08-09-2016, 05:45 AM
(This post was last modified: 08-18-2016, 04:42 PM by Dekalb_Blues.)
Well, here I am back in beautiful Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, U.S. of A., Inc., for the week of the intergalactic Muzikfest, featuring all kinds of groovy live music performances from solo to large ensemble, in all genres from Zydeco to Classical, with plenty of top-flight jazz in between. I was born and raised in this place (which like Paris has les Rives Gauche et Droite) and went to the first such 'fest 33 years ago -- that was when the whole affair was so laid-back and off-the-cuff that some musical acts would even wander around like medieval troubadours, looking for audiences! -- now the thing is corporatized and lawyered and tightly-scheduled and strictly-venued eight ways to Sunday, but you can still have fun and catch some great tunes whilst meandering about publicly in various states of merry intoxication (as long as you keep most of your clothes on and don't scare the horses).
VIP deck overlooking main outdoor stage
Sampling of some outstanding artists I've seen in the past three days (usually sitting or standing close enough to tickle them, if the need arose):
[Incidentally, this was filmed in a certain old bar in Easton, Pennsylvania, which I sometimes graced with my presence, as it was just a few blocks up the hill from the riverfront palazzo where I lived a few years back.]
[A wonderful dance troupe that performed elegantly debauched little comic dramas to select music. In this vid they are uncharacteristically actually wearing some costumery.)
[This guy is a powerhouse. There was many a baby's thing shakin' like that, for two hours straight, wow.]
[I was an unpaid roadie for this guy's band back in 1982, when my barely-legal trust-fund-baby girlfriend was the barely-paid female vocalist in his band -- oh, the stark frontier-town venues we played in the coal-mining region in hell-and-gone northeast Pennsylvania. Sort of like that honky-tonk with the chicken-wire-protected stage in the movie The Blues Brothers. Brosky recognized me standing by the stage last night and launched into nostalgic recountings of those ancient days, and then into this period song (the subtext of which deals with the local "Pennsylvania Dutch" culture and its old-fashioned dialect's accent). Allentown (immortalized in Billy Joel's 1982 hit "Allentown") is the next teeming metropolis west of Bethlehem (which is the city really referred to in "Allentown", as it was home to the once-mighty-but-by-then-failing Bethlehem Steel Corp., whose steel went into all the skyscrapers in NYC, the Golden Gate Bridge, the armor-plating and giant cannon of battleships in World Wars I and II, etc., etc. My father headed its lab for assaying global ore supplies and providing quality-assurance for the finished product. (For your information, BethSteel was at the cutting edge of industrial metallurgical applications of X-ray-spectroscopic technology in service of analytical mineral crystallography, in case you're ever asked this on a quiz show or by a wizard guarding a bridge over a chasm.)]