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Taken from Salt Lake Magazine (Aug 07, 2015)
Review: Michael Franti
by Christie Gehrke
Red Butte concertgoers: We need to talk about your concert provisions.
Please don’t get defensive. I love you. I do. I even love those of you who show up with wine stakes and wagons (literally) full of snacks, wine and beer. I judge you, certainly. But I still love you.
So, it’s from this place of judgment and also love that I tell you that if I have to go to one more show only to smell your low-quality weed coming at me from every direction, I will riot. You paid a lot for your concert tickets—spend a little more on your "concert supplies."
But it was the odd jumble of a crowd that Michael Franti and Spearhead drew to Red Butte on Thursday — a strange mish-mash of white people with dreadlocks and pungent skunkweed and Mormon families dragging vanfuls kids along for a fun family night.
The barriers in front of the stage seemed to suggest security fears that Red Butte's flora wall would not keep the rowdy crowd at bay. And there were mysterious black boxes strategically placed amid the seating.
The energetic Franti kept up the enthusiasm throughout the show, despite pulling a calf muscle training earlier in the day.
Those black boxes were platforms for him to stand on during his forays into the crowd.
It turns out that those folks who held back during the mad rush to stake claim to a piece of land when the gate opened may have ended up with the best seats in the house for this show as the singer danced away towards the back of the lawn section.
His barefoot walkabouts made Spearhead an afterthought, which is a shame. All eyes were focused on the front man, wherever he was in the amphitheater.
Franti was charming. During “Sound of Sunshine” he pulled a little girl named Shania from the crowd to sing with him. At other times during the show he slow danced with a fan and asked a woman to come up to sing a new song, “My Favorite Wine is Tequila,” with him.
During “Say Hey (I Love You),” Franti told his stage crew, “Let’s get some kids up here” and at least 30 tykes got on the stage with him. Adorable? Sure. But, have you ever tried to get 30 kids to do anything? The rest of the venue waited as the crew herded cats off the stage before the show continued.
Franti got preachy. He dedicated a song to the victims of the Charleston shootings, which was a nice gesture, even though the song itself was not particularly profound and included lyrics like, “This is a song for all of the people, pumping the gas and pumping the diesel.” He waxed philosophic with such gems as, “My religion is kindness,” and “A setback is just an opportunity to step back so you can jump higher.”
He was also bossy. “I want to see you jump!” “Clap your hands!” He shouted orders like it was a game of Simon Says to the crowd — my body, my choice, Franti.
The crowd obeyed. They bounced. They clapped. They danced (mostly terribly). They tossed around beach balls and waved glow sticks.
“I’ve never met a Mormon person who wasn’t kind to me,” Franti said in one of his soliloquies. Yet the Mormons on hand covered their children’s ears every time Franti dropped an F-bomb, which turned out to be more than you might think.
And as the Franti fanatics piled into their minivans and VW buses, I wondered if I'd missed out on whatever shared experience the audience was having. Or maybe I just wasn't high enough.
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