BeachLife Festival goes on as Sunday Shines

by Gavin Heaney

Sunday afternoon at BeachLife saw a little sunshine when Marcus King rocked the HighTide with his teeth out. King is a husky southern soul-rocker with all the right fix-ins. He grinned out from sideburns under red shades and a straw cowboy hat like a young Meatloaf gone buck wild as he wailed on his smokey maple telly through a pile of crunchy Orange amps. “Anyone drinkin’ today? This is for all the hedons in the house!” he hollered as an introduction to “Too Much Whiskey,” his nod to Willie Nelson’s amber current flow. King hits the blues guitar like BB, stretching and bending the scale, trying to catch that note just beyond the ceiling. 

The blues scale is contained in a limited, more primitive box shape, and King tried his best to break out of it. The band’s sound made me realize southern rock is essentially an iced tea of country, drizzled with sugary R’n’B. The band’s country rock was sweetened with soul music and King’s singing was channeling Aretha Franklin at times. I detected an Ike and Tina turn to the groove of their cover of “Ramblin’ Man” before they went all in on the Allman Brothers tune with its signature harmonized guitar noodling.

Afterwards as the throngs packed in like sardines for The Beach Boys, I was the lone salmon swimming upstream to the RipTide stage, where I reunited with loco locals and South Bay stalwarts in a jubilant jam pit with one of SoCal’s rudest reggaeton rockers, Common Sense. Nick Hernandez is still a ball of fuego and shows no sign of ever cooling down, animated with his passion for performing, strumming his uke and twisting his mic frantically to their funky latin laced grooves. I was surfing in Cabo many swells ago and recognized him ripping the rock. We surfed all afternoon together, trading wave after wave. It was sublime for me to hear him sing, “Such a beautiful day, at the rock. Throwing buckets and snapping turns, at the rock.” It took me right back to Costa Azul. They closed with a tight, two tone ska cover of “Paint It Black” which sent souls and soles bouncing madly.

SpeakEasy stage host Michael Glabicki, singer of Rusted Root, showed himself to be a profound shaman-songwriter and music medicine man. Glabicki trilled Gypsy Kings styled guitar runs and hammered out heavy handed rhythms on his wide open-tuned steel string while stomping a kick drum. He looked like Indiana Jones, shaded by his fedora, and wielding his guitar like a whip as he dug up ancient and adventurous sounds. 

Though accompanied only by an electric guitarist, it was magically more majestic than its mechanism. The duo performed Rusted Root songs with their distinctive classical Spanish guitar and African styled chants and rhythms. Their blend of world music is tribal and trippy like a drum circle in the ‘90s, with that patchwork patchouli blend of alt rock and hippie dreadlocks. A little girl in the front row with braided hair and neon face paint danced while waving a Japanese fan. She was joined on by a gaggle of  ecstatic dancers when Glabicki’s accompanist pulled out the penny whistle, signaling “Send Me On My Way,” which is an absolute joy to the senses. 

Glabicki’s vocal range is maniacally musical. He bubbled and cracked with pizzicato soprano pops, soaring from falcon falsettos to an inhumanly low didgeridoo growl, which dropped the jaws of the smiling people. The duo revealed American music is also world music in their train beat, two stepper “Rain.” They made country music sound as if from some other land than our own.

The band’s funky protest songs still picket on and their campfire crusade continues rallying for humanity, demilitarization and the environment. Glabicki draws from a taproot of sacred sound and clearly revels in the joy he brings to people, welcoming everyone to his play.

“BeachLife. This is exactly how I thought it would look,” said Jackson Browne serenely and stoically. “I can’t remember the last time I played a festival.” The singer songwriter has shrugged off long haired middle age to emerge as a stately sage, bearded and iconic. But he was hardly running on empty, armed with an array of endlessly exquisite and effortless sounding songs delivered with an ageless voice. It’s quieting to hear Browne at this stage in his life, free from adolescent ambitions and pop pretenses. He offered a comforting, sane perspective for what he called “strange times.” He hit some hard points to ponder in his song “Until Justice Is Real.”

Ain’t on your TV, ain’t on your phone

You want the truth you got to find it on your own

It may not be that easy to see

The truth will cost you in the land of the free

His hit songs were merely the icing on the cake of his song collection. “Somebody’s Baby,” “Doctor, My Eyes,” and “Running on Empty” surely caught the crowd’s recognition, but hearing them live brought new energy to the classic songs and revealed how good the writing still is today. His band of long time regulars conveyed their soft rock convoy with weightless gravity, swirling sounds of sweet surrender that winded like a road through a desert canyon at sunset, echoing pedal and lap steel layers and humming hammond organ. 

“Take It Easy” was written by Browne and completed by Glenn Fry, who made it a massive hit with The Eagles. When Browne performed it, you could tell it was probably mostly his creation. Palos Verdes guitar kid Saxon Weiss joined his great uncles on stage and filled in some short bursts of California country blues. His riffs ran lighter, more easily than the elders, but were executed respectfully, an homage to the long road they have traveled and, perhaps, some  of that same long road is ahead of him. 

The festival ended with the tempestuous twisting of Alanis Morissette’s tangled mane and hell hath no fury like it. She paced and pirouetted across the stage, trumpeting her straight harp like a rolling stone, heralding her hit song “Hand In My Pocket” and inciting the beginning of a set long sing along. Morisette’s raw talent is undeniable on every level. As a songwriter she has penned poems of pain that acknowledge and heal the female psyche and reveal their divinity. As a singer she is a powerhouse vocalist on par with anyone, and she brings a stunning originality that is ineffably and inescapably her. 

She is like Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and Stevie Nicks in one, combined with her own kind of cantering, careening crazy. She winces and writhes like a banshee trying to twist out of her trauma in an act of self exorcism. She puts herself out there, punk rock as possible, exposing her darkness proudly and pervasively. While she champions hard awkward truths in hard rocking songs like “Right Through You” and “You Oughta Know” she has a buoyant, bitter-sweet sarcastic side in songs like “Ironic” and “Thank U,” which have the extraordinary effect of turning the little pitfalls of life into joyous anthems. There’s something akin to Buddhist wisdom in her way of transforming annoying or painful episodes into causes for celebration. She knows that hardships are our greatest teachers and she is grateful for them.

Thank you, terror

Thank you, disillusionment

Thank you, frailty

Thank you, consequence

Thank you, thank you, silence

The entire crowd singing along at the top of their lungs to “You Learn” was proof enough Morissette strikes a chord that resonates in everyone brave enough to be honest with themselves and transparent to others. 

Allen Sanford, BeachLife’s Festival founder said in his speech at California Surf Club last week, “I’ve always been a doer, not just a dreamer.” He has made his dream come true with the festival and I gather inspiration from that and all the incredible BeachLife artists as I do from the hard charging surf heroes of my hometown. Like them we should dream big and do it. That’s living the BeachLife.