Five Guidelines to Housing a Happy Wook

(Or how to advance the music festival community at home.)

My wook is a good wook. He may be a broke drifter hippie who smokes every other one of my cigarettes, but he rakes the yard. He sweeps. Drums and dances with the baby. Does all the dishes after breakfast, including the sinkful accumulated the day night before. Honestly, welcoming wooks as they pass through may be the counterculture's solution to housekeeping.

So long as we don't get overpowered and reduced to a mooch house.

My wook may be wearing a jacket he picked up off the street after a Biscuits show, but that doesn't mean I haven't offered him freshy clothes and a rainwater shower. He is comfortable with showering four days ago, and I accept this. Because of the  revolving wooks on my couch, I will share how to best care for your drifter hippie as he/she comes and goes.

MY WOOK YIMMY IN HIS SECONDARY NATURAL HABITAT, COUCH

1) PATINA IS IMPLIED.

Don't offer your wook a shower every day. Chances are, after a couch invitation, the wook will feel quite welcome to your available resources. Excessive offers toward grooming and hygiene will appear as if you have some highstrung neuroses. You may be spoken to and treated differently. Wooks go for months on the road with lakes as their cleansing solace. If your wook is like mine, he may offer to wash your car after your first offer for the shower. That doesn't mean he'll feel inclined to take another before the week ends.

2) A FED WOOK IS A HAPPY WOOK.

This could be a square meal or two a day. Many wooks find luxury in dumpster diving, and may be enthusiastic/creative about the contents of your cupboard.

3) BEER, CIGARETTES, UNO MAS, ETC.

"If you got 'em, smoke 'em," right? So long as there is beer, wine, cigarettes, pot, or a nitrous tank in the house, a wook probably won't feel inclined to leave until it's all gone. Your invitation extends to your chemicals. It often repeats itself in the form of, "You don't mind--" or "Is it cool if I grab another?" After all, who has fun hoarding?

Wooks can be the loosest, most outrageously hilarious company you could foster, and they often contribute however they can. I find the proactive and heartfelt contributions more sustenant than monetary offerings. Many wooks don't "work." But when they do in the ways that they do, they hustle their asses off.

4) GIVE YOUR WOOK DIRECTION.

While a wook is between shows or cities or whatever, he or she will best serve you and his or herself with clear direction. Otherwise, they may lose themselves in your books or tv for a delusional accumulation of hours. Simply sharing sentiments you'd like to accomplish that day, whether it be clearing out your garage or writing a folk opera, a wook is sure to jump in, get involved, and offer unique twists and tweaks. Drifters get around. The whole perspective is to see a lot of shit, and live fully to experience more. The rambling outside world can offer a lot to the domesticity of a sheltered one. Sometimes, we all need to pick up the dread-head flagging a sign to a couch. Sometimes we all need some shaking up.

5) TAKE CARE OF YOUR WOOK AND LET YOUR WOOK TAKE CARE OF YOU.

Yes invitation and connection is flowing and fruitful, but with all drifters, always watch your wallet. Of course there are wooks who will run into the street trying to sell your jewelry without a dream of keeping a dime, but blind trust often leads to loss and deception. Situations like a promise for two hundred dollars for those old Oxys you never took is never a safe idea. In most situations, do not lend out your car keys without sitting in the passenger seat. Wheels don't have to run away; they drive. Always keep the safety and interest of your family in mind when working with wooks. The only self you can truly know is your own.

Perhaps adopting traveling wooks is something your family is considering. Perhaps you are seeking traveling hippies and artists and don't know where to look. If you'd like a couch population narrower than couchsurfer can offer, there are countless forums and threads for different shows, tours, and festivals, and loving drifters. Or just hit up the nearest Shakedown and hold up a sign: "OPEN COUCH."

If you're open to it, bring the connection into your homelife. We are all here to learn from each other, to share our love and light so we can play with that in others. You may even grow a default wook as my family has, a constant companion leaving the question of when he will return, along with the exciting anticipation that he always will. Offering a sanctuary amidst a string of far-flung adventures is an invaluable commodity for new age festival hoppers. Contact me to put yourself on the map of my wooks today.

