Suwannee Hulaween, which happens every year on the weekend closest to Halloween, is one festival I'd wanted to check out for quite a few years. The Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park & Campground, located in the Florida Panhandle on the Suwannee River, near the town of Live Oak, hosts a number of festivals every year like Brainquility and Suwannee Roots Revival, and I think Hulaween is the biggest one. For years I'd seen friends' Instagram pictures from not only Hulaween but various other festivals at this venue, and I knew I'd have to go there for one of them.
As the world began to come back to life in 2021 after the pandemic-related lockdowns of the year before, it was inevitable I'd again start thinking of going to Hulaween. At some point in the summer, while temporarily living in a Maryland hotel room, I went to their website and found that it was already sold out. Thankfully, I have friends working behind the scenes, one of whom could reserve a GA wristband for me when I forwarded her the money.
And speaking of friends, remember Tomorrowland, when I did that Belgian Journey? There were people I met there who were going to Hulaween, and invited me to camp along with them and their extended family. Already this was shaping up to be the best festival of the year.
Getting There
The Spirit of the Suwannee is in a somewhat out-of-the-way location, and for now I live in a town in eastern New Mexico that's even more out-of-the-way. It would have been more convenient to fly out of Lubbock or Amarillo to Dallas/Fort Worth, and then from there to Jacksonville to catch the shuttle bus, but I wanted to limit this trip to direct flights with no layovers. So first I booked round trip flights between Albuquerque and Atlanta, on Delta using my reward points, and then something I'd never done before, two Greyhound bus trips, one from Atlanta to Lake City, FL and another from there to Jacksonville.
The flight to Atlanta left on Wednesday, October 27, 2021. It should have taken three hours to drive to the Albuquerque airport from Clovis, but thanks to road construction there was a long and aggravating traffic jam on westbound Interstate 40 that very nearly caused me to miss the flight. Thankfully I made it. The flight was itself three hours, and thanks to the crossing of time zone boundaries I skipped ahead in time another two, so it was dark in Atlanta when I landed there. I took an Uber from the airport to my hotel in College Park, the Atlanta suburb where the airport is. I stayed at a Clarion Hotel, which, like the flight, was free of charge thanks to reward points I used.
Early Thursday morning I checked out of the hotel, took another Uber to Atlanta's rather dingy Greyhound station, and boarded the bus which started its long drive south as the sun rose, and as the rain started.
Rain was pouring all morning, not just over Atlanta but over most of Georgia and north Florida. I had to check in with my friends who were already there at Hulaween, and they were getting rained on too. I was a little worried, but all the weather reports were predicting it was going to clear up in the afternoon and there wouldn't be any more rain for the weekend.
The bus spent six hours heading south on I-75 from Atlanta through Macon, Tifton, Valdosta, and after crossing the Florida-Georgia state line, Lake City, Florida where I stepped off. Here I would be boarding another bus which was technically going the wrong way, east to Jacksonville, even though the festival was due west in Live Oak. Catching the Hulaween shuttle bus from the Jacksonville airport was the only way in I knew of.
After getting a cheap sandwich for lunch from a convenience store, I stood around waiting a while outside the Lake City Greyhound station for the second bus to show up. Interestingly, this bus was painted in BoltBus livery, even though the BoltBus company went under at least a year earlier. This bus spent about an hour heading east to Jacksonville on Interstate 10.
Are we there yet? No. Are we there yet? No. Are we THERE YET??? ...No. Hey, at least the rain stopped.
Jacksonville's bus station was noticeably larger, cleaner, and more well-maintained than the dingy, dilapitated shacks of Atlanta and Lake City. I couldn't stay very long, though, since I had to get to the airport, on the northern fringe of the city. I had done some research ahead of time on the local bus system, but once again decided to be lazy and got a ride with Lyft.
I don't regret being lazy and getting the Lyft ride this time. The driver was from Charleston, a city I was planning to visit during the week after the festival, so we got to talk a bit about my upcoming travel plans there.
At the airport I finally felt one step closer to Hulaween. There were a whole bunch of festival-bound travelers waiting there for the shuttle bus. One of them was giving everyone chocolate truffles. He was originally from New York City but had since moved to Colombia where he ran this chocolate truffle business. Real sweet and tasty.
This final bus ride of the day lasted I'm not sure how long, probably an hour and a half or so, as it drove west on I-10, retreading all the ground I'd covered on the second Greyhound from Jacksonville to Lake City and beyond to Live Oak and the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. At the end of the ride, I stepped off the bus thinking I did it, I'm finally here, I made it to Hulaween!
Not so fast! To get into the festival, I first had to claim my wristband from one of the ticket counters, and this took much longer than anyone expected. They didn't have the wristband reserved for me as they should have, and I had to get my friend on the inside who had reserved it on the phone with the people working the booth. Eventually, after the sun had set, and after they found my wristband had already been claimed a day earlier according to records, we finally figured out what happened. She'd reserved two wristbands, one for me and one for someone else. That someone else had shown up the previous night and whoever had been working the booth then mistakenly gave her my wristband.
