This year’s Willamette Valley Music Festival delivered on a tried-and-true formula: starting with the bands, then wheeling out the DJs. None of the bands that played either the main stage at Lillis or the Kind Stage at the EMU Amphitheater attracted more than a small crowd of revelers. But between 7:30 pm and 1 am, when guitars were out and mixers and laptops were in, the festival slowly but surely blossomed into the party its organizers surely hoped it would become.

The main stage kicked off a little after noon with Eugene’s own Pluto the Planet, whose high-energy indie-Afropop was wasted on a sun-baked crowd with no energy to dance. Lures, a much lower-energy indie pop band, came next; though they had to go after Pluto as a touring band, they would have fared better at the beginning, helping the audience transition from their groggy Saturday mornings to an all-day music party.

It wasn’t until Dirty Man & the Chiefs, a very good and explicitly populist psychedelic soul band who covered both Elton John and Marvin Gaye at the end of their set, that a crowd started to form. It mostly started out as friends of the band, but more and more revelers joined in over time, and Dirty Man & the Chiefs enjoyed a sizable audience by the end of their set, which the Joe Cocker-style rock big band Pancho & The Factory inherited.

The very good jam band Era Coda soundtracked the spillover to the beer garden. I was surprised by how calm the beer garden was, and so was the staff; there was only one belligerent drunk all night. With the opening of a new pub in the EMU next year, the UO campus seems to be loosening its dry policies, which it’s held on to since 2002. The civility of the beer garden is a good sign, and UO students can no doubt look forward to more booze at campus events from here on out.

If the main stage was devoted mostly to conventional rock bands, the EMU was where the organizers dumped all the weirder fare. Aptly-named R&B trio Mellow Yellow, intriguingly consisting of a guitarist, sample-pad player and a keyboard player, opened up. Next came the Tony Glausi Quintet, who continued the stage’s lethargic, sit-down vibe. Synthpop duo Crater danced a lot harder than its audience, and it took an outlier–bluegrass ensemble Alder Street All-Stars, who also played an impromptu set near Johnson Hall–to get the audience on its feet for the gothic dance-rock of Tetra Bomb. 

Counterintuitively, the second stage closed just as the festival hit peak attendance. Drum-synth duo Octonaut served as both a literal and figurative transition into the EDM portion of the night, warming up the crowd with sultry, lush techno. Next came the “future funk” of SugarBeats and the multi-genre, anything-goes sets of Aaron Jackson and JayKode. (JayKode’s profile on the WVMF website says his repertoire includes “electro house, trap, twerk, hip-hop, moombahton, and even oldies”; what the website didn’t mention is that he spins all of those things within five minutes of each other.)

By this time, there were hundreds of partiers with hula hoops, glow sticks, and a ton of energy. This was still a substantially tamer crowd than the fairly sketchy one at last year’s festival, even with the extra flow of intoxication coming from the beer garden. Perhaps the legality and ready availability of five-dollar beer at this festival gave the crowd less impetus to dash off campus and chug cheaper, more potent fare before running back for the next act.

Forty-five years in, the Willamette Valley Music Festival still isn’t perfect. Given how much fewer people come during the daytime, the second stage doesn’t seem all that necessary. I also noticed only two of the festival’s fourteen acts had female members–step up your game, folks! But the beer garden thankfully wasn’t a complete fiasco, and the mere fact that it was present made the WVMF a viable alternative to boozier Saturday night activities. I hope to see a lot more people at the Willamette Valley Music Festival next year. Let’s just hope they’re always this well-behaved.

Gallery • 8 Photos

Photo by Daniel Bromfield