Today brought Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 8 to a close. I saw Elvis Costello (…), Sam Beam of Iron & Wine and Gogol Bordello’s non-stop metal-bluegrass-party-jam. And again, lamentably, I have no good photographs. It’s time for either a new DSLR or at least a longer lens (though to be fair I didn’t really try hard today). It’s late here now and I’m trying to catch up with both the Patriots and Sox on DVR so I’ll just post a radio edit of Sodom, South Georgia from Iron & Wine. To get the full Iron & Wine HSB experience, randomly pause the song at various points, tell the audience jokes and then restart at the bridge.

Today was pretty not too bad down at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Wandered around finding the stages, briefly saw both Nick Lowe and The Desert Rose Band. I settled at the Porch Stage to see a set from Joe Purdy (whose name I hadn’t heard but who has had songs on House and Lost (he’s who Hurley is listening to on the beach in this scene from season one). Overall though, Purdy’s great live though a touch heavy on geographic nostalgia.

Dave Alvin has got the best concept in the business working – he’s surrounded himself with an all-female backing band (“The Guilty Women”) of mostly Austin players. I tried to count them all but it kept changing, somewhere between eight and seventeen musicians. As long as we’re doing soundtracks, Quentin Tarantino used Dave’s old band (The Blasters) song ‘Dark Night’ in From Dusk Till Dawn. In the clip below that song’s been dubbed over various wrong parts of that movie. It’s definitely not the song being played during the infamous Salma Hayek snake dance scene, that’s Austin’s Tito & Tarantula, though points for whoever cut this to make it look like a match.

Oh. Also saw part of Robert Earl Keen to continue my efforts of making up for sets missed at ACL, though it was getting dark and cold and about time to go watch the Cubs get knocked out of the playoffs so wasn’t so much into that.

My intrepid Foss Fest research of late summer festivals (and contact buzz hotspots) continued tonight at the Robert Plant/Allison Krauss show (last week, Austin City Limits, this week, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, next week, Dai Ginza Matsuri!). This is the first event I’ve been to down in Golden Gate Park (an easy walk from my new house) and it’s really a great venue, lots of topography, giant primordial trees and plenty of interesting people. To the disappointment of the PA crew Robert Plant was not (I think it’s fair to say) thirty years old, sexy and shirtless but Allison Krauss sang beautifully. T-Bone Burnett played there as well – his arrangements are sparse, spooky, brilliant. I’m glad I didn’t see their set last Saturday at ACL but feel some amount of guilt that I influenced others to go see Beck instead. The bluegrass banjo version of Black Dog alone was worth the (free!) price of admission. The version they played tonight had a much sharper staccato bass drum than the version below, though it’ll give you an idea. This is going to be a good weekend*.

*provided Dice-K can get a couple/three outs right here.

Bad news. According to O’Hare, the much anticipated MC Hammer presence at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 8 is limited to a Friday morning set as part of a “special educational program for local schools“. WHAT?!? I speak for us all when I emphatically say screw that – today’s childrens are in no way cognitively capable of enjoying MC Hammer on all the various levels of appreciation (publicly expressed derision, not-so-clever irony, middle-school nostalgia & reminiscence, wardrobe emulation malfunctions, suppressed roller-rink motor memories, legitimate overdue respect, etc).

PS. The game in the video is AudioSurf. Suxxor to your Rock Band 2.