How to properly enjoy the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival
How to properly enjoy the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival
It's one of the largest and free-est music festivals in the country. Be one of over 750,000 attendees over the three-day musical extravaganza in Golden Gate Park.
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival is one of the coolest events to take place in Golden Gate Park. The annual festival—always held on the first weekend of October—brings in over 80 acts across six different stages. The festival was founded and subsidized by San Francisco venture capitalist Warren Hellman, who aimed to keep the event free, and the event lives on in his legacy.
The Bold Italic has written a few survival guides and tips, and we’ve also published quirky video interviews of attendees. Today’s special guide pulls our best from our archives with some new deets, too. First off, your most important information: Where do you take a poop? Or tinkle. (At home!!) There wasn’t a detailed map to do your business at HSB, but we cobbled this one from ADA spots available —
This is the lineup for 2023. And here are our legacy tips from 2013 — 2019 that we still find useful today:
Don’t wear sandals and then complain about your broken toes at the end of the weekend
Sandals are only appropriate for one activity: avoiding foot cancer (or whatever) when showering in a public bathroom. Beyond that, cover your damn feet.
Park at the Rooster Stage early
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is not a festival where people are always on the go, moving from one stage to the next. Instead, it’s a place where people typically park at one spot and stay there all day (edibles help if you ever get antsy). This is why the infamous Rooster Stage has somewhat of a cult following. To each their own when it comes to deciding which one of the six stages to park at for the day, but if you’re a newbie this year, the Rooster Stage is a great place at which to experience your first HSB.
Don’t forget to bring alcohol
The rules allow you to bring beer and wine in non-glass bottles, a rarity at any festival, and a godsend to the chronically unemployed. If you get tired of carrying around two five-liter boxes of wine, you can always stand on them to see the stage better, under the condition that you give the people behind you free range to drink your shitty wine. What do you care? You have 10 gallons of it.
Wear sunscreen and bring a jacket
Golden Gate Park might be one of the most climate-diverse parks in the country. On Saturday, the weather forecast is 75 degrees and sunny. Hopefully, this will be the case all day, but the chances of that happening are slim. As we all know, around 5:00 p.m., the fog will roll in, but that doesn’t mean that the party will end. If you’re going to HSB for the day, bring sunscreen for the first half and a jacket for the second half. A cold HSB is an unpleasant one.
More tips from TBI’s stories here and here. Beautiful photos captured from the 2019 festival here.
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