I hit the Peach Festival for the third time this past weekend and for the third time had a blast. In some ways, there’s little remarkable about Peach, it’s a jambandy summer festival with a lot of usual suspects in the lineup. That being said, there is that strange alchemistic magic going on at this site in Scranton that seems perfectly suited to the event.
I remarked this weekend that I know the Peach Festival is well run because there isn’t a second where I am asking myself whether it is a well run festival. In my 3 visits to Montage Mountain, I have not once been like why are they doing that!? The biggest complaint I have is that the website kind of is not a very good source of information, particularly seeing as the whole point of a festival website is to dispense information. Other than that…? I got nothing. It’s poured rain every year I’ve been there, there was a fire on the festival site this year (a literal fire on the mountain), etc. etc. and things never wavered from smooth sailing.
The festival site mirrors the energy of the festival itself. A weird hodgepodge location that’s a ski mountain and a water park and a run-of-the-mill outdoor amphitheater. As such, it’s appropriate for over-the-hill Deadheads/Allmansheads and for middle-aged partiers and for young wooks and for families with kids and they’re all there having an easy-go-of-it weekend. One of the stages is right next to a wave pool and so, yes, you can ride waves while listening to up-and-coming jammers and I see absolutely nothing bad about that.
Another sign of Peach’s they-must-be-doing-something-rightness. There’s this bizarre thing where somehow there are no lines(!?). Getting into the festival grounds or to use the (indoor-plumbing) bathrooms or to ride the water slides or getting drinks or food or for the shuttle home, if there was a wait, it was a short one. It’s just one of many examples of things you don’t notice unless it’s in the bad way (you notice when you wait on a lot of lines, the opposite not so much). It’s a lot of little things, but it makes for a very nice weekend. Even my favoritest festivals in the world make me scratch my head with some of their decisions. Not Peach Festival.
Of course, that’s all well and good, but what about the music? Well, I’ve only been 3 times when the lineup has stuck out for my personal tastes and the calendar worked out, but they really do a great job booking the festival. The fact that it’s centered around a standard shed and the way it’s booked make Peach a very top-down festival, which is to say, unlike many of the other festivals I attend regularly, the bands at the top matter the most. Usually I’m a middle-out kind of guy, if there are a lot of bands I like in the middle of the fest poster, I’ll be happy with a favorite band or two near the top and a favorite band or two near the bottom. With Peach, those big guns are kind of important, it really feels like you’re going to a, say My Morning Jacket show, and the other sets are in support of that… and the years I’ve gone had some great headliners who played impressive sets. This year I was there Fri/Sat/Sun and got to see Ween, MMJ, and Tedeschi Trucks Band play excellent full shows, what could be bad? That isn’t to say that the supporting acts and side stages are to be ignored, almost all the bands I saw that I had never seen before this year made a positive, will-definitely-check-out-again impression on me. The booking at Peach gets a thumbs up from me, Roger.
Won’t go through every highlight this year, but here’s my top ten from what I saw at Peach this year:
- Tapers Choice
Half day’d my Friday and did my best to hustle to NEPA but mostly I wanted to make sure I got there in time for Taper’s Choice. Through a series of cheeseburger stops and traffic and travel-day whatnot, I walked in a minute or two into the TC set and knew it was going to be a great weekend. Playing on the Mushroom Stage, these guys may have had the smallest crowd of any act I saw all weekend, which is a shame, because they crushed their improbably long (100 minutes!?) slot. I have a few thousand words to write about Taper’s Choice, I haven’t seen a band subvert the genre they’re playing in while simultaneously thriving in that same genre quite like this since discovering the Bad Plus and watching what they did deconstructing the jazz piano trio trope. Guitarist Dave Harrington is at the top of my wish-he-still-lived-in-NYC list and proved it and then some. My highlight of the weekend was the first thing I saw.
2. My Morning Jacket
There has never been a festival band quite like MMJ. Even in the most mundane festival setting they absolutely destroy, always bringing their A-game to whatever slot and they can play almost any festival there is. Their Saturday night set was (yet another) show for the ages, with a Beatles bust-out (likely played because Sean Ono Lennon played directly before), a heavy-hitter setlist, more teases and covers, and lots of extended rocking out. They rarely disappoint and they did not at Peach.
3. Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Peach
There are a lot of conversations about what’s next in the jam world, but you don’t often hear Donato’s name mentioned, or maybe the kids are talking about it, but they don’t want me to find out. (too late kids, I had him on my radar before you). He had the keep-me-awake-if-you-can 12–2am slot at the Mushroom Stage Friday and damn son, he kept me awake. The set started at a 9.5 and crept up on the Richter scale with one fire jam after another, eventually breaking the meter, Donato laying it down, but his band really making the dent in the side of the mountain. There was a song near the end, maybe it was the set closer, that just broke my brain.
