Podunk Bluegrass Festival - East Hartford - Preview

Podunk Main Stage
Photo by Larry Bilansky

The Podunk Bluegrass Festival’s thirteenth edition will run from July 31 – August 3 at Martin Park in East Hartford, CT. Podunk is often used as dismissive name applied to a small place of little significance. It also represents a place in Hartford named after the Podunk Indians. While suggesting a small, rural setting, Podunk is actually held in a 27 acre city park in East Hartford, CT. Although located in the urban center of Hartford, the park offers a quiet and protected place for a bluegrass festival. Podunk has achieved a rank among the top four bluegrass festivals held in the northeast each summer by offering top notch entertainment, plenty of associated activities, and, this year, an innovative series of seminars for bands and bluegrass professionals to work with national authorities on elements of their professional development.

This year’s lineup is an exceptional one, offering both traditional and progressive bluegrass bands in rich combination including international, national, and regional representation:

Aldridge, Lester, and Ferguson with Gail Wade, Kene Hyatt, and Marc Roy (MD) – Thursday Blistered Fingers (ME) - Sunday

Blue Moon Rising (TN) – Saturday

Chris West (Blue Moon Rising)

Keith Garrett (Blue Moon Rising)

Dale Ann Bradley (KY) – Thursday and Friday

Dale Ann Bradley

Dailey & Vincent (TN) – Friday

Jamie Dailey

Darrin Vincent

Cadillac Sky (TX) – Saturday

Brian Simpson (Cadillac Sky)

Matt Menafee (Cadillac Sky)

Cherryholmes (TN) – Saturday

Jerry Cherryholmes

Cia Cherryholmes

Sandy Leigh Cherryholmes

Skip Cherryholmes

B.J. Cherryholmes

Molly Kate Cherryholmes

Larry Cordle, Carl Jackson, and Jerry Salley (TN) – Saturday

Gravity (Sweden) – Thursday

The Infamous Stringdusters (TN) – Friday

Jeremy Garrett (Infamous Stringdusters)

Travis Book (Infamous Stringdusters)

Chris Pandofi (Infamous Stringdusters)

Andy Hall (Infamous Stringdusters)

Andy Falco (Infamous Stringdusters)

Joy Kills Sorrow (MA) – Saturday and Sunday

Claire Lynch Band (TN) – Friday

Claire Lynch

Jim Hurst (Claire Lynch Band)

The Muellers (ME) – Friday

Tony Trischka Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular with Special Guests (NY) – Saturday

Tony Trischka

Noam Pikelny (Double Banjo Spectacular)

Nothin’ Fancy (VA) – Thursday

Nothin' Fancy

Dan Paisley & Southern Grass (PA) – Saturday

Dan Paisley Band

Dan Paisley

Pine Mountain Railroad (TN) – Sunday

Karl Shifflet & Big Country (TX) – Friday

Carl Shifflet & Big Country

The SteelDrivers (TN) – Saturday

The Larry Stephenson Band (TN) – Saturday

Larry Stephenson

Kristen Scott Benson (Larry Stephenson Band)

Jason Barie (Larry Stephenson Band)

Check here for a specific performance schedule. There is also an extensive selection of workshops and family oriented activities. Podunk offers a Kids Academy staffed by the same people who work at Strawberry Park and Grey Fox, providing continuity for kids whose families attend more than one festival as well as first class learning experiences in making bluegrass music. Look for some interesting surprises in at least the Tony Trischka and Cordle, Jackson, Salley sets.

This year Podunk will be sponsoring a series of workshops and seminars for bands and musicians scheduled to be held off site at the East Hartford Cultural Center in East Hartford on Saturday at a nominal cost of $15.00. Offered for bands, people who play in bands or are thinking of starting one, these workshops offer an opportunity to learn from musicians, song writers, and industry executives about the nuts and bolts of being a bluegrass professional. Workshops include:

Working with an Agent - by Jim Roe, Roe Entertainment, Nashville, TN

Record Companies – Ken Irwin, President, Rounder Records

Producing Your Record – Carl Jackson

Booking at Venues – Arnie Fleischer, Promoter Emelin Theatre, Mamaroneck, NY

Managing the Band – Pete Wernick “Dr. Banjo” and Vickie Simmons

Songwriting – Larry Cordle and Jerry Salley

For more information on this remarkable opportunity, call festival promoter Roger Moss at 860-282-8241.

Camping at Podunk is “in the rough” but provisions are made for hot showers. A feature of this camping experience is a “Best Campsite” competition, so campers who like to decorate their sites can have at it. There are nearby shower and toilet facilities, and pump outs will be provided, presumably at a price. Campers may begin to check in on Wednesday. Podunk provides its own food cantina and promises a wholesome menu including vegetarian choices. Other vendors will be on site, but have not been announced.

Tickets to Podunk cost $99.00 for a four day pass with camping. Adult day tickets on Friday and Saturday are $38.00 with lower prices on Thursday and Sunday as well as discounts for juniors 13 – 17 and seniors 65 and over. Children under twelve are free. Tickets may be ordered on-line at these prices. Gate prices are higher. Check out ticket information here. My friend Jack Holland has posted a preview of Podunk at his blog Bluegrassers. Check it out for more information about the bands.

Is Driving Behavior Changing?

