Honestly it’s hubristic to think you can host an outdoor festival on a weekend. If you want to put on an open air event in this town, do it on a Tuesday. Otherwise, pack your wellies and a poncho and prepare to be damp. If Taylor Swift couldn’t make the heavens work in her favor, what hope do any of us have?
This weekend, the greater Boston University campus was host to the first ever WBUR Festival, a celebration of the public radio stalwart’s 75th year. Like Boston Calling the weekend prior, the inaugural fest was met with scattered rain showers and high winds.
Really, WBUR Festival is two festivals. One is a street fair tucked behind Marsh Chapel on Bay State Road, kitted with food trucks, vintage clothing vendors, and a big stage for musical performances. The other is held indoors across BU’s finest auditoriums and features in-person interviews with authors and luminaries, as well as live versions of programs found on WBUR and the wider world of public radio. The street fair is free and open to the public, while the WBUR Festival proper is a ticketed affair complete with lanyard and accompanying badge.
That these two festivals intersect at all is putting it lightly. A lanyarded attendee might never set foot in the street fair unless they happened to pass by while on their way to catch “Hunger, Anger, Joy,” a conversation between Roxanne Gay and KCRW host Sam Sanders at the Tsai Performance Center. Though my press pass gave me VIP entry to nearly every event at the fest, I was there for the music.
Following an early afternoon set by violinist Pranav Swaroop, indie pop group Hush Club made the most of the mid afternoon mist. They did their best to win over crowds huddling for shelter under trees and covered walkways while up the street, Dr. Anthony Fauci gave a talk at the BU FitRec center on the heels of his 2024 book, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service. On stage at BU’s so-called “beach,” Hush Club brought extremely coordinated musicianship that made for some of the day’s funkiest tunes. Though the weather was an inappropriately gloomy backdrop for the band’s upbeat pop, some intrepid festival-goers with their own inner sunshine were getting loose in the muddy grass to the band’s set-ending cover of the Zutons-via-Amy Winehouse hit “Valerie.”
The weather finally (briefly) relented for Jaffa-based singer Neta Weiner, who sang charismatically in Hebrew and English. Weiner’s hybrid of Jewish folk and hip-hop found the singer donning an accordion while backed by a band that included electric violin, clarinet and two trumpeters along with guitar, bass, and drums.
Naomi Westwater, an accomplished student of folk, followed as the weather once again took a turn. Their careful acoustic guitar strumming and diaristic lyrics would have made a fitting accompaniment for what was shaping up to be a very cloudy afternoon but a fierce wind off the river threatened to drown them out. In fact, a mesh banner was torn from the stage after Westwater concluded their set.
Festival headliners Beeef took the stage at 5 that afternoon, competing with a conversation with Ira Glass a few blocks west. More nasty wind and stinging rain accompanied the hometown heroes as they soundtracked the dismantling of roughly a dozen vendor tents circling the quad. Still, the sultans of steak were tight as ever. A highlight: single “Something in the River,” Beeef’s messy love song to Boston and the mighty Charles it surrounds played in full view of the (very choppy) waterway behind them.
The lanyard and street fair halves of the event seemed to converge at the festival’s penultimate talk where punk pioneer Kathleen Hanna guested on a live episode of Rachel Martin’s NPR show Wild Card. Hanna told stories of her childhood in Maryland where she would hide in her parents’ attic and make houses for her Barbies while she escaped a tumultuous family life downstairs. Hanna has been a musician longer than she has been a public intellectual, but the publication of her 2024 memoir Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk gave her the latitude to be booked on the Wild Card stage rather than the Street Fair stage. One was certainly a lot drier than the other.