Rumor Has It: Mucklewain 2008?

If you know me at all or listened to the show at all in the last six months, you know the two nights of whiskey and southern music and singing along with strangers that all but made 2007 for me: Mucklewain.

Four of us headed into east Tennessee at dusk on Friday evening, my tiny car crammed with a tent which we hardly slept in, a cooler full of beer and cheese sandwiches, and a trunk full of blankets and WRVU coozies, with a few toothbrushes thrown in just to keep up appearances.  We were there on official station business, as one of the sponsors of the 2007 festival, but only the coozies gave us away.  We had the radio cranked up, the booze on standby, spirits were high.  We really had no idea what to expect, but we were damn excited either way.

Now I know Lollapalooza, and Pitchfork, and all the indie-headlining festivals have their perks.  I've been to my fair share, crammed in with kids in Chuck Taylors and hipsters passing pot around, thrilled to finally see The New Pornographers but kind of wishing I wasn't craning my neck past the guy with the Radiohead tattoo and watching the giant television screens instead of the stage.  With a few key exceptions, those festivals tend to be about gathering together a ton of bands you'd love to see play, cramming them into two days, and hoping the heat doesn't get to you before Yo La Tengo does.  I hate the saga of plotting which bands I'll see, sacrificing some newcomer act so that I can get to the Girltalk stage six hours early and stake out my spot in the second row.  I hate planning meticulously so that we don't either run out of water or have to pee for four hours.  I hate that guy who keeps smoking next to me.  I hate that chick who decided to wear  her 'going out' outfit.  I'm tired of having five hundred strangers within five feet of me.  I love the music, and some of the people, and some of the atmosphere, but were I offered the chance to pay double and see the bands in the bar down the street, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Mucklewain is arguably the opposite.  Going in, I knew less than a dozen of the fifty or so acts playing throughout the weekend.  Coming out, it didn't matter.  I felt like friends with them all.  After forty-eight hours of scorching sun and icy nights, of sharing sleeping bags and tents and campfires and beer with whoever you happened to meet, of telling your life story to strangers and singing along to songs you didn't know you knew the words to, we were exhausted and dirty and smelly and happy.  Really, really happy.

Mucklewain understands what a festival's supposed to be, what I'm told it used to be when my parents were the ones in the crowd, in the generations before mp3 blogs and the Pitchfork dynasty.  Mucklewain has atmosphere.  Mucklewain has community.  Mucklewain is all the great things you associate with the south, the recklessness, the friendliness, the familiarity, the total lack of bounds between strangers and friends, between musicians and fans.  The crowd is there because they love music, not because one big name act dragged them there.  They don't go slinking off after the headliner plays.  In fact, you're hard-pressed to even figure out who the headliners are.  The musicians all know each other, come and go on each others' stages, slip in and out of each others' sets, come and stand in the crowd and sing along with us common folk.  By the end of the second night, you know them too.  You've bought them a beer, they brought you backstage and returned the favor.  You danced to Drivin N Cryin together.  You threw your arms around each other.  You forgot who it was you came with and who it was you're leaving with, the music's with you and you're a part of something, whether it's loud and raunchy and thumping on the mainstage, or quietly entranced on the songwriter side.  

The music itself was phenomenal as well.  You know that friend you have who always invites you out to local shows, passes along his favorite albums, has infallible taste in music worth listening to?  That friend is Mucklewain creater Joie Todd.  Along with the musicians I came dying to see (Amy LaVere, Bobby Bare Jr., Cory Branan, Lucero, Les Honky More Tonkies, etc.) I wasn't disappointed by a single act, and fell pretty crazily for a few of them.  Malcolm Holcombe was every bit the crazy genius I was told to expect, Shelly Colvin and Jeff Black played a moving folk-country duet, and Old Union played explosive rock that made me wonder why the hell I've never gone to see them play in Nashville.

It's a shame that the turnout wasn't better.  Whether because it wasn't advertised widely enough, the headliners weren't big enough, or southerners are just stingy with their cash, I felt for Joie Todd and the bands that played not knowing whether they'd be paid for their time.  Many of them didn't care.  Joie worked his ass off getting the festival together, and I wanted it to be a mad success for him.  In all ways except financially, it most certainly was, but it remains to be seen whether he can afford to take the same gamble this fall.

Rumors are flying that Mucklewain will in fact be returning to Tennessee for its third year running this September, despite the lackluster turnout and the financial woes it may or may not be facing.  I'm gonna keep wishing and praying until then that it does decide to give us all another chance.  If it does, I'll be talking about it nonstop on the radioshow, and I may even guide a caravan of cars down to the festival if need be.  Whatever it takes to get you all there.  We'll all stake our tents together and start making friends, Nashville-style.  I've spent the last four months craving Mucklewain, and I'll spend the next eight doing everything I can to make sure it happens again this year, and make sure you're there to enjoy it with me.  

It was, by far, the best vacation I have ever had.

MUCKLEWAIN.COM