Loose Leaf Notes

Michael Franti is beautiful inside and out.  I like the way he jumps when he performs and how he gets the crowd jumping too.  I like his fun lovingness and his life philosophies, one of which is to hug someone everyday, kiss someone everyday, miss someone everyday and give some love to someone that needs a little extra everyday.   Listen HERE.

“Music brings us together,” the barefoot, dreadlocked musician told the crowd during his Thursday night performance with Spearhead. In the church of music, he had the crowd members turning to nearby strangers to give hugs.  Joe and I met a couple from Atlanta that way.

I remember thinking that he was like a sports car, with so much energy and with stagehands like pit crews changing out his guitars like tires.  His songs come first and the genres he uses to perform them — a mix of rap, reggae and rock — are secondary to the lyrics, music and the hooks that engage fans in uplifting sing-alongs.  HERE’S a clip of a song he dedicated to vets.

My neck got stiff from holding up my camera to catch all the action during the show and I was brave to keep snapping when about 50 yellow balls got thrown from the stage into the crowd during Franti’s Sound of Sunshine. I got popped a few times, but held tight. Watch the action HERE.

Franti is the kind of down-to-earth guy who leaves the stage when the show is over from the front instead of the back, so he can mix with the people.  He’s also the kind of guy who takes the show right out and into the crowd.  That’s him in the way back center with the white shirt on.  More HERE.

The balls and crowd surfing were fun, but my favorite part of the show was when Franti called all the children on stage to dance and sing a few numbers with him.  I could see the kids being empowered right before my eyes.

The Friday night headliner I was waiting for was Ziggy Marley, (who I had seen once before in a Radford University gym sometime in the early ’90s).  I’ll never forget seeing his long dreadlocks fly and hearing him say that Floyd was beautiful and that he should get a place here.  “This is my kind of neck of the woods,” he said in his Jamaican accent before singing I Don’t Wanna Live on Mars,  a song from his newest album, Fly Rasta.

It was probably a good thing that they only allowed the media in the pit for three songs because after I got a few up-close shots, I was free to dance, and I did …  from one end of the field to the other.

Like the rest of us there, I loved when he sang his father’s song, but even more, I loved his Conscious Party songs, like Look Who’s Dancing Now.  All I could think about when he performed those songs was Joe and I walking in St. Croix in 1988 after drinking Bailey Coladas at a shack bar on the beach.   Joe was on the island re-building after Hurricane Hugo and I had come to visit.  We were in love, strutting up the street, just a little drunk, and swinging a boombox that was playing Conscious Party at full volume.

After Ziggy, I couldn’t stop walking with a high step bounce and without raising my arm ever few steps.   I walked that way all the way to the VIP beer tent and before going home to rest up for day four of the festival.