So you'd think they could just give me the other wristband right then, right? We actually had to track down that other person, who the wristband was actually reserved for, and take a picture of her driver's license--I guess that's just to be proof that she was in the festival and we wouldn't be locking anyone out by giving me the wristband. After showing the ticket counter people the picture of the license, they finally gave me the long-awaited Hulaween GA wristband and I could walk right in. Checking the time on my phone, I saw that exactly two hours had passed since I'd stepped off the shuttle bus.
Alright, we're finally in, let's Hula!
The Venue
The vast expanse of camping areas was maze-like. Of course, all festivals' camping areas seem that way when you first get there. The people I was camping with sent me a video showing me how to get to their campsite. I'd never have found the campsite without that video, though since the sun had already set and the video was made during the daytime, it was a little difficult following the directions. The campsite was behind a place called the drum circle, which was something of an outdoor mini-theater with a few rows of wooden benches in a semicircle; we'll return to this place later.
There was also a somewhat famous bat house in the middle of the camping area. That is, it was a small shack high up on stilts which was used as a habitat for bats. Throughout the weekend I heard things about it but I never saw any of the bats flying in or out of it.
I should also mention that the camping area had, like most other festivals' camping areas, a shower trailer. Unlike the showers I used at other camping festivals, this one was worthless. The one time I used it, I must have waited in line for something like 45 minutes, hardly any water trickled out of the showerhead, and that water was ice cold.
There was also a well-stocked convenience store called the Country Store. Did you forget to bring a towel? Need some more beer to take back to camp? Want some Spirit of the Suwannee souvenirs, like a coffee mug? Get it all here.
All along the walls, near the ceiling, of the Country Store were tracks on which sat various model trains. This one I had to take a picture of, because it looks like one of the earlier, '90s generation of German high-speed ICE passenger trains. Nice callback to a recent era of my life that I still miss. For some reason this model is painted "LCE" instead of "ICE"; I think that's just the name of the company that made the model.
And then of course we have to talk about Spirit Lake. This was not only the titular lake, but the area around it which was full of art installations and various other attractions.
One place I didn't spend enough time at was the Frick Frack Blackjack casino. Frick Frack is a staple of festivals like this one. Here you can play blackjack, but you're not playing for money, you're gambling away objects you don't mind giving away. Most people gamble with old junk and knick-knacks they find buried in their closets, the hokier the better. All over the walls you can see items that past players have lost there, like old childhood trophies, which the owners thought were worthy of being shown off.
There was also this place, called "House of Lost Plague Church."
It's hard to tell from back here, but all along the walls up front one can see the remains of keyboards taken from junked pianos. The church occasionally hosted DJs at night; we'll return to this later.
Throughout the Spirit Lake area you can find fantastic figures such as these:
They were created by an artist named Paul Kuhn, whose creations can also be found at Electric Forest and elsewhere.
There's also Incendia; this collective appears at various festivals setting up a dancefloor under a flaming dome. Since it had a full sound system set up, it hosted quite a few DJs including some of the same artists that played sets at the festival's official stages.
Speaking of flames, we can't forget about Uncle Charlie's Red Hot Cock...
It's a seesaw. Two people sit on opposite ends and if they rock it hard enough, flame shoots out the beak.
The most amazing part of Spirit Lake was the lake itself. Getting a good photo of it was tough, which is probably why I don't have one. There were so many laser light projectors which formed the most impressive laser light holograms over the lake all night, every night.
I remarked to people I was camping with that the atmosphere here really reminded me of Electric Forest, and specifically that Spirit Lake was quite similar to Sherwood Forest. They said that was no coincidence, because the String Cheese Incident started up both festivals.
Finally, there were five official stages in the festival. The Meadow and the Hallows were the two big ones, across from each other in a huge open field. The Amphitheatre was just that, in a more forested part of the grounds. Spirit Lake and Campground were both in the Spirit Lake area. There was also an unofficial sixth stage, the aforementioned Incendia, which was also in the Spirit Lake area and included a dance floor under a flaming dome, which didn't have any posted schedules, and occasionally hosted unannounced sets from festival artists like Skrillex and Claude VonStroke.
Long view of the Meadow, early on Friday afternoon. That's the stage where the String Cheese Incident always played. The other big stage, the Hallows, is behind me and to my right. Notice where the big HULA lettering is on the left...
This was taken from right in front of that big HULA, looking back at the Hallows where a band called Jungle is playing Sunday night.
The Music
Hulaween was certainly the most musically diverse camping festival I've ever experienced. While Electric Forest was mostly a rave with some jam bands, funk, and others, Hulaween was more balanced, roughly equal parts rave, jam, funk, soul, and other genres. Just like at Forest, the String Cheese Incident played their multiple "incidents," two on Friday, three on Saturday, and one on Sunday. There were other jam bands playing as well, including Umphrey's McGee and My Morning Jacket. Bringing the funk were Lettuce, Funk You, and SunSquabi. Durand Jones & the Indications as well as Leon Bridges added some R&B-soul sounds. As for electronica, most of that entire spectrum was represented, from LSDream to Chris Lake and Claude VonStroke to Skrillex to Mersiv. And then there was Khruangbin, who I don't think really fit any kind of label at all.
