This weekend, High Sierra Music Festival once again returns to the friendly confines of Quincy, CA for another weekend of familiar acts like Tedeschi Trucks Band, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Leftover Salmon, ALO, Greensky Bluegrass and many others as one of the west coast’s premiere festivals delivers another strong edition. 

Over the years, High Sierra has served as a home base for those bands who proudly hail from the western part of the country and a destination for those traveling from the east. As you’ll see in the second installment of our Festival Memories series, those artists who have played High Sierra in the past and who will be returning this year hold the California festival near and dear. Even if it’s the guys of Dr. Dog, who claim they had one of their worst shows ever at HSMF. 

Read a collection of High Sierra memories below. 

Vince Herman | Leftover Salmon

We rolled into our first High Sierra at Bear Valley after driving 30 miles the wrong way on a one lane road. Poured out of the bus into a snow filled camp with acoustic junction playing. We started getting rowdy and now it’s 20 years later and plenty of stories created in the meantime. Some of my faves include: Our friend WZ with a five gallon jar of mayonnaise dancing and rubbing it all over the crowd, cutting the Tye North’s hair on stage with Jeff Coffin on shears, The grease parade, taking over Grizzly Radio in the middle of the night and seeing the faces of the staff as they came across the field at dawn knowing we commandeered their station, Parading into the backstage with such a motley deranged crew that dr John just shook his head as we approached. Baby pool flips, horse stall living.

There are just too many to bring up. High Sierra is such a concentrated explosion of music. It’s like New Orleans plopped down in rural California and when that happens, stories happen! Can’t wait for more this year. See ya at the kickball field!

Steve Adams | ALO

My first year at High Sierra was 1999, their last year in Bear Valley. Zach, Dan and I had heard a lot about it over the years so we decided we had to check it out.

We were immediately taken by the scene of musicians and the passionate community of festival-goers. Although I had been to other small festivals over the years, to me this one felt like my first real music festival experience. Karl Denson on the main stage, Rockin’ Teenage Combo on a side stage, Hanuman Trio busking all around, String Cheese up the hill. It was magic, so much so we knew we had to come back each and every year.

In addition to all the fun we had discovering new music and meeting cool people, we also found ourselves in a late night jam on the tennis courts that we’ll never forget. Attending the party was a ripping banjo busker named Dan, plus members of Hot Buttered Rum (who weren’t yet a band I believe) and a sax player in a gorilla mask. It was an epic night, howling at the moon, singing at the tops of our lungs, playing till our fingers were numb, watching the sun come up over The Sierras, surrounded by campsites and late night/early morning music-lovers.

The next year, High Sierra moved to Quincy and set up a new home, and it’s been nothing short of the best memories of my life. Each year brings something subtle and new, all embraced by that loving spirit of community and celebration through music. Ask us for another memory, it won’t be hard to list dozens.

Scott McKicken | Dr. Dog

We’ve been to High Sierra a few times and its always been a great time and a great vibe. In fact, it was one of the first festivals that we played that made me reconsider whether or not festivals just had to be big, chaotic. hot messes full of stress and lacking focus.

That being said we did have what may actually be one of our worst shows ever at High Sierra once, but it was entirely our own fault. We were scheduled to play a late night set in the Jam House that didn’t start until one am. Having never really played that late before several band members mismanaged their consumption of intoxicants and by the time we hit the stage, on the whole, we were like a bunch of insane asylum patients and the set degraded into a visceral mess of terror and anarchy. Totally amateur and disrespectful even. I actually cried in the woods afterwards! But these things happen from time to time in the rock n roll business and this year being our first time back since then, we have titled this mission ‘THE REDEMPTION SHOW’. And we intend to bring our A game. We are looking forward to it on a lot of levels!

Marco Benevento | Joe Russo’s Almost Dead 

Joe and I drove out to California in my Subaru station wagon with an organ, a Leslie and a drum set and it was like our destination gig. We basically booked shows from New York to California just because we knew we were playing a big festival out there. In our eyes it was big because we hadn’t really done much and I knew Dave Margulies because he used to manage The Slip and I was really tight with those guys.

