“Leftover Salmon: Thirty Years of Festival!” by Tim Newby 

The containment plan of social distancing for COVID-19 is taking aim and taking out a slew of scheduled concerts and spring festivals. The latest to fall – and probably largest roots music festival to be canceled – is the 33rd annual Merlefest that was set to run April 23-26 in North Carolina. And survey says it won’t be the last to be canceled.

A cloud of uncertainty is now facing the U.S. music festival industry that has bloomed from a handful like Milwaukee’s Summerfest and Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals (both of which pre-date the famed 1969 fest Woodstock) to more than 800 festivals that drew more than 32 million people in 2019.

Sure we can nash teeth and sit and worry about whether or not our favorite festival is going to survive, but as my spiritual advisor Willie Nelson said, ‘there’s nothing I can do about it now.’ Perhaps, a much healthier use of time here as we practice social distancing, is to take a breath and read. Let’s savor those backpacks of memories, and dig in with a great music-filled book to further appreciate the magic of eclectic bands and festivals and how they all bring so many people together in one love.

For jam festival fans, a must-read to get your mind positively twirling like a flaming poi pot in the black of night is the 2019 book, “Leftover Salmon: Thirty Years of Festival!” By Tim Newby, a writer for Paste, and Relix and author of “Bluegrass in Baltimore.” Newby first saw Leftover Salmon here in West Virginia at the epic All Good Festival and truly captures the essence of this band of merrymaking aquatic hitchhikers. Newby takes readers – in chapters featuring a dozen of the guys who have been members of this self-described “Polyethnic Cajun Slamgrass band” – on the long, strange trip that describes how Salmon has proverbially swam upstream, over some waterfalls and all through the night thousands of nights to share the joy of making and sharing music together.

For festival fans in West Virginia, it’s really cool in a bluegrass family tree kind of way to read how Salmon’s founders Drew Emmitt and Vince Herman were brought together in Colorado over their musical love of Mountain State native Tim O’Brien’s groundbreaking bluegrass-blended roots band, Hot Rize. The Arizona-born, Nashville-raised Emmitt was already out in Boulder falling under the influence of that first generation of jam grass when Herman, a Pennsylvania native West Virginia University student who was baptized in the weird and wonderful songs of Vince Farsetta, and WV old-time scene, took a road trip to Boulder in October 1985 to Emmitt’s Left Hand String Band at the Walrus Saloon. “It’s kind of weird to get out of your car, walk into a place, and find someone who you will play with for the next twenty-five years,” Herman recalls in the book.

While like any evolving band, Salmon’s journey through a mind-boggling 30 years of playing and touring has been rough and rocky, but it’s that kind of trail magic and openness to the universe that has ultimately guided their career during which they have been one of the first bluegrass-based touring bands to really successfully pinball between wild campus clubs and a wide range of festivals, building a grassroots following in the underground roots music scene without commercial radio airplay.

A neat aspect of the book is that Newby interviews and shines a light not only the founders Emmitt and Herman, both of whom have amazing recall, but also the dozen or so members of the band through the years including: Mark Vann, Michael Wooten, Tye North, Jeff Sipe, Greg Garrison, John Joy, Noam Pikelny, Andy Thorn, Alwyn Robinson, Erik Deutsch and other bands’ members who have toured and played countless festivals and shows with the band, which is noted for having influenced a slew of bands including YMSB, String Cheese Incident, The Motet, Shanti Groove and Rose Hill Drive, all from the Boulder area.

As you can imagine, Salmon has some really wild stories from the road traveling for about 3 1/2 years in a converted school bus, “Bridget,” that famous keyboardist Pete Sears called “like riding in a big yellow joint.” Emmitt describes the band nearly freezing to death in the bus (with no heat) in Vermont in winter when they had to take a screwdriver to chisel off the ice from the inside of the windows. But Emmitt also describes the time they played a gig in Florida and he drove the bus through the night so the band could wake up to a sunrise in Key West.

From the festival side,  you read about the evolution of America’s festival scene through the growth of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and how Salmon brought their perpetual campground party spirit to this and a thousand other fests with their traditions that bubbled up out of their “Camp Howdy,” including the hilarious tradition of “Anahuac,” a campfire picking takeover in which a group of pickers would sneak up and sing the Austin Lounge Lizards song “Anahuac” at the top of their lungs out of key before running away. And, of course, their tradition of getting a call and response going at any time by yelling the words, “Festival!”

“In Telluride, it had a life of its own. As the years progressed, you could be in the campground and yell, ‘Festival,’ and someone in the other camp would yell ‘Festival’ and it would go around the campground. When the band was onstage I would yell, ‘Festival’ and they would yell it back to me. Drew started it all, Herman said. “ ‘Festival’ has come to mean so much more to the band that just a silly yell from stage. The communal idea and endless fun of festival are encapsulated in the ‘Festival’ yell. It has come to be a greeting, a state of mind, the place to be. It represents all the band was and still is.”

While it may be a month or so before we can yell ‘Festival’ at a camp-out musical gathering, for now, we can read all about it and savor the beautiful magic of sharing music and community spirit that flows from “Thirty Years of Festival.” And, if the spirit movies you, like the Italians singing “Grazie Roma” together out their windows, lift your’s up and let a “Festival” yell fill the air.

Listen to Leftover Salmon’s 2019 appearance on Mountain Stage

Leftover Salmon founder Vince Herman will be in West Virginia on Saturday, April 4 as the host for the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame 2020 induction ceremony. Go online at www.wvmusichalloffame.com for more info.

 Regional Leftover Salmon dates are: May 23, DelFest (Maryland), June 12, Riverfront Live (Cincinnati, Ohio) and July 24 Floydfest (Virginia). Go online at www.leftoversalmon.com to see their full calendar.