Six Hippie Parallels: Pizza and Sex

How is pizza as tantalizing and habit-forming as sex? Just ask a hippie. These six insights come from the wook on my couch, Yimmy III.

1) Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. 

2) You can't really truly get enough. 

3) Even when you think you have had enough, you're always down for a little more in 10-15 minutes.

4) You can always find a new style if you know how to look.

5) It's good anytime, anywhere. Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

6) Sometimes the sloppy kind is the best kind.

The sexy pizza chronicles ☺

Wobble Culture: The Rise and Plausible Takeover of the Bass Heads

The wobble is sweeping the nation. Still. Sure techno and electronica have amassed clusters of rave culture throughout the decades, but much of the dubstep is something totally else, a blurby womp attack on the brain cells. And I hear these computer mastication beeps and beats in cafes and gas stations now. They even ripple through the car radio in wah-wah-wobble waves, contorting a rap or pop song with robot genocide glitches and dubby speaker splurbs. Like, is that someone bumping Macbook beats in the car next door at a show? ...Justin Bieber? Dubstep has wobbled its way into the mainstream?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DSx8_ucSK9A

I've been resisting the EOTO and Skrillex rave fests for years now, and cringed with a groan when my little brother asked if I listened to dubstep in 2009. And six years later, people still constantly ask, trying to determine: are you a jam hippie or a wobbly wook? So all right, last week I did it, I went to an art opening in Portland, ME that was heavily dub-rave-centric, featuring local djs and button-pushers with color blaring strobe lights. I'd rather swing sweaty hippies around on a mountain to some bumpin' bluegrass, but I was out for a rare time in busy motherhood and super set on having fun.

I totally found tripped-out solace in the narrow gallery hall with big open, windows and bright starving-eyed geometric art, but, determined not to be a bitch in the mud, I let go of stubborn opinions and into the dance high of the crowd. So I got out there, I danced, I jumped, laughed, skipped, spinned, laughed more, spilled beer, made friends, laughed and laughed and laughed my head off. I admit it—I wobbled, and I had fun.

Still, immersion in that glitchy gravelly womp totally spins my head like a film stuck skipping the same bleep of a scene over and over and over. My chakras fizzle into television vortexes staticky on snow. I calculate that the half drooling, half dancing crowd has got to be smacked on ketamine to have such an entranced at-homeness in their glazey-bright eyes. Music is my home when it lights me up and charms my chi into an ecstatic dance, but dubstep distorts and blitches it, so I tried not to listen too intently at the show.

I suppose in the digi-world where getting off is only a click or sext away, the soundtrack of laptops short-circuiting totally fits the disconnected libido of young adults. Watching everyone grind and gear their bodies into the hyperspeed beeps and blooping bass whirls, I could not avoid the perception that everyone was playing out sexual frustrations to the ritualistic spooking and splitching of the speakers. We aren't tribal anymore. Flashing lights, glazed eyes, bumping bodies mechanical as pistons, we are technologick.

My first Bassnectar show was neon hell. It was All Good 2010 when the festival was still in West Virginia, and Bassnectar was scheduled right after Furthur, on the stages immediately next to each other. Everyone was there that weekend for either Bassnectar or Furthur. The musicians with the biggest followings crowded twenty thousand hippies and wooks on the mountain of an oversold, sold out festival—and the crowds clashed like day and night, like Jerry and Schpongle, whiskey and water, coke and dope. Bassnectar started setting up as Furthur's encoring with “Ripple,” pushing glo-stick fanged rave fairies and freak-shows sweaty and marble-eyed into the softly swaying Dead-heads. Of course, half my friends wanted to stay for the last ten minutes of “Ripple” and the others were ready to weave to the front of the Bassnectar stage. The half-naked bass heads started spattering all over the flowy family Dead-head crowd like glow-sticks on the trampled earth.

