In "Telluride Bluegrass Festival: Forty years of Festivation," festival emcee long and Aspenite Dan "Pastor Mustard" Sadowsky calls the people of San Juan resort in the "Goldilocks Zone Championship crazy" for what is the natural home for the meeting of galvanizing flat collectors and people who love them.
"Even Aspen was too established to accommodate what this festival was to become (and Aspen was a monster parade)," he writes.
The concise narrative Sadowsky irreverent, often hilarious, comments - familiar to "festivarians" and listeners of his weekly radio KAJX - help bring history to life festival feet stomping in this retrospective elegant design. Sadowsky delightfully gives readers with tales of backstage, onstage and beyond musical with a cast of characters including Bill Monroe, Martin Sexton, John Hartford, David Byrne, Emmylou Harris and others, to try to capture the magic and the phenomena of the festival as "the march of the canvas," the "House Band", the "Festivarian" and its amazing growth.
The book includes a chorus of voices from the festival along with Sadowsky. There is a foreword by Sam Bush, short essays by artists such as Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck and Marikay Shellman (widow of the founder of the festival, Fred Shellman), with an afterword by Chris Thile of Nickel Creek.
It is a book coffee table with beautiful photographs of past festivals and reprints of his posters of each year, along with lists of perfomers of each excursion, in themselves, pulse accelerate any music fan.
Book design and layout are certainly gorgeous, and limited to 5,000 copies first impression is aimed at collectors and hardcore festivarians. The stories of the stage and behind him, however, deserve a wider audience - hopefully (? Perhaps by the 50th) Sadowsky can put together an oral history to capture the festival and its seismic cultural impact with a lower price and larger print run.
