Two Views from the Crater

Offering differing perspectives on Saturday's Crater Celebration are Burl Burlingame, 53, who attended festivals in the crater through the '70s, and Jason Genegabus, who was 1 year old when the last festival was held in 1978.

It was a slightly surreal experience at Saturday's Diamond Head Crater Celebration.

The fun started around lunchtime, when a fleet of Roberts Hawaii school buses and open-air trolleys began the process of shuttling people into the state monument. By 1:30 p.m. we had passed through the crater's access tunnel, where blue skies and rows of vendor booths greeted us.

The first thing I noticed was that it was awfully quiet for an outdoor music festival. Although entertainment was supposed to start at noon, the only music you could hear was a Woodstock concert CD playing through the main-stage speaker.

After ponying up for an $8 plate lunch and a $3 bottle of water, I sat down to people-watch. The audience would be constantly reminded that 28 years had passed since the last Crater Festival, but all you had to do was take a look around. I spotted a couple of vintage festival T-shirts, and many others had dusted off tie-dyed shirts (and pants!) for the show.

WE HAD to wait until 2:30 p.m. before the first performer, Kenny Endo, took to the stage with his taiko drumming troupe. Na Leo and Yvonne Elliman followed, accompanied by the Honolulu Symphony Pops, but both of their sets felt extremely rushed. Unfortunately, Matt Catingub and crew had to get back to the Blaisdell Concert Hall for a second show with Elvis Costello, and being late wasn't an option.

WAR immediately picked up the pace at 4:30 p.m. Even though keyboard player Lonnie Jordan was the only original member actually in Hawaii when the band played its last Crater Festival in 1978, they played the nostalgia card well.

"Was it a dream -- or was it a flashback?" Jordan asked. As his band-mates laid down the funk and 50-somethings in the crowd passed marijuana joints back and forth, it was a little hard to tell.

The energy waned a bit during Linda Ronstadt's set, with the legendary singer sticking to smooth grooves such as "Just One Look" and "Blue Bayou." Maybe it's because I'm not yet 30, but my "oh wow" moment came when she sang "Somewhere Out There," a slow jam from the 1986 animated flick "An American Tail."

But the lull couldn't have come at a better time -- it wasn't until Ronstadt's set started at 6:10 p.m. that the line to buy official Crater Festival merchandise had disappeared. Light showers also marked the first time all day that more than a few drops of rain had fallen.

When Steve Miller appeared 80 minutes later, the crowd was ready to rock. Dozens rushed the expensive reserved seats from general admission under the cover of darkness, as even more folks decided it was the perfect time to light a spliff. While some sat politely in an elevated VIP area, the vast majority shook the mud off their dancing shoes and cut loose to songs like "Abracadabra," "Gangster of Love" and "Dance Dance Dance."

THERE IN the dark, locals and visitors alike got a chance to relive their 1970s glory days. Some spent the evening with a significant other, reminiscing about a time long since passed. Others brought their children, to pass on some history and the music their parents listened to back in the day.

While I would have gladly traded Saturday's lineup for, say, UB40, Pepper and 311, the Diamond Head Crater Celebration could be characterized as a success. Thousands of people braved the mud and threat of rain to witness three top acts of the boomer generation. Let's hope this isn't the last time it happens.

Everything went swimmingly, when we expected to be swimming. The gods smiled down, as they usually did upon music festivals inside Diamond Head crater. The news was that a perfectly pleasant musical event took place, pretty much without a hitch, the local equivalent of trying to report good news out of Iraq.

In the olden days, kids, "The Crater" was a daytime event. You rose before dawn, carpooled as close as possible to the tunnel entrance at Fort Ruger, then hiked a couple of miles to get in. It was a big deal just to be inside Diamond Head, which, once we were there, was revealed to be scrubby and dusty, and the crater walls acted like a magnifying lens and you were a bug caught in the glare.

When the sun started going down, it was time to hobble out the miles to your car, which in those days had no radio for a meth-head to steal. You hit Zippy's on the way home (some things are still the same), and then you allowed your mother to scold you for your horrible sunburn. And then you had stuff to talk about during recess for the next month. Particularly if you saw your first topless woman.

No one cared about the downside. The music was great (generally, not always), but the big deal was the communal groove. Everyone there was not only digging the music, they were digging on each other, feeling tribal. You saw friends, you made friends, the same friends who, decades later, shared this moment in time with you. It's a kind of cultural bond.

Things have changed. There are those hateful colored tags on your wrists. The sound guys are playing the "Woodstock" soundtrack between sets, which is either cool or cringe-worthy. The technology of raising tents has improved mightily. Properly mixed concert sound no longer causes your ears to bleed. Fanny packs have been invented in the meantime, as have cell phones, not that they work well inside the crater.

On the other hand, plate-lunch combos weren't $15, and the event was a showplace for local craftspeople, not multinational corporations trying naively to appear hip. Cameras were banned officially but not in reality -- the same for backpacks, where the cameras were probably hidden. The only memories are supposed to be the officially licensed ones.

But you could still catch that once-familiar scent of pakalolo. Where are these old folks getting this stuff? Are they raiding their kids' stashes, or have their Baggies been buried for 30 years?

The stuff still works. Three decades on, you can still convince a stoned guy that the lyric in the WAR song goes, "The Cisco Kid, he was a friend of a Mayan."

Buzzed or not, the question is, Who is this type of concert for? Baby boomers with too much disposable cash, desperately hanging on to their hipness? A new generation discovering antique musicks? Either way, the venue seems uniquely suited to a good show and remains so to this day. The success of the event wasn't a figment of our youthful imagination so many years ago.

The crowd this weekend was primarily music lovers who also enjoyed the cultural solidarity of sharing the scene. A groovy happening, my man. We used to say stuff like that and not laugh.