This summer’s Beach Road Weekend music festival marked two milestones for Nancy Dryden, a librarian at the University of Connecticut.
“This is my 15th Tedeschi Trucks show and my first trip to Martha’s Vineyard in my 64 years,” she said during the band’s set Saturday night.
Ms. Dryden, an administrator of a Tedeschi Trucks Band fan page on Facebook, said that the pull of seeing her favorite group on a “beautiful” island was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
The crowd at Saturday’s show at Veteran’s Park included a mix of devoted Tedeschi Trucks fans who had traveled to the Vineyard and longtime Islanders excited to hear live music again in a venue close to home.
After being cancelled last year due to Covid, the second Beach Road Weekend returned this year with three concerts at Veteran’s Memorial Park. Moe opened the weekend on Friday night, with the Tedeschi Trucks Band performing shows on Saturday and Sunday night. The festival also hosted pre-shows and after-shows throughout the week at the Loft in Oak Bluffs.
In order to maintain social distancing guidelines, this year was a significantly scaled-back operation compared to the previous weekend in 2019. Instead of having 20 to 30 bands over the course of the festival, each evening’s concert included just the headliner. White paint on the grass transformed the field into “boxes” that could fit up to four people. Across the park, music fans filled out their pod rectangles with beach towels and chairs or the orange mats provided by the festival upon entry.
The reduction in crowd size did little to dampen the energy. Among the sea of tie-dye and Grateful Dead T-shirts, the joy of being back at a concert once again was palpable. Fans greeted old friends, posed for pictures in front of the multi-colored “Beach Road” sign, perused the merchandise and ordered food and drinks from stalls operated by local vendors like El Gato Grande, Coop de Ville and Mad Martha’s.
Once Tedeschi Trucks took the stage, however, they were the sole focus of attention. Fans danced among their pods, brandishing their IPAs like lighters, waving them in time with the music. The band played a wide variety of songs from their catalogue, with hits like Midnight in Harlem earning particularly huge reactions from the crowd.
Oak Bluffs native Iris Albert fell in love with the band because of that song, she said. “I’m here because one of their songs, Midnight in Harlem, played on the Green Room’s playlist while I worked there, and it actually became my favorite song for the whole summer. I got so excited when I heard that they were headlining.”
Derek Trucks on guitar set the crowd on fire with his bluesy solos, consistently triggering standing ovations. Julie Brand said she had signed on to work at the event as an usher in part because of Mr. Trucks’s reputation as a musician.
“I’ve never seen the band, but just someone from the Allman brothers being in it made me interested,” she said, referring to Mr. Trucks’s earlier career as guitarist with the Allman Brothers.
Ms. Brand said the relaxed, happy crowd made her job easy.
“I had to eject some people from their spot because they were in the wrong spot, so it was kind of like I had to be a bouncer, but we were just all laughing, it was just a misunderstanding,” she said.
ID scanner James Boyle echoed this sentiment. “Everybody’s in a really good mood,” he said. “The vibe is great, no drama. Everybody just wants to have fun.”
After the set was finished the crowd howled for more and the band returned for two more songs, after which Susan Tedeschi thanked her fans.
“I’m so happy to be here on the Island,” she said.
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