Poor Man’s Whiskey's top 5 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival memories

A decade ago, when the local band Poor Man’s Whiskey was first booked to play the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, they had no idea what to expect because they’d never heard of it. Their manager mentioned the audience would be mostly students, “so we thought we were going to play at a school or something,” mandolinist Jason Beard, a Santa Rosa native, remembered.

On the day of the show, two of the guys in the band flew in from El Salvador that morning. “And all of a sudden we look out from this giant stage and we’re playing for 4,000 to 5,000 kids who had been bused in from all over the Bay Area,” Beard said.

It was by far the largest show they’d ever played. Until then, Murphy’s Pub in Sonoma was their most frequent gig.

Back in 2001, when the late Warren Hellman, a San Francisco financier with a weakness for the banjo, founded the free festival in Golden Gate Park, he always intended it to have educational appeal for kids. After he saw the bond between Poor Man’s Whiskey and the students that first year, Hellman kept inviting the Sonoma County bluegrass band back year after year.

“I think part of it has to do with how we’re somehow able to connect with the kids,” said Beard. “We’re kind of goofy and we have no problem doing whatever it takes to get a laugh and get them involved.”

One trick is making bluegrass “cool,” says Beard. That means each year they dig through Billboard Hot 100 charts and reinterpret a few current hits. In the past, they’ve added twang and banjo to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!,” a Lady Gaga medley, “Gangnam Style,” and Lorde’s “Royals.”

The latest to make the setlist? Silento’s “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” - the bluegrass version that every middle-school student has been dying to hear.

“I’d like to think that hopefully we’ve inspired some kids to pick up an instrument and realize they can play one of these songs on their acoustic guitar,” said Beard.

Now, as they take the Hardly Strictly stage for the 11th time Friday morning, Poor Man’s Whiskey has a much larger following. They play around 70 shows a year, selling out the Fillmore back in February, headlining a night at the Kate Wolf Festival and taking their latest bluegrass rendition of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” on tour to the East Coast and into Canada.

Before the sprawling, three-day free festival kicks off this weekend at Golden Gate Park, Beard and the rest of the band took a trip down memory lane (while driving in the van to a gig in Half Moon Bay), to come up with their Hardly Strictly Top 5 highlights over the past decade:

1. “Mariachi Proposal” (2009)

“We were dressed in mariachi outfits and had a fiesta theme going for the set, with horns, violins and tequila. We had female dancers dressed in black and red with flowers in their hair. One of the dancers was (guitarist) Josh Brough’s girlfriend. Halfway through the set, during one of our Spanish-infused original songs (“Mango”), we stopped in the middle, Josh dropped down on his knee and proposed. Thankfully she said yes or that would have been very embarrassing in front of 5,000 people. Six years and one daughter later, they are still going strong.”

2. “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2006)

“We played the whole set in high school graduation gowns in anticipation of our grand finale song: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ As we played the opening lines of the song, we stopped and pulled off the gowns to unveil our 1970’s glam rocker gear we were all wearing underneath. Former PMW guitarist Eli Jebidiah emerged from the madness donning his Freddie Mercury black and white lightning-bolt unitard. We played and sang that song the best we could with bluegrass instruments. (Let’s face it, vocals were a little off.) Not sure to this day whether the audience was laughing with us or at us (most likely the latter). Good times!”

3. “Oktoberfest” (2007)

“For the Oktoberfest Hofbrau theme, we were all wearing lederhosen and drinking beer out of large steins. The band girlfriends were dancing, throwing pretzels into the crowd and thinking, ‘Hey maybe the fans are getting hungry - how about a snack to wash down all that beer you’re drinking in the heat.’ Good idea gone wrong: The pretzels were stale, heavy and hard. During the finale, while playing a weird Euro song called ‘Rasputin’ that Jason picked out, we watched as our fans were getting pelted in the face with stale pretzels. No one was eating them, except the seagulls.”

4. “MC Hammer” (2012)

“We were thrilled to find out we would be sharing the stage with the one and only MC Hammer for our middle school kids show. In our middle-school years, MC Hammer was our idol. You couldn’t beat those parachute pants, his dance moves and tunes like ‘U Can’t Touch This” and ‘2 Legit 2 Quit.’ Josh and Jason had the dance moves from the videos down, so the next logical step was to challenge MC Hammer to a backstage dance-off. Yep, PMW is too legit to quit.”

5. “Warden Hellman” (2005)

“Warren Hellman was a good banjo player and he had a great sense of humor. For this year’s theme, we were pretending to be jailbreaks from Alcatraz wearing the prison pinstripes. We dressed Warren up as the ‘warden’ who was chasing after us on the stage, trying to lock us back up. Instead of capturing us, we handed him his banjo and he played some tunes with us. Thank you, Warren, you are truly missed by everybody!”

John Beck is a Bay Area freelance writer. You can reach him at 280-8014 or john@beckmediaproductions.com.