This version of ON the Beat was initially emailed to subscribers on August 10, 2023. To obtain Josef Woodard’s music e-newsletter in your inbox every Thursday, enroll at unbiased.com/newsletters.
A certain technique to age your self, to not point out aligning with a sure alternative-progressive perspective, is to pine for the times when witty troublemakers Proctor and Ward used to supply their satirical providers with the cheeky Fiesta Parade protection on KTYD. This was at a time when KTYD was nonetheless the younger upstart on Santa Barbara’s radio dial, seeded in the course of the FM various radio revolution of the Seventies.
Proctor and Ward (aka Richard Proctor and Mark Ward), taking cues from gonzo radio-based comedy comrades in Firesign Theatre, may nonetheless discover lots to jive about. They may have made hay, for example, about this 12 months’s parade alongside Cabrillo Boulevard, which included each a float all concerning the Outdated Mission and a “Chumash” float — representing the enslaved labor drive behind constructing the Mission — or famous the second when the Chumash float dreamily handed the location of the memorialized Syujtun village subsequent to the Veteran Memorial Constructing.
Credit score: Josef Woodard
Digging underneath the floor and cultural implications of “Outdated Spanish Days” can fire up doubtful associations and evasions about Santa Barbara’s tangled root system. There stays no “Outdated Chumash Days” on this land the place the Chumash lived for hundreds of years, and the Mexican-American parts so central to the meals and mariachi (on the streets and on the Bowl’s Mariachi Competition) material of Fiesta isn’t given sufficient of a highlight or official nods of appreciation.
However these are acquainted kvetches, brushed apart within the thick of the few days of fiestivities. Finest not to consider deeper implications within the warmth of early August in Santa Barbara. This 12 months, OSD included duly famous indicators of progress when it comes to institutional inward-reflection, with gestures of Chumash cultural appreciation: Chumash elder Ernestine De Soto served because the occasion’s first Grand Marshall and Friday’s schedule included a well-intentioned however fraught recreation of a previous/new world assembly between a Tomol and the San Salvador tall ship off of Stearns Wharf. Elsewhere in shifting OSD traditions information, Jack Harwood represented the group’s first “male spirit” of the Fiesta, and David Bolton was its first brazenly homosexual El Presidente.
Many people have, through the years, gone via phases of Fiesta pondering: basking in youthful days, grousing, denial (aka getting outta Dodge) and at last, for a few of us, resigning to the sensory overload every mid-summer in Santa Barbara. It’s at all times simple to understand the various boards for dancers younger and previous round city, in flamenco mode and past, beginning on the Mission garden on Wednesday evening. That very same evening, our city’s signature thinking-party-band power supply Spencer the Gardener introduced down the home and shut down the block in entrance of the Presidio on Canon Perdido on Wednesday’s “Official Unofficial” opening.
Spencer and co. additionally performed on Thursday evening onstage of the newly-launched Mercado de la Playa. This Mercado plopped itself down within the La Playa stadium parking zone, and was a dizzy glut of enjoyable, grub, and amusement experience distractions throughout the road from the seashore, a Coney Island of the thoughts, 805-style.
On Friday evening, roughly 4,000 individuals swept up out of the official Fiesta zone downtown and up the hill to catch an alternate micro-fiesta on the Santa Barbara Bowl, a gospel-reggae-N’awlins funky soiree with Robert Randolph, Mavis Staples, Ziggy Marley, and Trombone Shorty (see evaluate at unbiased.com).
Whereas town slept in on Sunday, these within the know beat a path to the beating coronary heart of the Mercado Girl Guadalupe, adjoining to Our Girl of Guadalupe church on Sunday afternoon. There, a contented swarm of eleventh hour Fiesta-ites flock to the cheap Mexican delicacies (myself, I gotta’ have the ceremonial and delectable pozole), the chance-taking optimists crowding the Loteria tent, and with Mexican music booming and thumping from the stage, with a Miller Excessive-Life in tow.
In such a ripe and relaxed neighborhood setting, ideas of Spanish land grants or European imperialism are distant, momentarily washed away by the champagne of beers and what it represents. Subsequent up: “Outdated Spanish Days” reaches the ripe previous age of 100. As we enable relaxed requirements of conduct and accountability from younger and previous residents and household — carry it on!
Going Bowl-ing:
Talking of Bowl goings-on, the following week’s spotlight comes within the type of the Sunday, August 13, return go to from Father John Misty. For historic bearing, the now-semi-mystical character whose previous iterations/incarnations on the earth and in Santa Barbara have included drumming for Fleet Foxes and showing as shoe-gazing crooner — on the small however legendary Muddy Waters on Haley Road.
Latecomers to the present will probably be lacking out: openers The Head and the Coronary heart are a real blue indie-folk-pop sensation with their very own profitable sound. The newest chapter in a five-album discography relationship again to 2009 is final 12 months’s Each Shade of Blue: from the Roy Orbison-esque lilt of its title observe, the album is tastefully knowledgeable by selections of the pinnacle and the center, and of old fashioned and new perspective musical flavors.
