“Happy Hillside!” was a familiar rallying cry around idyllic Guelph Lake Island this past weekend as the annual Hillside Festival celebrated its 30th birthday. The multi-day music fest has become so synonymous with community, independent arts, culture, sustainability, inclusiveness and good vibes, man, that it’s practically its own holiday.
That such an effective event can take place less than two hours away can be mind-boggling for a Toronto music fan accustomed to watching ambitious promoters struggle with larger summer festivals, but a weekend-long immersion on the island campground offers a sharp contrast that proves both helpful and confounding.
So, in the spirit of Hillside’s positivity, I spent the weekend attempting to crack the secrets to its success. Here’s what I’ve learned:
1) When it comes to music, keep an open mind
The bread and butter of Hillside has always been Canadian folk and country, but the festival is also open to new and emerging acts from all across the musical spectrum. This year had plenty of roots from country-rock (The Treasures) to blues-rock (July Talk) to delicate, finger-picked folk (The Weather Station) to Jack White-approved throwback ragtime/jazz/swing (Pokey LaFarge), alongside a few loud, punk bands that went in the exact opposite direction (METZ and Fucked Up). But the most memorable moments came from acts that defy easy categorization.
Toronto/Montreal “noh wave” collective Yamantaka//Sonic Titan played an early afternoon set at the sheltered Island Stage as the skies opened up on Saturday, which gave them a tent half-full with festival-goers just looking to stay dry. The band’s mix of heavy stoner riffs, warm organ tones, phonetic Japanese lyrics and face-painted performance art is never musical comfort food, but a survey of the sea of faces revealed as many blown minds as question marks as Ange Loft backed through the audience with her tambourine, as if in a trance, and lead singer Ruby Kato Attwood wailed like a banshee.
The next day on the same stage, Colin Stetson’s experimental baritone saxophone compositions seemed to confuse just as many people, but his rumbling, sprawling feats of circular breathing were such an obvious, awe-inducing feat of endurance and strength that by the time he finished a marathon final song, the crowd erupted into rapturous applause before pausing to take a long overdue breath of air along with him.
Ironically, Toronto has found its most recent festival success by cordoning off into a number of micro-festivals, each dedicated to one particular subgenre: VELD and Digital Dreams for EDM, Riot Fest for punk, Toronto Urban Roots Festival (TURF) for country and folk. That approach definitely helps create a distinctively curated, coherent experience, but Hillside has found the same results by programming based on vibe rather than genre. Festivals like SummerWorks and ALL CAPS! have implemented that approach on a much smaller scale, but bigger multi-day fests like TURF and Riot use loose definitions of “roots” and “punk” to include kick-ass bands like Belle and Sebastian and the Replacements, respectively, that fit under the banner in spirit rather than purist definitions.
2) A music festival is about more than just music
Sure, having a big-name headliner sells tickets, but Hillside has such a unique, defined identity that fans are willing to shell out regardless of who’s playing. The Hillside Vibe is about more than Band X on Stage Y it’s about immersing yourself on an island for three days and knowing you can dance like a maniac to a Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet surf-punk soundtrack, strip off your clothes and swim in the lake or take a guided yoga workshop without feeling judged.
Hillside fosters this by focusing as much on the intangibles as the lineup. Stages are powered by green roofs and solar power food and drinks are all served with reusable plates and cutlery beer prices never exceed $5.50 for a carabiner-attached stainless-steel Hillside-branded mugful buses and walking trails guide people from campsite to festival grounds, stupidly friendly volunteers helping out in between.
It’s pretty simple logic – if you don’t feel like you’re being ripped off, advertised at or pandered to, you’re not going to feel guilty about spending more than $100 on a ticket. Give people a safe space, and they’ll take ownership of it. Create a working, breathing culture and promoters barely even have to promote: the festival celebrates itself.
The organizers didn’t plan any big, gaudy 30th anniversary celebration for Hillside, but the acts took up the cause anyway. Nineties Guelphian genre-bridgers King Cobb Steelie’s mix of funk, jazz and rock felt like a wordless, writhing celebration of CanRock history, while Jim Guthrie took a hyper-local approach to stage banter: he shouted out the street he grew up on.
The Darcys referenced their “all-time favourite Guelph band,” quoting the Constantines’ Nighttime/Anytime within one of their own tunes, and after Diamond Rings’ set was nearly cut short by a power outage (prompting hoots and raised lighters from the pitch-black tent), singer John O’Regan nodded to his history in Guelph’s DIY punk scene as a member of the D’Urbervilles, when mid-set interruptions were an everyday occurrence.
3) Let the people dictate the culture
The funny thing about promoters’ try-hard quest to create a long-running, fan-favourite festival (the late Virgin Festival went through as many incarnations as it had editions) is that Hillside has achieved it by barely trying at all. That’s not to say they’ve done nothing – all the aforementioned intangibles have gone a long way to creating the Hillside Vibe – but the laid-back, inclusive approach lets the festival’s community dictate its identity.
Hillside is a family affair, and that’s not by accident. Children’s activities run all day and the lineup offers acts that will appeal to young music fans, Guelph townies, hippie lifers and finger-on-the-pulse hipsters alike. That means keeping the main stage unlicensed, which is a minor inconvenience, but it creates a space where generations mix and children run wild. The Darcys nodded to that all-over-the-spectrum mentality by dedicating their covers of Steely Dan’s Home At Last and Peg to “those over 40,” while Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham lifted his young son Holden on his shoulders and gave him the microphone to sing the hook on The Other Shoe, creating the perfect encapsulation of the band’s new-found hardcore-group-hug ethos. “I used to hate hippie shit,” quipped Abraham. “But now that I smoke weed, I get it.”
You could say the same thing about Hillside. Seeing Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo debut his new band The Dust was an undeniably cool experience, sure, but it was much cooler to see him play later with Arcade Fire collaborators Richard Reed Parry, Sarah Neufeld and Colin Stetson (or it would have been, if my friends didn’t want to drive home early). That’s what you call a Hillside Moment. Ask a festival-goer and they’ll have a list of their own: the Pack A.D. and Snowblink jamming together on covers of Whitney Houston and Thee Oh Sees, interrupted by the sounds of India’s Jaipur Kawa Brass Band leading a children’s parade or a father-daughter volunteer team directing traffic with a choreographed dance routine.
Those moments are enough to overlook little hiccups that Toronto fans would likely gripe or complain about afterwards. No, volunteers sometimes can’t direct you to the overflow camping registration office without first sending you in three or four wrong directions and, yes, there is a disappointing lack of hip-hop. And no, I’m not likely to get a poncho, join an intentional community, quit all my writing gigs and start a sustainable co-op. But it’s so nice to immerse yourself in a pleasant, worry-free environment for a weekend that even as you’re grumbling about the neverending drum circles keeping you up at night, you just can’t help but greet passersby with a simple, two-word epithet: “Happy Hillside!”
