Rest Fest 2011: The Indomitable Spirit of Albany

When Hurricane Irene came trundling up the east coast last week, the Capital Region braced for the possibility of high winds, flooding, and blackouts. But there was one other consideration: what of B3nson Records’ second annual Restoration Festival, scheduled for that weekend?

My wife and I awoke on Sunday morning and knew we wouldn’t be going anywhere. The view out the window was horrifying, and we have a five-week-old child to consider. On the other hand, this was supposed to be his first concert. We were bummed, to put it mildly. I got on the Rest Fest website and discovered that, though one of their national acts, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, had to cancel, the show was still going on. With a morose resignation, I put together an iTunes playlist of the performers we would be missing that day and made pickles.

But as the afternoon wore on, the rain weakened, the winds let up, and we began to wonder what we were still doing inside. And then the news broke: the other headliner, The Music Tapes, had cancelled, and so the doors of St. Joesph’s were flung open. Rest Fest, the most mind-blowing celebration of local music imaginable, was now a free show.

We hopped right in the car.

At the church, the mood was exhilarated. There was already a very decent crowd, and people were streaming in. The same elated party atmosphere of last year’s Rest Fest seemed to have been bolstered by the feeling that we were enjoying it against the odds. We would not be stopped from rocking! We had weathered a hurricane! (Okay, tropical weather conditions, but, when we tell the story, it will be a hurricane.) Those who had already paid for tickets (my wife and I among them) were rewarded with free beer coupons. Things just kept getting better.

There was a lot of talk about how the church had been “under water” that morning, and of the committed crew of volunteers who worked hard to clean it up. One person described it as a “nightmare.” But the full scope of it only became clear to me later. I was chatting with Eric Krans of We are Jeneric, and he told me that when they had arrived that morning, St. Joesph’s looked like a sinking ship. They literally had to bail it out. “It would have been so easy to say, ‘Oh, well, that’s it. Let’s bail it out and go home. Cancelled.’ But we didn’t. This is the best day.”

Here’s the thing about that: that is SO ALBANY. Where else would that happen? Around here, we’ve learned how to cobble things together. And, more importantly, we love music and we love our community, and, honestly, inclement weather doesn’t scare us much. I really, truly believe that this could only have happened here.

The performers all played like it was the end of the world. I’ve included the We are Jeneric classic “After the Great Flood of Troy,” because it’s sort of hilariously appropriate, but also because their performance of it yesterday blew the roof off the place. The sizable crowd danced like maniacs. We whooped and shouted and jumped around, because the whole thing felt like a triumph.

I bought my son a T-shirt. As they only had adult sizes, we’re going to store it, so when he gets to high school, he’ll have the shirt from the first concert he ever went to. And the story that goes along with it — well, as stories go, you can’t get much better.

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