All About The Music Festival-A Wet, Wild Time

I spent the entire weekend working at the volunteer check-in area at WXPN's All About The Music Festival, held for a second year at Wiggins Park in Camden, NJ. It was nice to meet a lot of cool volunteers, as well as media celebs, including Blinq blogger Dan Rubin, and traffic.com's Lauren Valle (who, as it turns out, volunteered for the Kid's Corner area).

I didn't mind spending a lot of time doing the volunteer thing. IMHO, the music lineup was not as chock-full of "must-see" performers as last year's was. In 2005, the AATM featured the Drive-By Truckers, Rodney Crowell, the Indigo Girls, Loudon Wainwright III, Melody Gardot, Jim Boggia, and Patti Smith. It introduced me and may others to the phenomenal Danielia Cotton.

This time around, the New York Dolls were the big headliner Friday night, and from all I heard, they were as strong as ever. No makeup, either! (wait ... maybe that's not a good thing ...)

Danielia Cotton rocked, as always. Alejandro Escovedo did, too. I'm definitely going to have to catch him next time around. And LRC picked up some cool CDs from Codename and Lotus, who sounded good even from where we were stationed.

Following on the heels of Slo-Mo's terrific appearance on Saturday, the big show was provided not by XPN, but by Mother Nature. The skies darkened, the wind howled, and then the heavens opened up. People ran as the rain fell ... and fell ... and blew, too- sideways, diagonally. The volunteers in our tent pushed the tables to the center, and huddled as all hell broke loose. We all got a good soaking and lashing from the wind and rain, as we laughed and wondered when it would all end, and if the abundant lightning would avoid us.

The rest of the evening for me & LRC and a hearty little group of volunteeers consisted of cleaning up some of the debris at the VIP tent near the Marina. And there was a lot of it-wet tables & chairs, broken glass, and soaked linens-dozens of them, some wrapped in plastic but all in need of a good laundering. Carting them around (and in the next bout of rain) was an additional ordeal that tired us all out.

Sunday's weather was everything a good summer music festival should have-a small wind, sunshine, and low humidity. A good way to end the weekend!