Wak Party

Environmentalism has enormous buzz this year with Wakarusa's first Sustainability Symposium, an effort to promote the festival's green focus. This year, the festival amps up recycling, requiring vendors to use compostable products and run generators on biodiesel. Better water distribution limits bottled-water consumption. Panels of experts on coal and wind energy assemble to educate attendees. Every drop of beer in the 618 kegs that will have been tapped by festival's end comes from wind-powered New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado

Reducing Wakarusa's carbon footprint means more responsibility asked of festivarians, who presumably haven't come to Wakarusa to be responsible. They oblige nonetheless, and never has a festival trod so gently on Mother Earth.

The kind Wakarusa brethren do become a bit frenzied, however, as Ozomatli wraps up and Ben Harper's roadies get to work. Children twirl glow sticks, creating flames of neon against the dark sky. Substance enthusiasts shake their heads, coming into their new realities. Yuppies calmly sip beer, looking toward the stage and saying little.

Ben Harper walks onto the stage without pretense, and the crowd erupts for the awkward, mainstream representative of folk music, a genre for which mainstream success is somewhat antithetical.

YouTube: Ben Harper jamming at Wakarusa 2007 (fan footage)

But Harper sits down with a slide-guitar on his lap and leads the people, who know the words to all the songs, though words often are few and far between during jam-heavy Harper shows.

Over at the Homegrown Stage, folk takes a purer shape in the form of Alice Schneider, a KU alum and New York City Native who fronts Alice Texas. Her album, Sad Days, is tinged in country and belies her undergraduate days in Kansas. She evokes long, straight highways with "Love Is All Around," a ballad produced by Nick Cave drummer Jim Sclavunos.

Bad Seed participation makes sense — Schneider's songs are melancholy and dangerous and sewn of haunting stories. She delivers them to a crowd of fans who don't mind missing the big headliner for a chance to hear something this raw. They are many ages and colors; some wear flowing skirts, and others wear Old Navy sweatshirts in the cool night.

They are neohippies and nonhippies, intertwined.