A Post-Thanksgiving Love Letter to Golden Gate Park
As can be surmised from some of my previous posts, music is something I hold greatly dear — a day without my headphones is a rarity, and typically is battery-induced (or a function of forgetting my earbuds altogether).
I made a habit of listening to the previous night’s BBC Essential Mix every Saturday morning during college, a ritual that persists going on its fifth year. I relish the ability to experience the works of some of the world’s most seminal electronic talents from the comfort of my pajamas, sipping my morning coffee and able to pause playback as well as modulate volume to my liking.
However, there is more to taking in music to which I’m predisposed to liking in comfortable solitude. Much has been made (perhaps clichédly) about music’s power to unite, and this power carries over to creating a shared context and experience among swaths of those who might not otherwise keep company.
When it comes to venues in San Francisco to feel this while taking a musical journey that transcends and transports, Golden Gate Park is unparalleled.
I’d frequented the park in the past — it was actually the first place I visited when I came cross-country to meet my coworkers last year — but my initial encounter with music in the park came during Outsidelands.
The main stage told its own tale of otherworldliness, its tribute to the Bay Area’s most iconic bridge rendered in shimmering silver pieces evoking the light-manipulating surface of a disco ball. The impressiveness of this architecture would become truly apparent as the sun set on the polo fields, the brilliant blasts of color from the stage lights and backing screen creating a visual extravaganza as Gorillaz commanded the audience’s attention.
However, it was my initial foray to see Electric Guest on the Twin Peaks Stage that permanently altered my perception of the park. The stage’s massive scale found plenty of juxtaposition on both ends of the spectrum. The lead singer’s fluorescent coral sweatshirt and far-from-drab olive pants and similarly-colorful bandmates made plain how tiny a typical human stood in comparison.
The greatest amplification, though, was not of one’s stage presence or voice via technology, but of the power and majesty of the trees lining Hellman’s Hollow. They towered above the manmade mammoth, evoking the wonderment characters from fantasy novels must have felt upon finding themselves in an enchanted forest. Engulfed by the band’s transcendent sounds, I found myself questioning whether I was still in the park a quick bus ride from my apartment, which I’m sure was deliberate and in the same vein as Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for New York City’s Central Park as a place in which visitors could eschew feelings of urban claustrophobia in the middle of the country’s most populous city.
This effect was not limited to the city’s marquee music festival. I would return in the ensuing months to take in the sights and sounds of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and in that moment discovered an emotional reaction the park entirely distinct from my prior musical visit. The festival’s unapologetic quirkiness, coupled with sounds augmented by rather than entirely reliant upon electronics and the soft warmth of the sun washing over the crowd, resurrected a sensation I’d felt upon first encountering the works of the Grateful Dead: the love and peace largely associated with a pre-tech incarnation of San Francisco.
I’ve yet to find a more convincing case for context playing a critical role in how music is experienced, and follow-up visits to the park made its various pockets and gorges seem unfinished, as though a lynchpin ingredient in elevating a recipe was missing.
This unfinishedness — the conspicuous absence of melodies on the air and vibrations coursing through the Earth, as if to stir the surrounding plant life with life of its own — reveals the true power of the park.
The post-festival void makes evident that one can construct an entirely unique reality all for one’s own habitation. In the same place that one might wear a hole in their dancing shoes due to the in an infectious rhythmic fervor, I’ve found myself in an otherwise-isolated crater, my consciousness and senses under the careful watch of the guardian trees, resisting forces with potential to pop the bubble in which I made my home for an afternoon.
Revelry and reflection have equal places in Golden Gate Park, as do people from all walks of life — a fundamentally Olmstedian principle. In a city as chaotic and caught up in chronic upheaval as San Francisco, Golden Gate Park’s 1,000-plus acres provide the perfect in-city adventure — into music or one’s own mind — to reestablish an equilibrium, and it is for that I am thankful.
