Sasquatch Festival 2008

My Carbon Footprint is as Big as My Wang*A Belated after-the-fact mini travelogue from Memorial Day 2008 in which a Utah native turned Portland area Radio Shack employee has experiences both musical and existential

Never forget. This is something I, along with ribbon shaped bumper stickers and your self righteous uncle Gary, would like to remind you of. That's why there are golden retriever agenda-planners, films about 9-11, and the most obvious, Memorial Day weekend. What are we supposed to not forget? I can't remember. Neither can thousands of my fellow Sasquatch! Festival goers or the girl I made out with outside a house show in Olympia. Remembering is not quite the point, I don't think, so much as not forgetting. And while I have no idea what I was to remember, I certainly haven't forgotten, and that's called patriotism.

It had been a solid hour of trying to tame a wild and elusive remote control helicopter whilst watching a Twilight Zone marathon before I remembered I was actually at work. I was able to get out of Radio Shack early that Saturday morning, giving me a jump start on what would prove to be a long weekend of shows and substance misuse that would start in Olympia and continue to Washington's 7th annual Sasquatch! Festival, a monstrous gathering of bands and the people who watch them at the Gorge Amphitheater.



"This road is not going to drive itself," I said out loud, the hum of a dozen Kia's at Portland's southeast 82nd avenue Taco Bell drive-through mumbled in agreement.



A few hours later I met some people at my friend Kelly's house in Olympia. Her noise band, Tiffani Amber Theisen, was playing a house show somewhere in the woods and we were all late. My dog, tried to kill a chicken that belonged to an anarchist who lived next door. The chicken was missing, the dog had a mouth full of feathers, and the dude had an ominously calm manner about him.

"If you see the chicken, just let me know," he said, gazing blankly into the clouds. Kelly found the chicken not long after, unharmed aside from a bare spot on her ass where feathers used to be.

There were almost 20 bands taking turns on the stage that night; a pack of stray dogs seemed to be working the door, broken cars in the cigarette-butt littered lawn, dirt under every fingernail (or is it organic top soil?) and I, a bit overdressed with my sleeves and shoes.



If I went to Evergreen, I thought to myself, my major would be making out with chicks. There would be no grades. Someone mentioned a Salt Lake band was present, and set to play later that night, they called themselves Calico. I found their drummer - my friend, someone's ugly step-brother - none other than Tyler Ford, drinking Hamm's next to a paste-colored van.

"I've got some candy in here," he said, mistaking me for someone else, but it wasn't long before the confusion of seeing a friendly face in an unlikely place was soon cleared. Brady Gunnel, Calico's frontman, informed me they were on a northwest mini-tour (me too! sort of) and were the last band to go on. As the night waxed, I made it a point to tell everyone to stay for my 'favorite' band from Salt Lake, even though it didn't look like they'd be on until around 2 am. A handful of people stuck around while Calico took a million years to set up. My friends and I, tired and drunk, curled up like kittens in front of the band, ready to purr. Salt Lake's boys in blue (cardigan sweaters) were a perfect punctuation mark on an otherwise grammatically incorrect night of slop-rock. Their tightly wound, meticulous texture-folk had even Kurt Cobain's illegitimate son saying "meow." Their closer, a tongue-in-cheek-in-mustache reinterpretation of Montell Jordan's "This is How We Do It" had us whispering along, "I reach for my 40 and I turn it up/Designated driver, take the keys to my truck."

The next day had me waking up in Kelly's guest room, which happened to also be her kitchen. There's a lot of music to catch today, I thought, so I clogged the toilet and was again on my way to another adventure. Determined not to be stoned before I got to the festival, I accidentally smoked a J in the car and got way stoned, rocking some of Jackson Browne's best, most sentimental songs about hitting Daryl Hannah. "Jackson Browne is awesome," I said to myself, but so are Built to Spill, Battles, The Flaming Lips, and a host of other bands waiting for me at the Gorge Amphitheater. I must get into festival mode." I parked my car on some BLM land a few miles away from the amphitheater itself, my intention was to save some money on per-car camp costs by crashing with impressionable teenagers, while sparing my poor automobile the harsh reality of an impound, which a local farmer assured me would happen if I left her any closer to the venue.

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