Hardly Strictly 2021 - ONLINE ONLY, no in person festival this year (Thanks COVID)

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass unveils 2021 plans amid COVID surge

Aidin Vaziri August 19, 2021Updated: August 19, 2021, 9:45 am

The fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic has driven the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass online for a second consecutive year, organizers announced Thursday, Aug. 19.

Despite plans to bring the long-running popular free music festival back to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park over the first weekend of October this year, the alarming rise of COVID-19 cases in the region due to the highly contagious delta variant has brought on renewed safety concerns.

“There is no playbook for our current environment,” Sheri Sternberg, the festival’s producer, told The Chronicle. “We are constantly reaching out to experts for best practices and advice. Everything changed rapidly this year like a pendulum, from lockdown to no restrictions and then conditions worsened quickly. We had to remain flexible and made sure to have multiple backup plans.”

Following the success of last year’s virtual concert, called Let the Music Play On, the organizers have decided to do it again. As a result, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2021 will return as a free online event titled Come What May, this time featuring 15 live-streamed and 12 prerecorded performances stretching over three days, Oct. 1-3.

Many familiar faces will be back as part of the online-only festival too, including festival veterans Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Mavis Staples and Bela Fleck, who are expected to be joined by Hardly Strictly first-timers like the Tallest Man on Earth.

The event will be broadcast via the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass website and app, as well as on Facebook and YouTube, starting at 1 p.m. each day.

“We started out the year making sure we had a parallel path, to be ready for the park but also to make sure we had content in case complications arose with COVID,” Sternberg said.  

While other events such as the free Stern Grove Festival have been able to move forward despite the current virus surge, Hardly Strictly organizers had to take a more cautious approach given the free-spirited nature of the concert and its history of attracting up to 750,000 people to the park over the three-day weekend.

Sternberg added that Hardly Strictly does not have the infrastructure in place to monitor virus testing or vaccination status of attendees, as required by other large-scale events like BottleRock Napa Valley, set for Labor Day weekend, and this year’s Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, which has moved to Oct. 29-31.

“Our event is not ticketed so we have a different relationship with our fans,” Sternberg said. “Their safety, as well as our artists and crew, is paramount.”

Festival organizers decided to scrap the in-person event after consulting with the city’s health department, medical advisers and COVID compliance specialists.

“Based on all of the information we gathered, it became clear that a live event in the park was not in the interest of public safety,” Sternberg said.

The delta variant, more than twice as infectious as the original coronavirus and nearly as contagious as chickenpox but far deadlier, is proving more challenging to control than public health experts expected, even in populations that are highly vaccinated.

With about 54% of its residents fully vaccinated, California is averaging 10,000 new cases a day, a tenfold increase since July 1, with COVID-19 hospitalizations rising more than fivefold during that time for the state and the Bay Area.

Even though being outside is generally considered safer than attending live performances indoors, with events like Hardly Strictly it’s about the crowds the festival attracts.

“I haven’t gone to any large events and I don’t plan on it,” Dr. Robert Wachter, chief of the Department of Medicine at UCSF, said during a panel of infectious disease experts on Aug. 12.

The success of last year’s virtual concert — a three-hour online stream masterfully produced and directed by Matt Bizer — gave festival organizers the confidence to move ahead with Come What May rather than canceling the festival altogether.

Sternberg said the virtual event, which delved into the history of the free three-day concert dreamed up by the late financier Warren Hellman in 2001, helped the festival find a global audience. It also inspired the launch of the Hardly Strictly TV app, which will be available on Apple TV and Roku beginning Oct. 1. The app will have four full-length exclusives from the festival available daily.

Fans can look forward to virtual real-time sets by Andy Shauf, Lakestreet Drive and Valerie June, while prerecorded performances are expected from Bob Mould with Fred Armisen, Seratones with Alyndra Segarra. Others on the bill include Ani DiFranco, Della Mae, Galactic, Jackie Greene, Meklit, Peter Rowan, Rainbow Girls, Terence Blanchard, among others.

“It’s an exciting evolution for us,” said Sternberg. “Last year was about Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. This year, we focus on 12 artists, their musical journey and their relationship with the cities where they live.”

Ahead of the online celebration, organizers also announced two COVID-19 vaccination and testing events dubbed “Community Immunity,” scheduled for noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 22, and Sept. 12, at the Bay View Opera House. Spangalang, Tony Lindsay, Skip The Needle and Nic Clark are slated to perform.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect updates to the festival announced Thursday, Aug. 19. The virtual event will now begin at 1 p.m. each day.