Let it out: Coming together and letting go at BeachLife Festival
by Mark McDermott and Rachel Reeves By the time the Marleys stepped onto the Hightide stage at BeachLife Festival Sunday night, 51 bands had performed several hundred songs from morning til night over the previous three days. They sang of love and sex and drugs and beauty galore, of hellhounds, oceans, and midnight jokers, of the Land Down Under, and the moon bright on a treetop night. Singers sang about most everything human beings get up to and get down to, and after a year in which everybody was largely kept apart, just under 10,000 people came together each day and communed as only our species does — by shaking their butts, waving arms in the air, hugging, shuffling, and smiling like sunshine and togetherness were miraculous and newfound things. And so by 9 p.m. that night, a satiated weariness prevailed as Stephen and Ziggy Marley raised their voices to sing their father’s songs. Bob Marley, had he not died young, would have been 75 in 2019, when this festival was supposed to have occurred. The songs he sang from the time he first burst on the world stage in the mid-’60s til his death in the early ‘80s are often called (as is the enduring compilation of his work) “Songs of…
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