Live: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival

It’s Friday at rush hour, and the show has only begun on the N Judah train line. Regular commuters clutch their briefcases, terrified, as a crowd of rowdy interlopers -- many in cowboy shirts, many in no shirts at all -- pack the car. The route is headed toward Golden Gate Park, where the eighth annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival commenced this afternoon, and two of the car's more enthusiastic riders are stone-giddy about the opening day headliner: "Robert f*ck*ng Plant, man," one says to the other in the blown-mind inflection that's the universal dialect of the three-day event. San Francisco might host a slew other open-air music festivals, but Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a multi-stage festival of roots rock, country and bluegrass (paid for by San Francisco venture capitalist Warren Hellman) is probably the one that most accurately reflects the eccentricities of its host city. Starting with Robert f*ck*ng Plant.

Even from 100 meters back, Plant's presence alongside Alison Krauss earns the expletive, for both the creepy, creaking, banjo-divin' whisper of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" and material from the duo's universally praised Raising Sand. The forecast called for rain, but the cypress trees of the park are bathed in the orange light of a clear late afternoon, and the warmth of the performance sets the table for the feast that follows during the weekend: a convivial and easy-going affair, populated by a swaying mix of young hippies, alt-country zealots in snap button shirts and the Marin County Chardonnay set.

The next day, this is the crowd we navigate to the side-stage performance by former Jayhawks Mark Olson and Gary Louris (more gushing on this): baguettes jutting out of backpacks, and clouds of smoke from BBQ stands and medicinal weed, every fourth person in an "[Insert occupation or social network] for Obama" T-shirt. Playing songs off their forthcoming effort and tunes they'd collaborated on in their young careers, their (older) voices straining to reach the falsetto for the band's only near-hit, "Blue," before throwing it in and singing the thing an octave lower. Their performance was followed by the most poised set of the weekend from songwriter (and former Elvis Costello producer) Nick Lowe, which was good enough to inspire a push past the seated masses of L.L. Bean catalog shoppers into the front row. The lion's share of Lowe's solo set was from Lowe's recent At My Age, though the singer tossed off some of his near-hits from the '80s ("I Knew the Bride [When She Used to Rock 'N' Roll]," "Cruel to Be Kind"), and a delicate reading of "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?" -- a tune excellently rendered on Lowe's own excellent live collection.

When we arrived on the third day -- Will Oldham, Iron & Wine and Ricky Skaggs being the targets -- two days of shuffling past crowds, drinking warm beers from a backpack and lying in the grass had taken its toll, making it hard to summon much motivation beyond the solo set by Sam Beam and laying around to hear the closing of the festival matriarch, Emmylou Harris. Beam's solo reading of tunes from The Shepherd's Dog made for the most interesting stuff of his set, which distilled that record's tapestry of world music inflection for solo acoustic guitar. Even though Beam stumbled through a handful of tunes, the effect was still sublime: geese overhead, half-squinting into the setting sun. "You can smoke marijuana here, but not cigarettes?" he remarked during his set. "That's some California sh*t."