Yes I love the Dead and loathe the womp, but I was also 20 with raging hormones and high hopes of finding the Phish-head I was infatuated with in the crowd, so I followed my younger friends up to the very very front. Furthur literally played “Ripple” for what felt like a sweaty, shoulder-to-shoulder, belly-to-butt-to-belly eternity. Someone actually shouted, “SHUT UP OLD HIPPIES” before Bassnectar dropped that glurgy, lasery bass that blew our skin back and made Dave's pupils swallow his entire eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsb1Xt9B3HM

Wedged into the jigsawing-hip proximity of thousands of people, we recycled each other's breath rapidly in a sea of revved-up, tongue-rolling, screaming, yelling, and insatiable LED toy spinning and swirling festykins. As soon as the music began skweeching, the somewhat anime galactic gangster rave-bots collectively hooked onto the same waist-up scissory dance groove that spiked the energy and glow-stick war beyond anything my journey-jam-dancing-on-the-moutain-for-ten-hours self could handle. I didn't see that lusted-after Phish-head before the digital chainsaw strobe show started, and no one was moving anywhere for a while. It was not my flow.

When I asked Dave if he wanted to find the others and he nodded fast and nervous like a deer, I knew he was human too. We wiggled and wove back into the shuffling trickle of bearded men lugging sleeping children in red wagons alongside long-skirted henna goddesses.Coming out of the day-glo painted, half-naked, wompily humping crowd, it was literally like humans and humanoids. I left feeling antennae on the beeboppler heads from their spines transmitting dubstep signals, that the heads of the Furthur crowd were light-bulb brains, though some were brighter than others. I felt like a light-bulb.

Many heads were flickering and sputtering in the wake the wobble fest takeover, but Furthur did play “Estimated Prophet” AND “Roses” AND “Terrapin” into “Scarlet” into “Fire” AND an encore of “Cumberland Blues” AND the never-ending “Ripple.” While the 30 year-olds grumbled and sighed about what the festival scene had become, patchwork pitbull mama Janelle said, “Doesn't matter. They played the hippie anthem.” The never-ending “Ripple.” Everyone rejoiced. Thankfully, no one mentioned the “SHUT UP OLD HIPPIES” interruption. At least in that moment.

Obviously, this is not a black and white divide in people, though the shows are in vibes. Plenty of bass heads play the Dead and go to shows where the performing acts feature instruments, not computers. In 2012, Phish headlined Bonnaroo with Skrillex, though they played completely different time slots and days. But with the last of the Dead members playing their last show this summer, what will become of the festival scene? 

Said wobble-fest takeover at All Good happened five years ago. If Bobby and Phil don't step on a stage together again after this summer, what will a music festival be five years from now? People are already bringing less guitars and drums in favor of music and mixing apps on smartphones and bluetooth speakers. Weeblin' with the wobblers yes can be fun, but how is anyone supposed to flow music without instruments truly? Where is the synergy? The human connection from soul through art, through an instrument, through music? Let's try to preserve the fuck out of that please. I push enough buttons a day to watch someone else on a computer blaring a light show be the outlet for my sacral chakra. Fun is fun. Music is sacred.

Three Energies to Manifest a Festival Threesome

Whether you are single in search of multiple partners or a couple looking for a playmate or two, there are vital energies to channel to actualize this fantasy into your tent or Subaru or riverbank or tree. Obviously, you do not want to scan the throbbing dancers at the stage like an iFestyBot tallying yays and nays while everyone's culminating to expand consciousness and jam-thrive a moment, yo. Enjoy the experience simply and enjoy it fully. Give into the music, celebrate and project these energies, and the sex will manifest itself.

Bangor, ME Phish Tour Opener 2013

1. Openness.

Naturally, right? If you're seeking to maximize your sexual horizons at a festival, I'm guessing you're not very close-minded. When we're open, we bring and even suck others in, inviting their beings to dance as hard as our revved-up bodies are sparkle-splurging . So if you are rolling ready raring to jump on some laps, simply put it out there; dance your out your desires and pull others in like snakes being charmed. Basically, whether it's solo you or you and your girlfriend etc. seeking steamy tentmates, don't hide it. Be overt and the overt will find you. You're at a festival, a natural haven for human wildness. Open up, let it in, and the lovers will be as free and flowing as you expand your own self to be.

2. Sexuality.

Really, sexuality is not an energy that has to be distastefully presented. We can totally project this in an inspiring and tickling way that isn't offensive or compromising; sexuality should celebrated and uninhibited, especially at events like music festivals where people want to jam without feeling judged. Nervousness and second-guessing has no place in portraying our sexuality. Though my sexuality does not present itself the same way, what could be more fulfilling than watching the topless pixies fluttering around with painted chests and daisy headdresses and palm-leaf skirts? I mean have you ever seen anyone more free?

