On September 21, two General Managers of WCFM, one PR Director, one Programming Director, one ex-Programming Director, and a dear friend of the radio went to FreshGrass music festival, nominally to see an ex-DJ perform. Kind of more to take to its logical conclusion a long-running grift of going to the music festival for free, via press/photo pass acquisition. And yet here we are, little rule followers, doing our press: this is the second time I’ve put pen to paper about this damn festival. Ultimately we mostly had a nice time — we saw Lily Goldberg ‘22 perform with her band, we sat in the James Turrell, and one of our number experienced about thirty seconds of Bluegrass Bliss while listening to Béla Fleck brandish his banjo. The festival is nice, particularly when the weather is nice, but this year it felt more packaged than ever before. You know what to expect, coming here. You wear your flannel and your cowboy boots and you nod along, practicing your talking points on the mandolin and the fiddle. The lineup was not as remarkable as it could have been — sources report Lucinda Williams pulled out. And, largely, Williams students did not go this year, because RLT or OCL or maybe CES or ZCE failed to procure the normal hundred or so tickets offered to students. We’re not sure why, nor have we asked. Something vaguely less satisfying about having gotten in with a press pass when you can’t flash it at your friends who had to wait in line for their free tickets. We didn’t stay late.
Pictured: Olivia Johnson (PR Director) photographs The Devil Makes Three; Meyer Leff (Programming Director), Olivia Johnson (PR Director), Sasha Tucker (General Manager), and Cathy McPartland (Dear Friend of the Radio)
Written By: Sasha Tucker