PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The Waterfront Blues Festival at Tom McCall Park is not happening this 4th of July weekend, but as they say — if you can’t come to see the music, the music is coming to you.
Music is playing this weekend — although not where you’d expect to see it this 4th of July weekend. The Blues Fest Bandwagon is making eight different stops in the Portland area on Friday and Saturday, taking the show on the road to driveways, parking lots and other open spaces for 90-minute shows before packing up and heading to the next destination.
“It’s going to be a unique, intimate experience that is by no means like the 20,000 people we see each day in Waterfront Park,” Christina Fuller of the Blues Fest Bandwagon said. “But it’s going to be the 20 people we see right in the neighborhood, in the driveways that we’re coming to.”
That same warm-up band that serenades people in line at waterfront park will open for these shorter, whistle-stop concerts. They’ll play while the crew plugs in the sound and sets up the stage-on-a-trailer pulled around by the bandwagon pickup.
It is live music in what has been a live music desert since the virus began — and it’ll be played in some of the most intimate settings for people to enjoy at home.
“We’re going to play to their porches, to their front yards, to their driveways and are bringing them live music — two bands and then we’ll pack it up, move to the next spot and do it four times,” Fuller said.
They’ll do it four times Friday and four times Saturday with stops scheduled at every two hours from noon to 6 p.m.
They’re not publicizing the locations so as not to attract too big of a crowd. For the select few where the bandwagon does roll up to, it won’t be Waterfront Park — but it’ll be a taste of the blues brought right to the front porch.