4. Kendall Street Company
I don’t go to Peach to discover new bands quite like I do other festivals, but I am certainly open to it and my favorite new discovery of the 2023 rendition was Kendall Street Company, a band whose name I’ve seen around, but didn’t really know much about. I walked up to the Grove Stage (possibly curated by Garcia’s at the Cap) and they were in the middle of a rather groovy jam of the hey-this-is-pretty-good variety. Then they announced that they were playing a song called “Eyes of the World” and started this kind of 80’s-ish R&B-ish vamp and it wasn’t until a few minutes that I realized that it was indeed a Grateful Dead cover, like it took me a minute to recognize a song I’ve probably heard 1000 times, one of the more interesting Dead covers I’ve ever seen (in a good way, IMO!). From there they dipped into Zappa-esque prog and silly crowd participation and wild rockers. They reminded me of a band from the early-mid-90’s jamband heyday, when we didn’t call them Jambands yet and they didn’t all sound like they were trying to be Phish. They checked a lot of the boxes for me, I will definitely be checking them out again.
5. Tedeschi Trucks Band
I’m kind of hot and cold and hot again with TTB, but for whatever grumbling I’ve got, there’s plenty to be said for taking whatever opportunity you can get to see Derek Trucks play guitar. He’s just that good. This was the Sunday night headliner set and it was really fucking awesome. They have great originals, but Tedeschi Trucks is kind of all about what you get to see them cover (right?) and the setlist was heavy on gems including the set-opening “Woman to Woman,” an excellent version of the Stones’ “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo,” and “Walk on Guilded Splinters.” Peach is ostensibly a festival with roots in the Allmans scene and up until the TTB set I hadn’t really seen any Allmans tunes played yet (except a great Jessica jam/tease in the Kendall St Company set and a couple teases from Taper’s Choice), so when TTB played “Dreams” (perhaps my favorite Allmans song) and Derek took not one but two my-brain-is-now-mashed-potatoes solos, well, that was pretty fucking great. I left shortly after for the drive home, it wasn’t getting any better than that.
6. Sweet Lillies
Speaking of cool covers, I really dug the early-day Saturday set from The Sweet Lillies at the Mushroom Stage which mixed pretty darn good originals with a bunch of covers, mostly from the 80’s and 90’s, mostly hip hop. Mind you, this was a fiddle band with an excellent guitarist and occasional washboard solo (that often sounded like the turntable of the 80’s hip hop). Just a lot of fun, great energy, great musicianship. Will seek them out in the future.
7. Les Claypool’s Flying Frog Brigade
Speaking of cool covers, Les Claypool and his ridiculously good band playing Pink Floyd’s Animals in full. I mean, what else is there to say? They’ve been touring with it, they fucking crushed it. Sandwiched by some originals, etc. I loved this show.
8. Karina Rykman
It brings me great joy to see Karina Rykman come into her own. She played the main stage early one of the days at last year’s Peach Fest and this year probably drew about 5x as many people in a slot more suited to her growing standing in the scene (and beyond). Originals and covers and boundless positive energy and gratitude. Pure joy on both sides of the stage. The Karina Rykman inner tube is about to go down the water slide, I’d hop on and go for a splash or two.
9. JD Simo
It’s not the easiest thing to play in the blues milieu and make it fresh and interesting and I’ve been digging Simo’s take on the genre much as I once dug Derek Trucks when he was younger. Simo and his {fire-emoji} trio mix in elements of jazz and general weirdness, but mostly just do their thing. A great fit for the festival and a killer way to kick off a bunch of blues and slide guitars on Sunday.
10. The Psycodelics
Another band I had no clue about, another extra base hit for the Grove Stage. You might think this was a psych rock band, but they were actually more of an R&B/funk thing, although with a lot of rocknroll bite and infectious energy. I would love to catch these guys in a club, I really enjoyed their shit.
Etc Etc. Although not my favorite JRAD set, the highs were still pretty freakin high, with some delightful explorative jams (Brown Eyed Women!) and some highlight-reel playing, especially from Marco Benevento; LP Giobbi doing her Dead House set, a mix of dance music and sampled Grateful Dead didn’t seem to work for everyone, but I really loved it; always enjoy Umphrey’s at a festival and I thought this was a great set from them, lots of soaring peaks; Melt is such a great band, they somehow fit in at a jam festival like Peach, glad to see they returned; I do love Mike Gordon’s solo stuff and Rachel Eckroth was way above my expectations filling in for Robert Walter, wow she was great!; Ween was the most polarizing set of the weekend (if I had a dollar for everytime I overheard someone at a following set say “well, this is better than Ween!” I’d have a few more bucks to my name), but I thought they were quite good…
“…but you think everything’s great, Neddy.”
Indeed I do, indeed I do. See you at Peach Festival 2024.
