An Oral History

The first thing you should know is that we are sorry we didn't talk to you, too. We really, truly are. Because we know: You have a favorite Bumbershoot story. You saw the best show of your life there. You met your future wife and/or husband there. You saw a street performer or bought a book or saw a play or an exhibition or a movie that maybe didn't change your life but enhanced it in a way you hadn't foreseen when you bought a one-day pass hoping to see some third-level garage-rock band you'd heard on the radio at work.

Your story isn't the only one missing in action here. There simply wasn't space for Bumbershoot's prehistory, from the 1968 Sky River Rock Festival to Seafair to any number of neighborhood arts fests. Ditto the story of the One Reel Vaudeville Showthe archetypal late-'60s troupe, who performed on a flatbed truck and would later become One Reel Productions, the nonprofit corporation that has produced Bumbershoot since 1980.

Yet that part of the story has never entirely left the festival. Known in its first two years as "Festival '71" and "Festival '72," Bumbershoot's absurdly eclectic flavor was with it from the beginning. Literature, theater, dance, visual arts, crafts, performance art, more food than you can shake a stick at (but just about anything you can put on a stick)not to mention all that music. And just like the real-time event, there's no way this virtual mass recollection can fit it all in. So think of these highlights (and a few lowlights) as a mapa place to begin hunting in case you've ever wondered where it all came from.

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The 70s

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Barbara Earl Thomas (director, City of Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival Commission, 1989-95; artist, 2003 Bumbershoot poster): I was at the Arts Commission when Bumbershoot was thought up all those years ago. It was a very modest little festivalI think the budget was in the thousands. It was small. It evolved in a time when Boeing was bust, and there weren't as many people in the city as there are now.

Charles R. Cross (former editor, The Rocket): If you want to get a sense of what Bumbershoot was like in the early years, simply go to the middle of the thing, around the fountain. In the early days, it was like the kind of stuff that happens there. There wasn't a schedule, or if there was, no one paid attention to it. It was much, much looser. There might have been only a dozen musical acts over the entire weekend.

Judith Roche (One Reel producer, 1986-present): At the first Bumbershoot, I did a bunch of dance things on the fountain lawn with people. It started as a sort of free-for-all. People just kind of signed up.

Jim Page (performer): Seattle was magic in those days. The first time I rode the Seattle Transit, the bus picked me up hitchhiking. At the first Bumbershoot, I remember playing my street set. You could find a spot on the ground where there wasn't any stages. I was playing all the time; for a period of years, I would start playing guitar at 9 in the morning and stop at 2 a.m.

Baby Gramps (performer): I remember doing marathons every day and night for four days. It was a sleep- deprivation thing; a couple buddies of mine did it with me, staying up four days and nights performing. I wrote a lot of my weirdest songs like that. I didn't do them all the time; people can remember me saying, "Now for No. 492." Some people stayed up with me.

Jon Kertzer (director,Smithsonian GlobalSound Network): I took a job at the end of '73 with the Seattle Parks Department. Part of the job involved organizing the music for Bumbershoot. The major concerts were in the old Opera House, which held 3,000 people, and the [old] Seattle Repertory Theater, which held 800 or 900 people. The opening night concert in '74 was Ry Cooder and John Hartford; the next night was Willie Dixon, the Chicago bluesman, and Clifton Chenier, a zydeco player from Louisiana; it was opened by Dave Alexander, a blues piano player. Stan Getz had an overflow crowd in the Repertory Theater. I remember setting speakers into the ground behind the hall so people could hear it that couldn't get in.

Jon Kertzer: John Chambless became the overall director of the festival [in 1975]. He had been a philosophy professor at the University and had been one of the organizers of the earliest festivals in Seattle, the Sky River Rock Festival [in 1968]. He had not gotten tenure and was pushed out of the University of Washington in the early '70s. He had been an activist, a fairly radical voice on campus in the late '60s and early '70s. Then at some point in the late '70s or '80s, he went to work for Lyndon Larouche on the East Coast, and went totally right wing.

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THE '80S BUMBER WARS, BUMBERDRUMS

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Judith Roche: After a few years, the festival had lost energy. The first few years, it was great fun doing the hippie-on-the-lawn thing, but we had to move on.