We drove today from Waverly, PA to Wilmington, NC, a distance of about 623 miles through Harrisburg west of Baltimore, around the western side of the DC beltway and down I-95, US 117, and I-40 to Wilmington. While it took us about eleven hours and was a little tiring, I noticed some things I think worth noting. For most of the trip on the Interstate highways, we drove at about sixty-two miles per hour. Our Toyota Tacoma truck with crew cab and long bed got between 23 and 24 miles per gallon for the trip. This is about two to three more mpg than we get driving 5 mph faster.

During the past couple of years, driving under seventy on the Interstate system has been scary. Trucks bear down on you from behind and smaller cars whip past at fifteen to twenty mph faster than we like to drive. Today, a Friday with lots of people heading for the beaches and mountains, traffic seemed lighter than it often does, and it moved more slowly. The right lane held pretty steady at around 62. The passing lane was perhaps six or eight mph faster, but it was the rare traveler who sped past at high speed. While the trip took perhaps an hour longer than it might have in the past, it seemed a little less pressured and more civil to me.

Gasoline prices in Virginia and Pennsylvania were a little lower than we expected. We filled up at a Love’s station at Pine Grove on I-81 north of Harrisburg for $3.85 a gallon and again at Love’s in Skippers, VA for $3.95, in both cases below the national average and somewhat below prevailing prices along the route. Stations were crowded, but cars moved in and out quickly. Drivers on the road did not appear to me to be as angry as they have during the past couple of months.

What all this suggests to me is that people are altering their behavior to make small savings in the cost of driving. There’s a possible aggregate benefit of such changes, should they be real rather than just my impression, will have a positive effect on the price of gasoline. My only fear is that a $.50 reduction in the price of gasoline might be just enough to bring more people back on the road and increase the speed at which they drove. Only time will tell.

The Innocent by Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben’s characters inhabit a world familiar to many of us who grew up in suburban America. Ideally, it’s a world of lovely, wide green lawns, ball fields where kids could begin their glide to sports immortality, beer parties in friends’ homes where parents were absent, first sexual encounters in the back seat at the local drive-in, and the general haze of growing to adulthood in the second half of the twentieth century where suburbia supplanted rural America as the place where America’s families settled and its youth grew up. Coben turns this familiar world over and discovers the ugly underbelly of suburbia. In his world violence, greed, ugliness, and brutal pain are always just around the corner or down the tree shaded street. Local law enforcement often consists of home-grown good old boys not up to the discipline or rigors of modern law enforcement. Venal corruptors are everywhere waiting to destroy the weak and restore the law of the jungle to its rightful place. The world according to Coben is a dangerous place with a thin veneer of the good life covering the slime of reality. It gives us the suburban hell we all fear and seek to submerge in our consciousness. It’s in this nasty place where Coben takes his reader in each of his novels.

Coben began his writing career giving readers the likable sports agent Myron Bolitar and his psychotic side-kick Wynn. Bolitar, who grew up in Livingston as a basketball star and almost made it to the professional level before blowing out his knee, has established himself as a sports agent who often has to help his clients out of serious trouble. With the aid of Wynn, millionaire financier and martial arts wizard with no conscience to keep him from using his physical skills to their best advantage, Bolitar often works the sub-divisions and mansions of suburban Livingstone to solve clients’ problems. The books are tense and exciting page turners, and Bolitar’s wise-ass persona dominates them with joy and élan.

But the series detective genre seems not to have provided sufficient breadth for Coben, and he may have made enough money from the Bolitar novels to permit him a larger scope. The result has been a series of riveting stand-alone novels. The Innocent is a terrific page-turner making a significant contribution to Coben’s non-genre stand-alones. Matt Hunter, as a college student, is involved in a drunken fight during a college road trip resulting in the death of a young man. Tried and convicted of murder in this accidental death, Hunter serves four years and returns to his now ruined life in New Jersey. As time passes, he is able to resurrect some of the life he has lost, but is still haunted by the killing. He goes to law school, but is unable to take the bar exam, and thus begins working as a legal assistant in a local white-shoe law practice. He marries Olivia, a woman who has come back into his life after a brief encounter years before in Las Vegas, and with her pregnancy and the promise of purchasing a home in Livingstone, Matt’s life seems to be on the track to being resurrected.

Into Matt’s increasingly orderly world, chaos intervenes. A mysterious telephone call, a couple of pictures on his cell phone, a murder or two, and some circumstantial evidence all point right at Matt. Meanwhile a local cop, a county investigator (Lauren Muse, who has appeared in other Coben novels), the FBI, and a leggy, beautiful private eye are all involved in separate ways. And Matt is on the run. As Matt’s life devolves, the story becomes increasingly taught and riveting. As a reader, I often find Coben’s writing so intense I must put it down for a while to reduce my own internal tension. Coben leaves a couple of too obvious clues in this otherwise almost faultless thriller. An advantage of stand-alone thrillers lies in the author’s not having to spare his hero, thus the question of whether Matt will be able to work through all his problems stays before the reader right through to the end. The Innocent is a worthy addition to the Coben list and will provide any reader of thriller fiction or lover of suburban peace and quiet several hours of very satisfactory reading.

The Innocent is available through chain bookstores, Coben’s own web site, or your local independent bookseller.