The point is not that I necessarily want to sleep with these earth-wild spirits, but that I can appreciate their blithe freedom to beam their carefree sensuality. We definitely have to be comfortable with the unbridled sexuality of everyone (even/especially those we don't want to sleep with) to be fully comfortable with our own, which projects an accepting, warm intimacy simply in our demeanor and brings all colors of lovers into our path. Accepting all shades of personal sexuality brings us to the nonjudgmental, unhindered plane of having multiple partners and truly enjoying the multi-vibrational experience. Three- and four- and five-somes are much more likely and lovely to occur when we aren't trying to “get” something out of the partners or experience. It's not about how many orgasms we can get in a night. It's about amplifying individual sexuality through one another's, raising the collective experience into the most ecstatic it can be, bringing us to our last critical energy to exhibit in the search of multiple lovers at a music festival.

3. Ecstasy.

This is the most attractive and powerful energy we can project. When every breath is ecstatic, our whole core glows. Our entire body sweats in smiles and exalts with the bliss of uninhibited love. When we laugh, skip, hum, drum, dance, narrate a story, look into others with our real eyes, people get high on the energy at an ecstatic vibration. Like a vast majority of jammers, dancing is my plunge into ecstasy, so this energy always bursts open at festivals, inviting others into my auric field and tempting them there. In the presence of ecstasy, people cannot stay away. No one can resist the sublime contagion of inner and outer joy. When we act from our true sexual nature, not a place of possessiveness but a divine will to interconnect, we pump the environment with orgasmic glee, digging the perfect rabbit hole for others of the vibe tribe you manifest for a night, or many.

In no way am I advertising music festivals as a Craigslist-hub for orgies here. But since many jammers either encounter threesome opportunities with uncertainty, I wrote the previous post about avoiding potentially uncomfortable and compromising situations. And since many jammers are also seeking how to channel multidirectionally enthusiastic sexuality, I present you with this list of energies in the hope that we can approach omniorgasms with the most uplifting, mutually beautiful intentions that will feed the most fruitful experiences. After all, drugs are superfluous compared to the highs we can reach together.

Three Guidelines for Avoiding Unwanted Festival Threesomes with Swingin' Hippies

If you're touring or hitchhiking or hanging out with a couple or crowd of swingin' hippies, you may not know it yet, or you may be hoping they don't hit on you. There's nothing wrong with an orgy unless you feel forced into it. This creates tension and imbalance in what could be a beautiful connection, platonic or not. So follow these rules if you want to keep or make swingin' hippie friends yet do not want to engage in a sweaty tent threesome.

1. Don't take the molly.

This is paramount to resisting any sexual advances really. If you outwardly do not want to sleep with anyone, do not take this drug. Because all of a sudden, you will.

2. Don't slap the bag. Don't try the moonshine. Avoid the ice luge. And definitely turn down the tickle-my-pickle.

You might think you will be more comfortable with swingers if you kick back a few drinks, but you could lose composure and control. Blacking out is really common where people are getting more inebriated with every hour we're raging this mountain together. At least with the molly, you're a revved up, happy and cognizant participant. But if you hit the tequila, you might vaguely remember ripples of entangled bodily flashbacks in the morning. So yes the tickle-my-pickle (tequila shot chased by pickle juice shot) is exhilarating, but it's so great that especially at a festival, there's no reason to ever stop drinking them. Point being, if you are camping with some swingin' hippies you don't want to swing with, save the boxed wine and liquor for another night.

3. Keep it real.

How do you say no if you are unwilling? Well if the swingers are true heads and not free-love-pretenders, they will respect your boundaries graciously and pass you the joint like nothing happened. But, as ever with sex, people can get frustrated and pushy. Are these cats really your friends? Keep it real. If they do too, yes, they are.

Basically, if you really like hanging out with some hippies and just don't want to sleep with them, never feel obliged to. Swingin' hippies can be the most providing, gregarious, loving people on this festivus planet, but no matter how many shows they take you to or chemicals they feed you, you don't “have” to swing if that's not your way. I'm an enthusiast, but not an advocate.

