There’s a hippie named Chuck who owns acreage somewhere outside of Millheim, Pennsylvania, or at least he did back in the mid-2000s when I lived in State College, some-twenty miles west of there. Technically, I guess, Chuck’s land was farmland. And technically, I suppose, Chuck was a farmer. He might have been a damn good farmer, but that was of little importance to the hundreds who descended on his farm once a year for central Pennsylvania’s most infamous acid-drenched jam band hoe-down.

“Chuck’s Farm”, as the event was conveniently called, was a sort-of Venn diagrammatic intersection of Woodstock and the “moon tower party” from Dazed and Confused. It wasn’t a ticketed event and as far as I remember there were no staff. Getting there wasn’t easy. Most people drove down Friday night after dark and directions to the farm always came word-of-mouth and involved driving several miles down an unlit country highway and slowing down at a certain mile marker to look for a dangling glow stick. You’d make a right onto a dirt road and drive a half mile up and over a hill, at which point you might begin to spot some wandering soul seekers (for the record: people on acid can often be found roaming the periphery of wherever it is they are “supposed to be”). As you’d keep driving and near the makeshift parking lot slash campground, you could begin to hear the garbled rumbling of bass and drums and shreddy, noodling lead guitar.

The “festival grounds” were hardly bucolic. Chuck kept the party contained to what I imagine was non-arable land, for good reason. You had to walk over another small dirt hill, through some light forest to get to the music. Inside of a half-acre clearing, the (two) stages were constructed out of stacked lumber or used shipping pallets, I’m not sure which, and framed overhead with PVC piping and blue tarp. Everything was powered by gasoline generators that ran loud enough to drown out the music if you stood next to one. The festival had been happening on the same weekend every year for many years at this point and must have required some amount of planning and operational foresight, but the layout and construction of it all made no indication of that.