Culture
Very Special NMF Memories From the RFA Crew
< < Back toThis weekend is usually the most magical of the year. Let’s hope we are back at Robbins Crossing finding out about our new favorite band this time next year!
From Michael T.
From DJ Grumpy Grandma
Just like everyone else, I feel my connection to the Nelsonville Music Festival is special — and I don’t think that I am fooling myself to believe that it is.
The first time I attended the festival was in 2012 as a sophomore in college, volunteering as a music journalist for WOUB Public Media and my former boss, Bryan Gibson. When I first met Bryan in person after writing for him a bit early in the spring semester, he looked me square in the eyes from the office that would someday be mine and asked “so, do you really listen to the music you mention in your writing?” He was referring to my fondness for bands like Throbbing Gristle and the fact that I am a very small, and (back then) especially quiet person in a female avatar dressed in floral print who was also pretty young to know about Genesis P-Orridge.
Although it may seem “cool” that two of my favorite records in high school (CDs, actually, I didn’t start buying vinyl until post college,) were II by Meat Puppets and 145 by Wire, I can promise that these interests did not win me friends in high school. In fact, my best friends were a pair of typically duct-taped-together cheapo headphones battered from going everywhere with me and a steady selection of the cheapest Walkman knockoffs I could find and although this would serve me later, like when I would eventually become the arts and culture reporter at WOUB or when I interned at Billboard magazine, believe me, it hurt me more than helped me back then.
In many ways, that weekend covering the Nelsonville Music Festival for the first time would mark the first time that my obsessive musical knowledge would actually serve me. In 2016 I would be hired by WOUB to fill Bryan’s old position, and I have been grateful for the exhausting experience of covering the festival yearly ever since. I am the producer for the WOUB Culture videos you see here, and I am the associate producer of the Gladden House Sessions, and I have been both of those things since 2016, which my 20-year-old self would have never believed, but I’m starting to.
WOUB at NMF ’19: Day One Experience and Food
Ezra Furman – Tell Em All to Go to Hell
2018 Nelsonville Music Festival: tune-yards
2018 Nelsonville Music Festival: Nick Waterhouse
2017 Nelsonville Music Festival: Ron Gallo
Talking Heads – Crosseyed and Painless
Billy Strings – Dust in a Baggie
VIDEO: The Cordial Sins at NMF ’19
VIDEO: Festival Fashion at NMF ’19
Sierra Ferrell – 2019 Gladden House Session
Amanda Anne Platt – 2019 Gladden House Session
Tyler Childers – 2017 Gladden House Session
Sun June – 2019 Gladden House Session
From R@T
My original description for our playlists this week was about my deep connection to NMF. After watching probably way too much news coverage this week I have decided to go in a different direction.
The Nelsonville Music Festival was supposed to be this weekend but because of the growing damndemic it had to be canceled. That is unfortunate because after the last few months, and especially the last week, we really could have used it.
The Nelsonville Music Festival is my favorite weekend of the year. I, being someone who has helped to run the beer garden for over the last decade have a slightly different perspective of it than most. It is kind of like I have been watching it happen rather than participating in it. But, I still feel the joy that it brings. It is four days of love. It is four days of peace. It is four days of cooperation. It is four days of the best of us as a community that exists, unfortunately, temporarily. It is four days that serves as an example of how we should live every day. We work and live together, we eat together, we take care of children together, we respect our environment together, we enjoy and celebrate art and music, TOGETHER!
I love The Nelsonville Music Festival. It has been strange not preparing for it. I will miss it. I will miss the people whom I have worked with and have come to love. I will miss trying to catch a little bit of music while working to a point of exhaustion. I will miss golf cart rides with my kid who loved being my helper. I will miss all of the volunteers. I will miss watching so many people take pictures next to the NMF letters as you walk in. I will miss the feeling I get when I have had the occasional minute to stop and look around. It is an incredible feeling of love and peace and that what we ALL have created. It is a feeling of perfection. A feeling of how the world should be every day. It is what we need right now. Live to make that happen.
In lieu of The Fest my comrades and I at Radio Free Athens and I have put together playlists that are from just some of our favorite past performances. Be good to each other and we look forward to seeing you all at next year’s Fest.
Tim Easton- The Gladden House Sessions 2015
Sarah Shook and the Disarmers- Dwight Yoakam 2017
John Prine- Sam Stone 2013
St. Paul & the Broken Bones- Sugar Dyed 2014
Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas- Demons 2014
Built to Spill- Three Years Ago Today 2015
The Flaming Lips- Fight Test 2015
Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats- I Need Never Get Old 2016
Courtney Barnett- Nobody Really Cares if You Go to the Party 2016
Hayes Carll and Shovels and Rope- Hide Me 2012