Harvest Fest: Freaky Creativity At Its Best

Hopefully, it’s Sunday; you’re just getting home from an amazing weekend at Harvest Fest, and you raced to pick up your weekly copy of HPR because there were no newsstands in the forest you just inhabited for three days! Who knows, maybe it’s Friday, or one of those other crazy days of the week, and you’re already at home, or wherever you happen to be right now reading this, and you have no idea what this Harvest Fest business is all about?

Enter Wookiefoot – a musical artist collective of bliss junkies that operates like a globe trekking psychedelic circus. Take a minute and take all of that in! Wookiefoot has been throwing this annual party-of-sorts since before I first attended in 2004. This is something you don’t want to miss, whether it’s this year or next year. Start planning for next year if it’s too late this year.

Every September brings another festival opportunity to help ease the feelings of the “daily grind;” it’s a mental break from what can become the regimented patterns of life in the city – work, eat, poop, sleep and repeat. Wookiefoot started pushing fans and friends to help foster this inspired event – Harvest Fest – to grow and become a hot bed of creative coals, a place where you can take your imagination out for a stroll around the park and watch it grow.

The push was slow to move at first, but now, Mark Murphy, call him the front man of Wookiefoot if you’d like, can’t believe what they’ve got growing in Harmony Park Music Garden. “People are showing up in costumes, building little campground stages all over the park,” and bringing their most creative vibes out for a weekend in the woods. “You’re not just there to watch a band. You’re there to participate in a creative process, and I think that it’s a major collaboration is what gives this festival its intensity,” Mark, Murphy, Smurfadelic, or whatever YOU call him, said in a phone interview.

“I’ve always brought what I’m going to bring to a festival, but now I walk around the park just blown away by what all the other people are bringing to it (the costumes, the vibes, the decorations, the toys, the insatiable atmosphere for fun), and that, to me, is a dream come true.”

And while, yes, it is a party for many of the happy campers, this is actually work for Wookiefoot, and what a sweet job it must be! There are bands to hire, a park/forest to keep in order, security workers to round up, porta-potties to rent and fill, and on and on down the list. What could make things any more crazy for a group of working musicians? How about a new album?!

Wookiefoot has put the work in and will have an entirely new album for this CD release party of a concert weekend! They’ve been putting the final touches on the mixes, mastering tracks, and trying to learn the new songs. “It’s one thing to write and record our new songs, but it’s an entirely different thing to be able to perform them as a whole group.”

With all the chaos surrounding them, people may ask, “Why would you do this to yourselves and put this album together right now?” Murphy would respond that, “There’s something about the chaos and the pressure that I think enhances the creative process of putting an album together. And it adds that edge of nervousness to the performance, you know, where if you don’t have butterflies in your stomach you won’t play as good – that type of pressure.”

The new album is called “Be Fearless and Play,” and it’s a more “redemptive album” that deals with trying to overcome struggle with a very hopeful and positive bent mixed with ideas of forgiveness, and an encouraging promotion of world travel. Wookiefoot wants you to get out of your jar and go see your planet.

“I really do hope these new songs will inspire people to go traveling,” Murphy said, “because not enough Americans even have their passports, and it’s such a beautiful thing going on out there around the world. There’s so much to see and so many beautiful people to encounter.”

For anybody that doesn’t already know, Wookiefoot spends much of the year (and have for the last six years) trekking Planet Earth and trying to fix it up little by little with volunteer efforts, friendly vibrations, and the charitable donations they raise with another festival of theirs – Project Earth - which runs like a smaller version of Harvest Fest, but takes place in June, and is entirely non-profit.

And speaking of those aforementioned beautiful people, a few quotes were taken from close friends, that when asked for details on the Harvest experience, commented that “Harmony Park is a place where festival family goers can self-actualize amidst a backdrop of fantasy,” and another friend added, “It’s a place filled with billowing waves of living foliage that conjures notions of intangible spirits dancing on the wind, where the wood grained faces in trees whisper musical memories into your unconscious mind.”

In Harmony Park, this weekend of Sept. 10 – 13, costumes and bliss will rain aplenty, and as always, there will be enough cute little fairies running all over the place to keep all the Festie-villains and Superheroes grinning from cheek to cheek, ear to ear, and back again. It’s time to activate, friends. Check Wookiefoot out online at Wookiefoot.com, and get out there and plant yourself some seeds, whatever that may mean to you.

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