cohert’s stack of samplers and synthesizers. Oh yeah, and his cohert was dressed like a white warlock in a floor-length cape with a dramatic upturned collar. An odd couple indeed. Also helping push them above the throngs of new 80s throwbacks was the fact that the singer also played guitar, and was actually quite good at it. He was better at guitar when he took it on than his white warlock stagemate was at drums when he sat behind those, although it did provide a nice perspective of where there musical collaboration must have started.

Ranging from Prince to Asia to Dire Straits, Ghostland Observatory brought not just an 80s schtick back, but they made the entire playlist on the 80s radio station sound redeemable. And the ladies wanted to eat the singer whole. I guess it’s been a while since a singer was a good musician and sex symbol, so Ghostland kept us all happy.

Rumors had it that the other exceptional performances were by Backyard Tire Fire, Matisyahu, Ben Folds, Built to Spill and the Walkmen.

Langerado can’t be described by any single account, for each attendee the festival was different. Depending on the time of your arrival, the space you are assigned to camp in, and the bands you choose to see, every account is likely to be unique, but there are some unifying conditions that will help hippies in the future distinguish the 2008 festival from other concerts and other years. First, of course, are the relentless winds that will be sure to live on in the folklore spread throughout Volkswagens all across this great land. That is the sort of phenomenon that helps people remember this particular festival for years to come. Helping festers forget is what we came to refer to as the “Injun’ Rules” of the Seminole reservation. They never stopped selling alcohol, making this drunken fiasco the kind of experience you will always remember forgetting all about.

Living in the buckle of the Bible belt can be frustrating, even for devoted Christians. In some cases the difficulty comes from the image that is created when some of the more fundamentalist believers cast a shadow of intolerance around their specific moral agenda that seems at times to outweigh the love and grace aspect of the faith, and other times, liberal churches or followers are so tolerant that there doesn’t even seem to be a morality or an absolute to their belief. Those believers frustrate the attempts the stricter believers are making to make certain their culture knows where the God of the Bible stands on issues.
I was discussing some of the interesting things that have been happening in our pop culture recently with some friends of mine that are devoted, Bible-believing Christians (as well as some of the most intelligent people I know), around a bonfire at one of their 30th birthdays. We discussed the recent resurgence of morality-inspired albums and artistic projects that are reminiscent of the anti-war, secular humanism of the Vietnam era. Artists that were appreciated on a strictly artistic level throughout the Clinton and Bush I eras of Pax Americana, such as the Flaming Lips, Beastie Boys, and Cursive, that have recently released albums propagating a moral and political agenda.
On one hand, these artists have worked hard for many years to build a reputation as artists and as personalities, so there is some level of justification to them using that influence to endorse philosophies they believe deeply in. After all, every one of us around that bonfire had been fairly ignorant about the situation in Tibet until the Beastie Boys brought it to our attention. But they didn’t do it by tainting their music with a specific agenda, rather through external activism, without alienating any of their audience. With To the Five Burroughs, the Beastie Boys compromised their art as well as the integrity they had before their listeners when they forced out a less-than-inspired album wrought with political messages and released during an election year. Similarly The Flaming Lips have released At War with the Mystics, a politically charged album about the people taking the power back.
Probably most blatant, when it comes to indicting religion, is the new Cursive album Happy Hollow. On this musically brilliant album, the lyrical content addresses war or religion in every single song. While Tim Kasher distanced himself from the listener more on Happy Hollow than on any prior release, he also made harsh indictments on the church and their responsibility for so much emotional trouble and fabricated guilt and frustration in the world. Alongside this message is the anti-war theme.
I had the good fortune to get an opportunity to interview Cursive’s bass player, Matt Maginn, last week and I asked about these things. Read that interview to see his responses to some of these questions, but that is not really what I am addressing in this particular blog. In this blog I am addressing the place of pop culture in our personal philosophies. Books have been written and pundits have been outspoken about the illegitimacy of celebrities using their soap box to provide opinions that are neither expert nor qualified to be as influential as they are, as though they should be discredited for their opinions because they are artists. Personally I would rather hear what an artist that I admire thinks about something than listen to a pundit who is hardly more qualified and often seems to have put even less thought into the issue.
I don’t prefer the voice of the artists because I am more likely to sway to their ideals, in fact I doubt anyone likely to sway their ideals based on their fan status has ideals worth a shit anyway, but I enjoy a new perspective that forces me to rethink my own political and religious ideas. If believers are sincere in their convictions, if they really believe that the God of the Bible is an absolute and has established an absolute moral reality, there is no reason to be afraid of contrary voices. Truth is truth. So if Dan Brown releases The DaVinci Code and everyone wants to read it; let them. If it makes people question why they believe what they believe, won’t that deepen their faith and invoke a recommitment of sorts? If they are dealing in truth, won’t they come back to the true conclusions regardless of what the message was that inspired them to think on it again?
When I listened to Cursive’s Happy Hollow, I was upset by the distraction from the amazing music by the agenda that is showcased on the album. But the more I listened to the record, the more I realized the value of that distraction. Unlike The DaVinci Code, which presented “facts” contrary to a believers’ upbringing for cerebral and intellectual consideration, this was presented in the intimate moment of getting absorbed emotionally in the story of a song. Cursive’s Bad Sects off of Happy Hollow is a perfect example of this dichotomy. When I first heard it I wondered why Cursive wanted to throw their hat into the political discourse of gays in the church, and especially in the priesthood, but as I grew fonder of the song I started to experience it differently. Unlike Dan Brown’s poorly constructed mystery novel, Bad Sects pulled me into the story of one priests’ struggle to find a balance between his faith and his flesh.
“I know this is wrong because I’m told this is wrong.”
How often does our faith or our political position commit us to an idea that we have not thoroughly thought through on our own? We’ve taken ideas provided to us by a person or organization we trust, be it our church, our peer group, our candidates, or our favorite celebrities, and toted the party line because we are told how it makes sense. We are told this is wrong, but have we really taken it to court? Have we delved into why we think it is wrong and whom we are affecting with that decision?
Cursive didn’t change my mind about anything I believed spiritually, politically, or morally, but I realized the intimate depth of thought that can be brought on through a song. Through art that moves me. It is emotionally interactive. The depth of that impact can be threatening to someone that is weak-willed or has a poor foundation for their philosophies anyway, but for the thinking person, these re-evaluations are a good thing. They keep us honest.
As we stood around the bonfire drinking our cocktails and making toasts, we also discussed the resurgence of the concept that religion is bad for our culture. The new children’s movie Happy Feet presents the idea that religion handicaps society. Green Day, in their American Idiot album, suggests that religion is the thing that starts wars and fights. This is a popular concept lately. But in their idiot savant brilliance, the writers of South Park have once again displayed their courage and unbiased frankness in a recent two-part episode wherein Cartman, impatiently awaiting the release of the Nintendo Wii, travels to the future. In the future he finds a world in the violent throes of war, even though in this future no one believes in God. The basis for their violent struggle is the inability to agree on a name for their atheist culture. The message: even if there were no religion, people would find things to fight about. How true.
All in all I would prefer a culture that trusts its participants to make their own informed decisions based on many presented options, rather than a culture that legislates morality and doesn’t allow for discourse. Ultimately this is the American way: to allow for individuality and to trust our citizens to pursue honesty, personally and interpersonally.