This past weekend, located in the midst of 800 acres of Spanish moss decorated Live Oak, Florida, at the Spirit of Suwannee Music Park, The String Cheese Incident hosted their annual Halloween extravaganza with three nights of toe-tapping booty-shaking jams for fans from all over the country, Suwannee Hulaween 2013. To accompany the seven sets of Cheese throughout the festival was electronic phonemes Big Gigantic (which was unfortunately rained out) and Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) headlining late night Friday and Saturday. For the first time at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, there was a rendition of Spirit Lake transformed into an epic visual arts display with a collaboration of breathtaking lighting, art installations consisting of some of the Southeast’s finest sculptors, painters, fire/metal artists, and performance arts evolving the Spirit Lake waterfront landscape into a dream-like Halloween wonderland, fully accelerating all five senses under the direction of String Cheese’s art guru, Andrew Carroll. Included in the Spirit Lake Promenade was a Silent Disco allowing festival-goers to keep partying into the wee hours of the morning.
Kicking off the festivities Halloween night was bluegrass royalty Larry & Jenny Keel tearing up the main stage with acoustical jams setting a magical southern aura that Suwannee is known for with tunes such as “Bound to Ride” and a cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Ramble On Rose.” As Halloween night progressed, The String Cheese Incident took over the main stage for their highly anticipated three set spectacle. The first set blasted off in no time with “Desert Dawn,” followed by “Rhythm of The Road” morphing into “Let’s Go Outside.” Before ending the first set with the String Cheese favorite “Texas,” keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth amped the fully lit crowd for the upcoming second set with ghoulish bits from the theme song from the 1978 film Halloween.
The second set induced the Halloween themed night with a display of Voodoo inspired dancers on stage and giant jack-o-lantern inflatables bouncing amongst the ecstatic crowd as AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells” echoed throughout the property. Some of the other haunting covers played in the Halloween set included versions of the Police’s “Spirits in the Material World,” Kanye West’s “Monster” rapped by percussionist Jason Hann, Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child,” and finished the hyped set straight into Fleetwood Mac’s “Black Magic Woman.”
The last set of the three-set bonanza kicked off with the high voltage tune “Rosie” accompanied by the appearance from the jazzy four-piece Antibalas horn section making for quite a pleasant surprise. The Cheese then followed up with “Black Clouds” sung by bassist Keith Moseley melting into “Big Mon” and back again into “Black Clouds.” The real treat for me were the last three songs of the set making for eargasms galore with the “Spirit of Suwannee” improvisational piece blended into “Joyful Sound” and finished strong with “Open Road.” For the encore, the Antibalas horn section returned with much welcome to the stage for a groovy rendition of “Miss Brown’s Teahouse” followed by an upbeat version of Hank Williams classic “I Saw The Light” and clocked out with Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”
Thursday night’s festivities wrapped up at the newly introduced Spirit Lake Stage with music from Van Ghost followed by a second set from Larry & Jenny Keel. After the live music came to a halt, the crowds migrated, and encircled performance artists consisting of: hula hoop artists, fire dancers, fire eaters, belly dancers, still-walkers, and jugglers. The real treat for me was the Manic Menagerie Burlesque which included stripteases from a fire dancer goddess with a masked antler crown, a trance inspiring angel with elongated white flowing wings, and a wolf woman transforming during her dance into a version of Little Red Riding Hood.
The second day of the festival sounded off with up and coming Florida bands Come Back Alice and the Catfish Alliance at the Spirit Lake Stage. Later in the afternoon on the main stage, festival goers were blessed with improvisational wizard Steve Kimock and Friends with John Kimock on drums, Ron Johnson on bass, and Bernie Worrell on the keys. Featured horn players Jennifer Hartswick (trumpet) and Natalie Cressman (trombone) from the Trey Anastasio Band made for a very special addition to the show. They started the set with “A New Africa” and proceeded to jam into some funky freshness covering the Beatles “Come Together” and the Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River,” both crowd favorites. The crowd moved from stage to stage as a mass exodus, and Moon Taxi led the stampede to the amphitheater stage with highly popular tunes such as “Southern Trance” and “Whiskey Sunsets” full of energy that really captivated the audience.
The String Cheese Incident took the stage for the second day just as the clouds began moving fast overhead sending a warning that a large slow moving cold front from hell wasn’t far behind. During Cheese’s first set, guest appearances were made by Steve Kimock and Bernie Worrell for a star embedded rendition of Eddy Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Big Gigantic’s saxophone ripper Dominic Lalli was also a guest appearance during the second set making for an ecstatically charged “Bumpin’ Reel”, but that ended up being all that Big G fans would hear out of Big Gigantic Friday night with the nearing cold front that brought the festival to a screeching halt just mere hours later. The Main Squeeze was the last band to make it on stage before the heavens let loose with Zeus’ lightning bolts and buckets of rain wreaking havoc through the early hours of Saturday morning.
On Saturday morning, the sun shined as festival goers rung out their socks and tracked down lost tarps that had blown away the previous night, then made their way to the main stage for Brock Butler’s solo act. Brock played a diverse variety of covers from Tom Petty’s “Wild Flowers” to the highly popular Sublime’s “Can’t Fight Against The Youth” accompanied by Tye Mann on the acoustic guitar. Late in the afternoon Colorado’s favorite sons and bluegrass sensation Leftover Salmon had their turn to wow the crowd with popular foot-stompin’ melodies such as “Gulf of Mexico,” “Home Cookin’,” and “Up on the Hill Boogie.” The String Cheese Incident’s Billy Nershi made a guest appearance with Leftover Salmon for the last two songs “Down in the Hollow” and “BooBoo” arousing anticipation amongst the crowd for Cheese’s last two sets of the weekend.
The String Cheese Incident took the main stage for their final two sets of Suwannee Hulaween with more special guest appearances to come. Leftover Salmon jumped on stage with Cheese and harmonically collaborated a rendition of “Zombie Jamboree.” Guest Appearances from the percussionists of STS9’s Jeffrey Lerner and Toubab Krewe’s Luke Quaranta at the end of the first set, morphed “Colliding” jam into “Drums” arrangement. String Cheese continued to top themselves at the end of the second set with one last guest appearance from the Trey Anastasia Band’s horn players/vocalists Jennifer Hartswick and Natalie Cressman whom sat in on a take of the The Jacksons’ “Shake Your Body To The Ground” that left the crowd pleading for more. The String Cheese Incident answered back during the encore with a head banging throwback cover of Led Zeppelin’s infamous hit “Kashmir.”
The final headliner of the weekend to fulfill the electronic enthusiast’s appetite was Sound Tribe Sector 9 putting on an explosively amped show filled with spectacular lighting and heart thumping bass drops that left listener’s brain rattling in their skull for days to come. Wrapping up Saturday night’s festivities included musical acts from Emancipator and The Applebutter Express, followed by two hours of Silent Disco raving at Spirit Lake with DJ’s melodically stimulating participants until 5am. With rumors from festival organizers saying “a new tradition is born and we’ll see ya’ll in 2014,” festival lovers can expect more to come in the future with Hulaween partnering with The Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. Merry Halloween to all, and keep on keeping the music alive.