This month I poach my Editor’s Note from the latest issue of Relix but I wanted to share it here as well…

“Where were you during the microburst?”

Up until Wednesday, September 9, this was a question posed to me exactly zero times in my life.

I’m not even sure I’d heard the term microburst before (which, to be all meteorological about it, is “a small column of exceptionally intense and localized sinking air that results in a violent outrush of air at the ground. It is capable of producing damaging straight-line winds of more than 100 mph that are similar to that in some tornadoes, but without the tornado’s rotation.” Thank you, AccuWeather.com).

But, by the end of the weekend, that question, or some variation of it, came at me two dozen times.

Let me backtrack for a moment. In a broad sense, where I was during the microburst was at the Lockn’ Music Festival in Arrington, Va. I was onsite making the rounds, writing, editing and shooting photos for the official festival newspaper, the Lockn’ Times. We had four daily editions planned, Thursday through Sunday, and much of the Thursday coverage was sharing a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations for the event.

The rain first rolled in (and a wall of water really did seem to slide across the horizon) while I was watching rehearsals for one of the special collaborative performances slated for the festival. At the time, I was outside an open trailer while The String Cheese Incident and The Doobie Brothers prepared for their set (with all the musicians and gear, there was no additional room up there). Once the soaking precipitation began, I sought a drier space, and eventually made my way to the building where the Tedeschi Trucks Band and guests were working up material for their Joe Cocker Mad Dogs and Englishmen tribute set.

So, where I was during the microburst? I was watching Claudia Lennear wow everyone with her lead vocals on “Cry Me a River.” Really. Given what was happening, I suppose there’s some irony there.

Perhaps because there was so much sound in that rehearsal room, what I didn’t realize when I walked out into clearing skies—after hearing the band run through the song a couple times—was that an extraordinary weather event had struck the festival.

I wouldn’t discover this until an hour or so later when I returned to the trailer that served as our newspaper office. It was located in the admin compound where an emergency site-ops meeting was underway with department heads and crew members, all of whom bore grave faces. It became
clear that these individuals, whose careers spanned decades, believed that the weather had crippled the festival to such a degree that they might need to cancel the first day to repair damage that posed a safety risk.

I began thinking that when most of us attend festivals, we take it on faith that someone is looking out for our best interests. As I heard some of the discussion and learned more over the days that followed, I can assure you that such faith was rewarded at Lockn’. (The same is likely true of your ultimately assessed the dangers and arrived at a decision that they knew would frustrate concertgoers, while acting in those same concertgoers’ best interests. This determination was made with integrity, heart and the best of intentions.

The next day, while not enjoying music onsite (and again working toward the first day of the paper, which would now debut on Friday), I began thinking about these values and how in the best of all worlds, they also apply to the creative decisions that musicians make as well. I certainly would ascribe those attributes to the man who appears on our cover. David Fricke’s story relates how Trey Anastasio’s boundless creativity is accompanied by a purity of design that informs and enhances his process. (And let me add what a joy it is to run David’s first Relix feature.) The other artists in our issue, such as Bob Marley, Billy Gibbons, Dan Auerbach and Jason Isbell, also bear similar traits.

Of course, even musicians who share such a clear approach still need to deliver the goods, as all those artists undeniably do.

This leads me back to Lockn’ and my lasting memory, which is not of the Mad Dogs rehearsal but the performance proper. On Friday night, the extended ensemble took the stage for a 100-minute performance that proved sublime and also provided a salve.

Moments before writing this note, I had a hankering to revisit the set, so I went online to see what I could find.

The first search result from that evening?

“Feelin’ Alright.”

Indeed.