Bumbershoot was born Labor Day weekend 1971: a street fair grown too big for any neighborhood street, a slightly slaphappy spinoff of the various rock festivals that had kept the Northwest counterculture one toke over the line (metaphorically speaking only) in the sunset years of the '60s, and the first mass event to fill the grounds of the Seattle Center since the 1962 World's Fair. Sheb Wooley was the closest the organizers could come to booking a musical star (what, you don't remember "The One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People-Eater"?). Didn't matter. Upwards of 100,000 people showed up to mingle with hippies and troubadours, food and crafts vendors, emit rapt "Oh wow"s at the lightshows then blighting the culture at large and wait with otherwise bated breath to learn who had won the Miss Hot Pants Contest.
Actually, they didn't call it Bumber-shoot until 1973. That name was righteous, at once tipping a soggy hat to the city's widely scorned identity as the capital of rainfall and implicitly claiming it as a virtue. And under the spreading institutional bumbershoot, the Labor Day be-in edged closer to becoming a comprehensive festival for the arts, as well as the place no right-thinking Seattleite would dream of being absent from at the end of August.
Among the most memorably irreverent and accomplished of the fringe artists strutting their stuff at Bumber-shoot through the '70s was the One Reel Vaudeville Show, a motley crew of satirists and charlatans who, it only followed, became the custodians of the event's identity and continuity starting in 1980. They not only presided over Bumbershoot's evolution into a world-class arts event that attracted high-powered, big-name talent along with the flakes and flecks of local color - they ensured it would remain, first and foremost, the people's festival.
Which, of course, it unabashedly remains.
Bumbershoot 2003 will showcase the work of more than 2,500 artists. Musically speaking, Friday, Aug. 29, brings Modest Mouse, The Shins, Quasi, Solomon Burke, Kim Richey, Andrei Codrescu with Alix Olson, Maktub, Duffy Bishop, The Rockfords, Brandi Carlile, jazz great Chico Hamilton & Euphoria, The Slip and The Divorce, as well as the Battle of Bumbershoot III and the Young Musicians Showcase.
Saturday, Aug. 30, there's a tribute to rhythm and blues country-western legend Bonnie Raitt, Howard Tate, Duffy Bishop, Maxi Priest, the Austin de Lone Band, Syncopated Taint Horns & North Mississippi Allstars, plus Macy Gray, more Solomon Burke, The Dandy Warhols, Blind Boys of Alabama, Wanda Jackson, Kathleen Edwards, and never-get-too-much-of Chico Hamilton. Poetry also rears its head in the hydra-headed form of Andrei Codrescu, Sheri-D Wilson, Poets Against the War, Kinky and Kinski. And On the Boards will give a taste or three of its Northwest New Works.
Sunday, Aug. 31, '70s icon Donovan wafts through, sharing the scene with the contemporary likes of Supersuck-ers, Charlie Musselwhite, Rhett Miller, Eek-a-Mouse, Vendetta Red, Rennie Harris' Legends of Hip-Hop, Bernie Worrell & the WOO Warriors, Grey De Lisle, The Spits and Chuck Prophet.
Labor Day Monday, Sept. 1, R.E.M. lift the profile, along with Wilco, Nickel Creek, Leftover Salmon, Shemekia Copeland (who's also on Saturday), Daniel Lanois and Magic Slim & the Teardrops.
But there's plenty more besides music. The 1 Reel Film Festival, a Bumbershoot mainstay for decades, this year moves into the 900-seat Bag-ley Wright Theatre to accommodate RainCity's omnivorous film freaks. Everything from Hollywood High - showcasing the work of pre-collegiate cineasts - to selections from the Seattle International Film Festival's "Fly Films" - short films made on the fly over one festival weekend by some high-profile showbiz types moonlighting - will be on view. It all wraps at 5:30-8 p.m. Sunday with The Best of the Fest - ostensibly "the finest films of the past year from American short cinema" - and the Short Order Awards Ceremony.
That aforementioned Poetry Bout (9-10:30 p.m. Saturday, Bagley Wright Theatre) pits Andrei Codrescu against Sheri-D Wilson. Codrescu, poet-editor-novelist and NPR celebrity, is reigning Bumbershoot Poetry Champion; Wilson, a feisty performance-poet from the Great White North.
Local hero and eyewitness-to-history Philip Wohlstetter (6-7 p.m. Saturday, Charlotte Martin Theatre) will narrate a first-person account of the 1973 coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende. His performance will be interpolated with projected images and the poetry of Pablo Neruda.
Augusten Burroughs, celebrated memoirist ("Running With Scissors," "Dry") and novelist ("Sellevision"), will speak with the audience 6-7 p.m. Sunday (Charlotte Martin Theatre). And Medusa and C.R. Avery will explore, and almost certainly transgress, the boundary between hip-hop and spoken word 6-7 p.m. Monday (Charlotte Martin).
And stretching the boundary between the written word and the graphic novel, a special exhibit called Starbucks Inn Spot will frame highlights from the output of Seattle's Zine Archives & Publishing Project, better-known as Z.A.P.P. Zines and comix will be on display, and there's to be a series of readings and workshops involving zinesters from all over the country.
On only slightly more traditional footing, Bumbershoot's Theater & Performance department will offer up everything from improv and fringe to musicals and old-time radio, with a few talent shows to suggest who might be equal to bridging the various gaps.
In addition to the traditional venues of the Bagley Wright and Charlotte Martin theaters, Bumbershoot has teamed with Theatre Puget Sound to create a brand-new, all-theater space especially for the festival: the Theatre Puget Sound Stage in the Center House. It will be filled with local productions Saturday through Monday.
On Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Bagley Wright, The Stranger's fourth Citywide Talent Show "Pizzazz!" will gather "a dozen of Seattle's most talented citizens, from needle-eating magicians to 6-year-old blues singers." The Stranger strikes again Saturday, 1:30-3 p.m., Charlotte Martin Theatre, with its Celebrity Dream Date. And do you even want to know what Maria Glanz' "See Me Naked" is about? You do? 7-8 p.m. Saturday, Theatre Puget Sound Stage.
And we haven't even mentioned the ongoing banquet Taste of Seattle.... Art is all well and good, but there's also a spiritual side to life.
Admission to Bumbershoot-at-large, all 20-plus stages and myriad exhibit spaces over the 74 acres of Seattle Center, is $20 a day. You can't beat that with a stick. But at Bumbershoot, someone will probably try.
