Blood & Butts: Harvest of Hope

By Ant Perrucci

Travis told me and Rachel to go out to the St. Johns County Fairgrounds, check out the Harvest of Hope Festival, and get into trouble. We managed to get press passes (rad) and paid to do it (kickin’ rad). I had no idea what I was in for.

It was a weekend of very loud music, over a hundred bands, six hours of sleep total, a mouth full of blood, and a diet heavy on cereal bars and beer. I even managed to get some girl’s pants off.

FRIDAY
So Friday afternoon, I’m walking around, soaking up the atmosphere. My friends Rob and Chris own Needful Thingz on West King Street and had a booth set up. Next to them was People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

From my notebook: “4:34 – Beer. Watch some woman get out of a pig suit at PETA. It had a penis, because she put it on backwards. Tail out in front. She’s laughing.”

Rachel shows up. Off we go to get our press passes. We met a few interesting people along the way.

So, meet Jackie Jones. 19. From Chattanooga, Tenn. She was in the front row of the crowd waiting for Less Than Jake.

She’s got bright pink hair, but what drew my attention was the tattoo on her left arm of Less Than Jake’s 1996 album, Losing Streak.

“Hey, mind if I get a picture of your arm?” I ask. She obliges, and it’s at this point that her friend tells her to show me the other one. The other one? Jones turns around, pulls her pants down, and sticks her ass out. Well, as long as I’ve got a camera in my hand, you know?

Friday night. I have stumbled into Lord of the Flies here in the campground.

I walked from my tent in Styx. The campground was split into sections, all named after 80s bands. Passing through Devo on my way to Toto and Wham! Is a couple of scores of people playing acoustic guitars and singing Against Me! really loudly.

“F*&^ IT UP! YOU’RE GONNA F$%# IT UP!”

But the real party was over in Heart. By this time it was about 2:30 a.m. The lights have already been turned off, and there have got to be 100 people huddled around a drum circle. There are Indian war whoops going up and a road flare is burning, sending an eerie plume of red smoke high into the night.

The campers nearby are less than thrilled.

SATURDAY
A note about the security: Some of them were cool. Meaning, all I had to do was open my bag, show them the contents (notepad, pens, an unopened bottle of water, my camera) and get waved through the gate.

Some of them, not so much. And by “not so much,” I mean that if you weren’t lucky enough to get one of the chill ones, you were looking at five good minutes of being patted down and having everything you own rummaged through and violated.

“WHAT’S THIS?!” It’s a notebook.
“WHAT’S IT FOR?!” For notes.
“AND THESE?” Those are pens.

It was a hassle on par with getting on an airplane. Only we weren’t getting on airplanes. We were trying to get from one side of a chain-link fence to the other.

While Bouncing Souls was onstage, I noticed a small boy sitting on a large man’s shoulders. The kid was pumping his fist in time to the music and rocking out like nobody’s business. It was great.

After the Against Me! set, I noticed a number of women taking their pictures with the kid. So I went over and started talking to Asher, 5, and his father, Dana Kingery, 27, of Jacksonville. The kid was kind of shy.

“How old are you?” I asked. He held out his outstretched palm. He was this many.

“Do you get girls wanting to take their pictures with you a lot?” I asked. He blushed and buried his head into his dad’s shoulder.

From my notebook: “Bad Brains is on stage, and I’m skanking my way around the large sandpit in front of the main stage. The band shifts from slow reggae and launches into ‘Banned in D.C.,’ and it’s on. The running of the bulls.

“At some point, I got shoved in the back, and my face connects with the back of some chick’s skull. And now I taste blood.”

I cleaned myself up a little and got a picture for posterity. When you’re bleeding from the mouth and are beginning to suffer from exhaustion, there’s only one thing to do: Get food.

Dinner was a Yuengling (the beer, by the way, was surprisingly not-exorbitantly priced. $3 got you a decent sized Miller Lite or Yuengling, and $4 got you a Stella Artois) and what had to be the single most delicious funnel cake of all time.

SUNDAY
By Sunday, everyone was tired, and dragging themselves around and waiting for the hip-hop blowout that night. But there was some really good music to hear that day.

For example, I love noisy rock n’ roll. Which is why I’m glad I caught the set by Diet Cokeheads. They’re from Gainesville, they’re nice people and make one hell of a noise.

And their bass player is really cute, which was a bonus.

The mid-afternoon rolled around and I found myself sitting in the shade of a tree, people-watching and drinking a beer. Hey, it’s hot out here. Gotta keep hydrated, you know?

Sunday night, however, was the real thing. The main reason I decided I needed to go to this whole festival in the first place.

Kool Keith. Inspectah Deck and GZA from Wu-Tang Clan. KRS-ONE.

By the time KRS-ONE was about to go on, I was posted up in the photographer’s pit with a number of newsmen who looked like they grew up in the boogie-down Bronx listening to the old-school originators of hip-hop. Heads were bobbing. Rhymes were being thrown back to KRS. Some girl was dancing off to my immediate left.

Security guards were getting into it.

And we were supposed to be on the clock! That’s how good at his job KRS-ONE is!

“M.C.” he told me later. “[It means] MOVE the CROWD.”

He did. Watching him stalk the stage, you can understand just how KRS-ONE became the legend he is. He prowls. Angry. Hungry.

The man lives and breathes the beat. Nearly all of his set was freestyled. It was amazing. It was great. It was real, true hip-hop. The entire weekend has built up to this moment.

I got an interview with the man himself.

“So,” I began, “this is something I’ve wanted to ask you since I was 5 years old: You’re a philosopher?”

He laughed. “I think very deeply,” he said.

I can die happy.

By the time I left on Sunday night, I was dirty.

I had a fat lip.

I had ink stains on my hands, grass stains on my pants, and I probably smelled a little funky. I was in desperate need of a hot meal, a hot shower, and a cold beer.

But I was there. And you might have been too. And damn, did we have a good time together.