Well, I tried to take some photos over the Boo weekend, but they don't seem to be on the memory card for the camera, maybe they're somehow in the camera itself. Will check tonight if I can.
At any rate it was another great Boo. Went out Friday evening and watched the bands. Got there too late to be inside the band gate (closer to stage) as the area was all spoken for, so set up my tent just outside it, sat down and started playing some mandolin.
The guy working the band gate (this was just to keep any further vehicles out, everyone goes through the band gate on foot to get to the stage), Mark, who I did not know, heard me playing mandolin, and immediately "upgraded" me to camp at his place inside the gate. So I and Mark's well-meaning (but somewhat thick) friend and flunky Scott dragged my empty but already-set up tent down to their site, which had the advantage of not only being closer to the stage, but also to the porta-potties; it also had a fire-pit already going, which was another plus. After we dragged the tent down, I went back and moved the Rockmobile up there as well.
So I sat down and commenced to playing some more mandolin, and Cathy, another person I'd never met before, invited me to come over to their camp, the next over, and play, since Mark and Scott were still on gate duty and I was just hanging out by myself. Cathy introduced me to her husband Larry, who is a drummer. He lives out in Bell (a small rural town nearby) and couldn't find anyone to play with out there, so I told them about our great local music resource website, GainesvilleBands.com, where he might could hook up with some other players, and they were so appreciative you'da thunk I just gave them a free car or something. They gave me some of the food they were making, which was delicious delicious.
You can kinda see the sort of spirit that more or less pervades Boo, just from the first hour or so I was there. It's a like a big family of a couple hundred (I'm guessing) people, even the ones you haven't met yet.
My singer/keyboardist from my "church" side band, Pedagogy, Joel, came out that night, so I pal'd around with him. I showed him where the band food and beer were located, and we had some of that and watched the bands play. He had some stuff in town to do the next morning, so he didn't stay overnight.
It got down in the 30's F Friday night, so I slept in the van rather than in the tent. Put the big Ampeg SVT 8x10 bass cab face down, then put an air mattress on top of it, and that was my bed.
Saturday morning I went into the nearest town, Waldo, and got a couple of burgers for brunch, and washed my hair in the bathroom sink at the Wendy's. Back at Boo, I hung out for most of the afternoon at the Big Oil (another band playing that night) camp, back out on the other side of the band gate, listened to the Gator football game on the radio, and helped unload a pickup full of wood for their fire. Scott came down from the campsite I was set up at and hung out too. Our sitemate Mark had got up and seemed fine that morning, but ended up under the weather soon thereafter, no doubt from the prodigious amount of vodka, and/or the shrooms, he'd done the night before. His girlfriend Kim was there keeping an eye on him, but basically he just needed to sleep it off after having puked his guts out (thankfully somewhere aways from the campsite).
My Pedagogy bandmates arrived in the late afternoon, and we went and set up onstage once we got the go-ahead. Set went fairly well, though my onstage bass volume was higher than it should've been, or more accurately, Joel's keyboards should've been backlined rather than just direct into the board. I hung out with Joel and our drummer, Nickel, for a couple hours until they had to leave, and kept watching the bands right through to the closer, Big Oil. Before Joel and Nickel left, the band that had opened on Friday night had come up to us and asked if we wanted to ever do any gigs out in the country, they would hook us up, so Joel and them traded info.
As it turned out, I knew at least one person (frequently several) in each of the bands playing Saturday night, and saw lots of people I hadn't seen in years both in the crowd and onstage. My friend Rebekkah was wearing voodoo face paint and came running up out of the darkness and hugged me before I had a chance to figure out who she was. She was pretty drunk and looking for a mutual friend, so I made a point of sticking with her for awhile until she found who she was looking for. Boo in general is a pretty safe environment, but I didn't want her wandering off and falling into the lake or the canal.
After the bands ended, there was a laser light show for an hour or so, but I ended up at yet someone else's campsite. Two women invited me over as I was walking back to the van, again total strangers. We swapped stories for awhile and I took my leave to crash atop the Ampeg-bed in the Rockmobile again.
Woke up to pee quite early and realized it was almost sunup anyhow, so after getting some free coffee (this is available to all Boo'ers, as the owners of a cafe come up every year) I sat in the van (luckily parked facing east) with the heat on getting my core temp back up, and watched the sunrise. Once it was fully light and I could get the van out without any drunken Boo'ers wandering in front of (or behind, when I was backing out to turn around) me in pitch blackness, I headed back to Gainesville.
