Bear Creek Bayou Music Festival played host to new beginnings and premature endings when the funk-laden event made its debut at Mardi Gras World over the weekend. What it didn’t play host to was large crowds. Judging by the size of the festival grounds and the production that went into it, it’s fair to assume attendance was lower than organizers expected.
And that’s a shame considering the magnificent weather, friendly vibe and (for the most part) great music at Bear Creek Bayou, a New Orleans spin-off of Florida’s now-defunct Bear Creek Festival. If one had to lay the blame for low attendance somewhere, it would have to be with the unreasonably high ticket prices. Two-day passes to the festival went for $169 before fees, with single day tickets running at a whopping $90. For comparison, three-day passes to the much larger and much more established Voodoo Fest are currently on sale for $155, while single day tickets to Jazz Fest went for $70 this year.
Still, there were plenty of special moments to go around for those that did attend. One of the first came late Friday afternoon, when New Orleans rockers Earphunk played their final show on the festival’s River Stage. The prog-funk five-piece, who graced the cover of OffBeat back in March, abruptly announced their dissolution on Facebook last week. It was a surprising decision that meant Friday’s show–scheduled to take place one week before release of their new Steve Albini-produced album–was to be their last. Despite their impending break up, the band seemed to be in top form and good spirits as they blazed through new material from their forthcoming record, Right Where I Belong, and old favorites like “Sweet Nasty,” a set-closing tune that elicited an enthusiastic singalong from the crowd.
While the day represented an ending point for Earphunk, it was something else entirely for Bernard Purdie & Friends. Led by legendary funk, soul and R&B drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, the newly formed band played their first public show on the festival’s indoor Ballroom Stage. The group, which also features players of Brian J (guitar), Pete Shand (bass) and Ivan Neville (keys), delivered a supremely funky set that left attendees wondering what to expect from their upcoming debut album, an effort that’s set to drop in the spring of 2017.
Friday’s undercard, which also included acts like Soulive, Lettuce, Foundation of Funk and Dumpstaphunk, proved to be more intriguing than the day’s headliner, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic. The band’s iconic leader–Mr. Clinton himself–could only be described as “phoning it in” during the show, an altogether lackluster performance that contained as many questionable covers (Lil Jon’s “Get Low” comes to mind) as it did P-Funk classics.
Saturday’s headliner was more on point. The Flaming Lips have always been overly-reliant on gimmicks like inflatable characters, confetti cannons and unapologetically trippy visuals, but it was nice to see the band embrace its position as something of a nostalgia act. Instead of focusing on weaker (and more recent) releases like Embryonic and The Terror, the psych-rock champions played a set that was almost entirely comprised of material from their late-90s/2000s heyday. It was good news for fans of the band, who gleefully soaked in tunes like “Race for the Prize,” “The W.A.N.D.,” “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” and “Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung” amidst the gloriously mind-bending production.
Finally, the festival came to a close with a fantastic show from Lotus, whose fusion of jam band funk and electronic dance music seemed like a fitting end to a day that included sets from The Flaming Lips, Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe and many more, along with surprise sit ins from artists like John Medeski, who embodied the original Bear Creek Festival’s spirit of collaboration when he took the stage with Lettuce, Gravity A and others.
All photos below by Kim Welsh.
