clean air clear stars
Soon after arriving in Pioneertown, CA, for the Clean Air Clear Stars festival, my travelling companions, Calvin and Hobbes, were (naturally) forced to concede that I was right to drag them there.
As Calvin so aptly put it, Clean Air Clear Stars encompasses all the good things about a music festival without:
• Wankers (including pill poppers and Kanye glasses wearers)
• Shoe requirements
• People with their phones constantly out (too remote for reception)
• Overpriced bottles of water
• High heels
• Sniffer dogs
• Toilet queues
But to say that how amazing CACS is is merely a culmination of lacking all the things that suck about music festivals would be denying the festival and its organisers their due credit.
My attendance in 2009 actually decreased my will to go this year. I’d had such an amazing time that I was certain there was no way its 2010 follow up would indeed be able to follow up. As it stands, both are life highlights.
This year’s line-up boasted fantastic acts including Dead Meadow, Leopold and his Fiction, Sky Parade, 1776, as well as the side projects of Dandy Warhols members – Peter Holmstrom and Zia McCabe – Pete International Airport and Brush Prairie, respectively. Despite its ongoing high calibre of artists, festival director, Tommy Dietrick, described this year’s CACS as the family event.
‘This year’s probably a bit more grass roots, kind of like the first year was. Last year we had a ton of people but we had the Dandy Warhols, year before that we had Black Angels and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. It’s smaller this year but to me, it doesn’t matter if there’s 1000 people there or if there’s 300, it’s still doing what it’s supposed to do,’ says Dietrick.
The concept for a festival in what is, more or less, the middle of nowhere, arose from the simple desire to get a group of like-minded people in the same place.
‘It’s not like we’re treading on new ground by bringing people together but it’s bringing together specifically the California/West coast sort of psych scene, but then mixing it up with all of our international brethren. The digital revolution over the last five or ten years made the world so much smaller and there’s been a lot more contact between like minded types of artists, musicians. So we did this one thing which was out in Jawbone Canyon and when we started thinking about throwing another one of these all night parties, it was a natural course for us to choose Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown. We’d all been going there for years and been fans of getting out and away from the city of LA. Once we’d chosen the spot, we thought, who cares about making money and turning it into that could end up being ugly in the end. We thought why don’t we do something positive and decided to raise money to give to environmental charities.’
After partnering up with a non-profit for the first three years of the festival’s history, organisers decided to donate all the money made this year to a specific task, where every dollar made above basic running costs would plant a tree; a successful endeavour that saw the festival raise funds to plant 1700 trees.
As well as their commitment to music, the commitment to the environment has similarly special resonance with the area and its residents.
‘In 2006, there was a fire that hit this whole region. As nitrous oxide and greenhouse gases increase over desert climates, those are essentially the first regions on the planet that react to the shift in climate. The red brome, which is a fast growing low ground cover weed, just starts spreading and the more nitrous oxide and greenhouse gases in the air, the more it spreads. So that is what allowed these fires to just roar through 60,000 acres, when you have a lightning storm or someone drops a match or anything. When it hits close to home like that you think, wow this is real.’
The most apparent aspect to your average festival goer, however, is the weekend’s relaxed atmosphere and the community that exists between these musicians.
As Dietrick puts it, ‘the bands here are also festival goers. Everyone gets to enjoy the event and be a part of it and it’s not like we’re going to be backstage drinking expensive Coronas and you’re going to be over there drinking Pabs or whatever. It’s never impressed me. I’ve been to all those backstage parties and the ones that are fun are with the people that don’t care that they’re there and the ones that are lame are the ones where everyone’s just walking around emboldened through ego and sniffing cocaine and talking about how great they are. It’s pretty boring.
‘It’s completely by choice and design that everyone can walk freely through the crowd and just have fun and enjoy it, rather than putting the bands somewhere off to the side. I think music should be connecting people. Bands live for that validation from the crowd, but that’s certainly not the only reason to make music.’
Clean Air Clear Stars is the kind of event that makes you wonder how it could have possibly flown under the radar of all major music press, but it’s also the kind that makes you hope it always does. It’s the intimacy and the lack of rampant fandom (bar yours truly) that makes this festival so special.
Admittedly, Clean Air Clear Stars is a bit of a hike (well, flight) from our isolated island, but it’s the perfect haven for psychedelia/shoegaze/festival lovers.
The next Clean Air Clear Stars event will take place during Australia’s spring, 2011.