I met Dave along the way he’s like, “You know, I can’t pay you, but if you guys want to come out and play, you’re more than welcome. I’ll give you two spots.” That didn’t even matter. I was just happy to be playing a gig in front of so many people out in California, where we never play. And I was just beyond excited to do it and had a blast and met so many people.

It was really interesting how some people already knew about us and how we had been playing the Knitting Factory a bunch. That was so cool. And then just going around, like waking around, playing with Nathan Moore and just getting the whole hippie vibe of California was so cool. Um, you know, and then it just grew into this thing where we would play it every year and it never got un-fun.

Josh Clark | Tea Leaf Green

If High Sierra where school, I think I’d be a a sophomore in high school. Because it is that to me–school. The most fun school on earth. I was 22 when Tea Leaf was asked to play its first festival ever. That set was nirvana. Our first real crowd. Maybe 500 folks. To us, a stadium size crowd. But the most eye-opening part was the level of musicianship on display across the board. So much great music in one place and all around you for four days. I’d never been anywhere like that before. That first year one of my strongest memories was wandering out early morning to find Brad Barr plucking a banjo on the corner under this street light. We were strangers at the time. I swear there was a mist.

I had no idea I would forge friendships that continue to this day and that I would find myself a part of something that extended beyond high Sierras boundaries. The people I met my first couple years at the festival I would continue to see throughout the country as our bands zig- zagged past each other, sometimes coming together for performances or sometimes just stopping in if we were in the same town on a night off or maybe after ones show was over. There’s a camaraderie in the Jam Corner unlike any other. High Sierra is where it was found for me.

Two years back I think, at my last High Sierra Brad And Andrew Barr and a couple of the Fruition guys closed the fest for me on our camp’s picnic table, friends just passing around the guitar in the early morning under a street light. I swear there was a mist.

This year I’m packing up my wife and two year old twin boys, ready for class.

Erik Yates | Hot Buttered Rum

High Sierra was one of the first festivals to put its faith in HBR. That meant a lot! I never would’ve guessed, when we rolled up to Quincy in 2001 behind the wheel of a thirty-year-old Volvo sedan with an open dump trailer hooked on the back for the string bass that we’d be back there for six years straight. It really became a center of gravity for our working year, and the folks we connected with there became fast friends and fans.

I’d never seen anything like it – the ambiance, the music and, most of all, the people made High Sierra a kind of technicolor sanctuary for our most forbidden creative urges. It was a gorgeous place, a nonsensical place, a place filled at all hours with the best kind of noise. And all I wanted to do was sing along. A typical day might lead my vocal chords into jamming at our campsite for eons with David and Enion Tiller, chanting the stars up under a helium jellyfish with Zach Gill, shouting “Bush in de trash” at 3 AM after a long guerilla bluegrass sortie with Vince H, and going out entirely by sunrise over some jet fuel at the Coffee-a-Go-Go. But, hell, there I was shaking my ass anyhow before getting my requisite two hours of sleep, cause soon enough it’d be time to go to ‘work.’

May the work continue! Long live the beautiful madness of the High Sierra Music Festival.

Nat Keefe | Hot Buttered Rum

I remember jamming with my future Hot Buttered Rum bandmates in the campgrounds of the old site in Bear Valley. 1997? That was also the first time I met the guys in ALO. They were already a band, and were talking big about setting an improvisation world record. I was impressed. And the festival had this amazing vibe, taking something from the newly-defunct Grateful Dead scene and incorporating it with the laid back atmosphere of a bluegrass festival. I’d found my people.

Fast forward to 2008 and the Happy Brigade leading a kazoo parade to the Hot Buttered Rum main stage set. They also lent us a Stoke-o-meter to put on the stage and two Stokeomotrists to run it; we came dangerously close to Over-Stoking, but steered just clear of disaster. I think we played High Sierra six years in a row, and it really helped us get in the groove of what we do now. We haven’t been there for six years, but it is still a nexus of my social life.