Everyone has their boundaries and the right to have them respected. Take me, I'm a belly sleeper; don't snuggle me until the morning. You, who knows, you might love swingin' shows with swingin' hippies. But don't feel guilty or like less of a open-mind if you don't swing all the way. If they are your friends who love you, the love will be stronger from a more clarified light. If they are random campsite neighbors who became your new best friends in two hours, keep keeping it real and gauge what their intentions are. Obviously not every hippie couple is trying to swing with you (though if you put that energy out there, it might seem that way). The thing about festival sex is you're either gonna do it or not, so ensure your decision is enhancing your festival experience, not compromising or dampering it in any way.

NOTE: This post uses “swingin' hippies” as a generic term for festival goers who like sex with multiple partners at the same time. They are not always middle-aged and living in a curtained van with three pitbulls asking whether you'd like to go twist palm-leaf roses on the side of a road on the other side of the country. (If this happens, definitely establish whether you want to be in or outside the couple's bed-life, because you're going to be sharing the back-of-the-bus mattress either way.) But sometimes the festival people coming onto us are doped-up dubsteppers or overstimulated twenty year-olds or vegan pagans. In the frenzied festival uproar, we can't always choose our suitors. But we can take simple, common sense steps to avoid discomfort and regret. Nobody likes to wake up in an irrelevant town in a strange van entangled with not one, but two random wooks. But in case you do, read on.

Rising Appalachia Bringin' the Heat this Spring

Rising Appalachia hits the road this spring, from the south to the west to the northeast and all over in between! After -22 temperatures and 60 mph winds this winter, I am stoked as a fiddle to catch the soul-spirit, razzity folk-hearted jam in Portland, Maine again. Sisters Lea and Chloe throw down and flow a lulling warmth in their music with a smooth kind of friction, like elegant but tribal, spiritual but dirty, vocals both haunting and enchanting, music both Southern but global, old world but new. It all grooves and grinds together in an entrancing melodic haze punctured by rolling rhythms, soul-dripping voices, and “LISTEN THE FUCK UP” lyrics.

Rays of Sandstone drummer Ben Rayborne introduced me to Rising Appalachia and Nahko Bear on Southeastern travels last winter, and I've been hooked since. My alienation to modern music dissolved; the music so spoke to what I was feeling in sound and intention, after YEARS of not hearing any new music that sparked me up. Truly I'm picky and have no patience for radio indie-pop or the soberest kid's Macbook dubstep. But I have seen both Rising Appalachia and Nahko Bear and Medicine for the People this past year, and totally have my show calendar marked to see both bands again.

Rambling bongos and bouncy banjos, the three friends I brought to the July 2014 show in Portland actually danced as hard as I did (which usually only occurs with a drug-induced endeavor.) But there were no drugs—can't even remember drinking, and we were skip-dip-hoppin' with the high swing-around energy of a hoedown, then wiggle-wham wormed into the deep, low bass notes that follow you creeping “Downtown” through a dark alley to swerve your limbs like snakes. These ladies and their high energy band raised my auric plane into a sunrise over the Blue Ridge parkway and sent it falling fast but featherly all at once. That alpine mountain soul-jam is gonna rage Wakarusa this year, hot damn. And it's a lot of things, but mostly magic when artists hook you somewhere no other music can take you. I'm sure as hell not gonna miss what's next. Check the dates and make sure y'all don't either!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOsEvYBLo7I&list=UURmxz4fw_LzwQF19LKXgRVg&index=1

Of Modest Mice and & '90s Children

Modest Mouse is absolutely the first band to awaken my jam-dance: unencumbered catharsis extreme. 2006 on the NJ Transit to the city, we were rolling our 16 year-old faces off each with an earbud in, the entire discography up until their latest album Good News for People Who Love Bad News on my iPod set to shuffle. The train was stopped for an hour because a man had jumped in front of it. We compensated by raging our whole bodies up and down the slippery seats, elbows flying, heads thrashing as far as our shared earbuds would allow. "Teeth Like God's Shoe Shine" was so wild and heavy that when "She Ionizes and Atomizes" came on next, my thumb hovered over the next button, ready. Fast as a snap, Meg grabbed my hand in hers and gasped, "I love this song!" My heart nodded and body smiled as i sailed on the dreamy twang cascade.

