Earthfest 2012

On Saturday, Brig and I went down to the Esplanade for 92.9’s Earthfest 2012. It is a concert event put on by the station with sponsors ranging from Whole Foods to Subaru. This year they had Eve 6, Switchfoot, Spin Doctors* and Third Eye Blind. Pretty great, right?

The show started at Noon but we made our way over around 1:30. The place was packed. It’s weird to say that about a wide open area but there was almost no room for movement. Even crossing the bridge to get to the Charles was backed up with people and took a few minutes. I think the best word to describe it has to be “horde”.

Everything in the Hatch Shell was more than taken by the time we got there and we were fortunate to find a spot in the grass right in front of the river and on the other side of the walkway of the concert. We could hear everything perfectly and the visuals didn’t matter. Instead we got to watch literally hundreds of kayakers rowing by, some just out for a splash and others setting up shop to listen to the bands.

We were in a pretty hot spot with no cover so we didn’t expect to stay through the end. Luckily, “Eagle Eye” McCarthy spotted a couple leaving their fantastic tree spot and ran over and staked our flag blanket down. It was perfect! And despite our initial concerns we didn’t even have any bird poop issues. The newly found shade reinvigorated us as we took a musical journey from Dare You To Move to Meant To Live to Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong to Two Princes (Brig’s fave) to Thanks A Lot to Never Let You Go to Graduate to Jumper to Semi-Charmed Life. So even though we missed Eve 6 early on, we weren’t bereft of hits.

What had to be the most surprising thing from the concert was just how many fans of the Spin Doctors are out there. The people on either side of us got audibly excited when they came on and plenty of people left right after their set. I couldn’t believe it.

Then came the grand finale with Third Eye Blind and all the kids our age just belting along. They were really unsatisfying though as they worked these really expansive and experimental walks to nowhere halfway through a few of the songs and lost everyone before finally coming back to conclude it. Jumper was seriously a 10 minute opus that everyone thought they had cut short and started into a new song midway through and then 7 minutes later out of nowhere they were back at Jumper’s bridge and finished it. It was the weirdest thing. Then Stephen Jenkins felt like pausing and chatting right before the best part of Semi-Charmed life when everyone gets worked up and screams GoodBYE! totally taking the crowd out of the whole build up to that point. But hey, it was a free show so I’ll take it.


*Or as I like to call them, the Spin PhD’s.