NORTON STREET — LIVE OPEN AIR FESTIVAL

There was a time when music escaped from the building.

It got out of the nightclub, out of the concert hall, out of the recording studio, and found itself in a field with several thousand people, a questionable electrical system, somebody selling handmade jewelry on a blanket, three dogs nobody could identify, and a distinct possibility of rain.

The open-air festival was one of the great inventions of hippie culture.

Not because hippies invented outdoor music. Human beings had been making music outdoors for a few hundred thousand years.

The hippies simply remembered.

For a few remarkable years, music wasn’t merely entertainment. It was communication, experimentation, tribal identification, political expression, spiritual technology—and occasionally an excuse to dance for six hours without knowing exactly where your shoes had gone.

The audience wasn’t entirely separate from the performers.

Everybody was part of the event.

You didn’t just attend a festival.

You entered it.

And once inside, the normal rules became somewhat negotiable.

Strangers talked to strangers. Food was shared. Clothing became optional or improbable. People painted things that ordinarily weren’t painted. Musicians played too long. Songs changed shape halfway through. Amplifiers failed. Generators coughed. Somebody inevitably climbed something they shouldn’t have climbed.

And through it all came the music.

That is the territory of Norton Street — Live Open Air Festival.

These songs belong outdoors.

Imagine the Norton Street company transported onto a temporary wooden stage somewhere beyond the outskirts of Bardotown. The sun is going down. The amplifiers are humming. Somebody at the mixing board is desperately trying to locate channel seven.

The crowd stretches back farther than expected.

And somewhere nearby, Kay GOD is broadcasting the whole thing live.

The important thing about hippie culture wasn’t the hair, beads, bell-bottoms, incense, psychedelic posters or Volkswagen buses.

Those were merely evidence.

Underneath was a much more interesting proposition:

Maybe we don’t have to do things the way we’ve been told they have to be done.

Maybe music can be different.

Maybe theater can be different.

Maybe art can be different.

Maybe community can be different.

Maybe consciousness itself can be different.

Some of those experiments worked.

Some failed spectacularly.

Some are apparently still in progress.

Norton Street fits comfortably into that tradition because it has never been particularly interested in staying inside the lines.

So turn it up.

Imagine the grass under your feet, the smell of food and dust in the air, the sun disappearing behind the stage, and several thousand improbable companions gathered around you.

The band is ready.

The red light at Kay GOD has just come on.

And for the next little while, nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen.

That’s the festival.

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Here’s the Bardo bus now!

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