"I hope we move soon," I commented, rolling my wrists and arms into waves forward. Meg's hand jumped from my hand to my thigh.

"WE HAVEN'T BEEN MOVING THIS ENTIRE TIME?!"

Obviously we sprinted and wormed our way through the blue-lit crowd just as Modest Mouse came onstage, immediately plunging into "The Ocean Breathes Salty." Through the show, my whole dance spark inside woke up thrilled and ready to light up with the music. "Bukowski" moved my snakey limbs in new twisty ways and "Paper Thin Walls" had me jumping hard enough to feel my skeleton reverberate off my ankles. I've only heard secondhand stories about a bad Modest Mouse show. They've had me dancing just as hard every time I've seen them. And after their latest album, this anticipatory hunger in my soul pocket has been ceaselessly squiggling to see them again this summer.

En route to the Colimbus Circle show, 2009. On the way to an "All Nite Diner" not to mention "Cowboy Dan"

I'll admit. When Ophelia hit me up with the early Internet release of the "Lamp Shades on Fire," track, I had high expectations of a dirty, out there Mousey wilderness, because she kept going on about how great it was and how she couldn't stop listening to it. But when she came over and we listened together, I shrugged. "It sounds like it could be on 'We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank,'" I said, following the uppity layers and buh-buh-duh-duh bridges between them. She went upstairs to pee and came back down with a partially melted moleskin notebook. 

"You left this on your fucking LAMP!" she said. "We're listening to that song again!" We did, and my opinion was the same. I didn't listen to it again until this girl at work asked if I had. When I reactively replayed the song in my head, I fondly craved the rugged frenetic  riffs that appeared and wanted to hear them again. Beyond that, I also enjoyed getting it stuck in my head as Amy continued streaming it from YouTube multiple times a shift. I gotta say, yes! It's Totallyyyy fucking Mousey.

There are some musicians who clearly use their instrument as an outlet for the soul, like this guitar riff is rolling directly out of a facet of its player. It's why no one can echo or come close to singing like Isaac Brock or Janis Joplin; its why Mousey riffs, tempos, and layers can only be described as Mousey,  and why the glurbdacular culmination of funk and foodling can only be described as Phishy. There is a distinct difference in musicians playing from their inner-selves compared to music that all sounds the same on the radio. So after jammin' out the cafe two days to  "Strangers to Ourselves," I feel guilty for my initial reaction that Isaac Brock was recycling a sound. Hell no, this album is Mousey as ever.

"Nobody really likes this song, but they just don't get it," says Amy, the first time she plays me "Pistol." "But I LOVE it," she says, bouncing on her combat booted ankles to the thwackiting of drums as she turned the tiny speaker-knob up with a cheesin' smile. Amy's 18. And she's geeking out about Mouse as I've been for oh-my-oldness, a year and a decade now.

And head bangin, feelin that low-to-the-ground, grimy subway-fog beat start to build with frisky piano, I stop stocking coffee cups, look up at Amy and say, "HELLLL YEAH!" She claps and jumps up and down, and even throws both arms into the air with a triumphant "YAY!", and we dip our heads in and out of the whacky abrasion of lyrics that make us laugh and the taser-arcadey spook-beats. We dig it.

Through the years; Modest Mouse has steadily been a prominent favorite; I love it all. They've got a new flare on the distortion layers, which riddle and rattle, pump and pulse, blorp and bang beneath the distinctively haunting guitar ring-around that it could only be Isaac. Again, hell yeah. Each album carries its own taste, vigor, environment, dream-world, one for every mood and mindset, yet all share that striking Mouse sound and play. Even though it's hard to fathom an album to pin my soul down harder than The Lonesome Crowded West does, Brock's musical vernacular has spanned so many portals and forms, all while channeling that unmistakable Mouse jam, that yeah, it's spanning generations and bringing us together in our own esoteric Mouse hole. It's dark, it's bright, it's wig-out weird and dancehall explosive. It combs your brainwaves and flogs your ears, flings your neck and knocks your knees, pulling your cerebrum and forcing you to know: WE HAVE DEFINITELY BEEN MOVING THIS ENTIRE TIME.