Getting There
by Steve LaBate
For anyone who lives in a city, suburb, even a small town… the Seminole reservation at Big Cypress—site of this year’s Langerado Music & Arts Festival—is truly in the middle of nowhere. Like most of the other festival-goers, we cruised the 40 scarcely populated but gorgeous miles east from Fort Lauderdale down Florida’s Alligator Alley, under endless blue skies and towering pillows of clouds, straight into the heart of the Everglades.
Before the Paste Langerado crew left this morning, we had a quarter tank of gas, so we thought we’d be fine without a fill-up. Somehow, though (my best guess is that some twisted over-ambitious hippie on a head-full of acid took out a hacksaw and cut the Big Cypress highway sign right off the pole), we ended up missing the festival exit, getting lost, and then—with a vicious sputter followed by a complete loss of power steering—we ran our Mazda’s gas tank dry and shimmied to a stop on the side of some winding swamp road 15 miles outside of Everglades City. I looked up: “Panther Crossing” read one sign. “Beware of Gators,” said another.
We tried in vain for about an hour to flag down a passing motorist; there were none. Finally our apparent guardian angel—in the form of a Waylon Jennings-obsessed Columbian-American local named Harvey—arrived on the scene and whisked us off to a gas station five miles down the road. Turns out we’d almost made it. On the way, Harvey told us we need to be careful in the swamp: Just last year, a woman was jogging along the same road we’d stalled on; she stopped to tie her shoe and a gator popped up out of the roadside ditch and tore her arm off. When she tried to escape from the ditch, the police later hypothesized, the gator tore her other arm off. They found her dead on the roadside. While we were filling up our gas can, we also learned about the 35 remaining endangered Florida panthers (native to this part of the Everglades), which are often killed by speeding cars. We promised Harvey we’d keep it under 50.
Back on track, we finally arrived at Big Cypress for the festival. Later in the evening, after bouncing around between stages and catching snippets of The Wailers, Ozomatli and other acts, I finally settle in for my first full set of the night: G Love & Special Sauce. The pleasantly lazy crowd chills in the breeze as the sun begins to dip below the tree line. Hippies and tattooed freaks—totally in their outsider element here—hackey sack as Special Sauce busts a funky/bluesy groove from the ever-so-appropriate Sunset Stage. G Love and his cohorts run through plenty of new material and a handful of tried-and-true live staples: “Rodeo Clowns,” “Baby Got Sauce” and “Cold Beverage.” When the latter comes on, a trio of spring-breaking college girls starts hula-hooping. The crowd follows suit, getting up off the dry grass and twisting to the music (sans hula hoops, of course). G Love blows his harp and sways side to side, too, as if the whole crowd is his dance partner for the evening. “Baby Got Sauce” heats up, bolting toward the show’s end on a jammed-out uptempo coda, akin to the static organ-heavy vamp at the center of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride. As the song finishes big, Bassman Jimmy Jazz mimics Pete Townshend’s trademark windmills on his upright and G Love plays showman, summoning his best late-period Elvis moves—running in place, waving his arm in a graceful whip-like motion to command that the band hits a series of accents in unison. The crowd cheers, then scatters like rain clouds giving way to sunshine—moving on to the next adventure of the day.
Free For All
by Sara Miller
Forget Vampire Weekend—the eight men and one woman of the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars ARE Afropop. As in, they’re from Africa. As in, band leader Reuben Koroma and rhythm guitarist Francis Lamgba fled Sierra Leone in the early ‘00s and met in a refugee camp in Guinea, where they formed the core of the group that tours today. “We always remember those terrible days,” Koroma said between songs, “we wrote a song: ‘Living Like a Refugee.’” Then they launched into the titular track from their debut album, the frilly ruffles on Koroma’s cotton-candy-pink jumpsuit ululating as he danced ecstatically around the stage.
The beat-heavy (four percussionists!) dance-pop of the Refugee All Stars—the more-upbeat descendants of Bob Marley and The Wailers—engenders happiness. It’s impossible to watch Koroma and not feel his warmth (and the warmth of his smiling bandmates) radiate from every shambolic pop-and-lock of his flailing elbows. “Do you know what life is like in a refugee camp?” Koroma asked. “No cold water to drink, no hospital, separated from your country, surrounded with diseases like cholera, malaria, HIV ... but one good thing is the band. The band was born of the situation, and we survived it! So join the the band and celebrate!” And we did, and they did, playing with the grinning abandon of sweet freedom.
Check back for more later on !!!, The Roots, Built to Spill and The Beastie Boys, all live from Langerado.
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