Thursday
Thanks to my delayed arrival caused by the wristband mixup, I only saw part of one set on Thursday, which was Zeds Dead at the Hallows.
Friday
After a few hours of sipping beer and walking around Spirit Lake, the first music I experienced this day was Daily Bread at the Amphitheatre.
Just what genre is Daily Bread, anyway? I've always had a hard time figuring out genre labels. This sounds like...chill...trap...electro...-hop? I'm just throwing shit at the wall there; maybe you can listen for yourself and come up with something better.
As the sun set Friday evening, The String Cheese Incident played their second and last set of the day at the Meadow. They weren't totally unfamiliar to me; I'd already seen them once before at Electric Forest 2018 and listened to them occasionally since then, but it was here that something finally clicked in my mind and I really "got" this jam band excellence. I loved this set, but there would be a much more memorable incident the next night.
Next up over at the Amphitheatre was another long-running institution I'd hitherto somehow never heard of: Lettuce. All my friends loved this band but up to that point I'd had no idea they even existed. Better late than never! Lettuce is an awesome funk band that showed off some incredible musicianship for the hour and a half they were on the stage. The whole set is available on YouTube now.
(So, that's Bread, Cheese, and Lettuce. Usually I'd put a little more on my sandwich, but that'll do.)
The next day I looked up Lettuce on Wikipedia, during one of those rare moments when I got a cell phone signal. The band's been together since all the way back in 1992, and released their first album in 2002. Still can't believe I'd never heard of them. Even more shocking, weeks later at home I put on my Euphoria 2016 shirt, but first took a glance at the lineup on the back, and was stunned to find both Lettuce and Daily Bread had played that festival, going wholly unnoticed by me at that time.
After Lettuce, I split from the group I was with to go find my other fest fam, the one I went to Euphoria and Middlelands with, that is, the few of them that were at this festival. They actually worked there and had just finished off whatever shifts they were on, and then snuck me into the VIP area which was to the right of the Meadow.
View from the VIP area. Off to the left of this photo you can see the Hallows.
From that point we saw most of Chris Lake's set, who was over at the Hallows, a little farther away from the VIP area. I'd seen Chris Lake less than a month earlier at ACL. The set here at Hulaween was nearly the same and just as good.
Right after Chris Lake we had to zip across the crowd to get to the left of the Meadow stage, for some reason I've long since forgotten. We probably stepped on more than a few toes in the process...sorry if any of those toes was yours. We stopped at a point that was to the left of the big crowd now assembled at the Meadow, right in front of the huge letters spelling out HULA.
Headlining the Meadow on Friday night was Skrillex. I'd seen Skrillex once before back in 2012, in the superclub Amnesia on the Spanish island Ibiza. Back then he was riding high on the dubstep wave of those days, though I'd say his music goes beyond that label. That set, nine years earlier, had covered all the tracks from the EPs he'd released back then, such as "Bangarang," "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites," and "My Name is Skrillex," mixed in with music from contemporaries like Flux Pavilion. After almost a decade, he had a lot more of his own material to go through at Hulaween in 2021, so there was all the stuff from the early 2010s, the 2015 collaborations with Diplo released under the Jack Ü name ("Take Ü There," "Where Are Ü Now," and "To Ü"), and more recent songs like "Would You Ever," "Mumbai Power," and "In da Getto."
Something I'll never forget about Skrillex's set was someone in the crowd who was close to where I was. I never caught a glimpse of him, but every time there was any kind of bass drop, he would growl, "DURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!" Every time this happened I almost fell over laughing.
Saturday
After spending the afternoon bouncing around between various stages, the Spirit Lake art installations, and the campsite, I took in some more jam band excellence from Cheese, during the second of their three incidents that day at the Meadow. While Cheese took their break between sets, Durand Jones & The Indications brought their soulful sounds to the nearby Hallows.
Durand Jones & The Indications
That evening I had thought about seeing LP Giobbi at the Amphitheatre, since I'd enjoyed her set at ACL earlier that month, but I'd heard so much about what the String Cheese Incident always does during their last Saturday night set, I decided to stick around for that. Now, I have to wonder why they scheduled anyone else during that time slot.
The last Cheese set on Saturday night at every Hulaween has always been a slew of cover songs, always with a different theme every year. The theme is always announced ahead of time, but the band has been known to unexpectedly change their theme at the last minute. That's exactly what happened this time. The theme this year was supposed to be "monsters," presumably including songs like "Monster Mash." Fittingly the stage was decorated with stuff like tentacles and giant eyeballs. But as soon as the band took the stage, they told us "this year's been scary enough, so we're just gonna play songs about dancing." And so, "dancing" was the new theme for this set, which included tunes like ABBA "Dancing Queen," KC & The Sunshine Band "I'm Your Boogie Man," A Taste of Honey "Boogie Oogie Oogie," the Bee Gees "You Should Be Dancing," Tones and I "Dance Monkey," Lady Gaga "Just Dance," and such. And then about a little more than halfway through...
These two huge inflatable monsters, a Chinese dragon and Godzilla, appeared. The people holding them from the ground slowly pulled them around the edges of the crowd.
The end of the set had to be the most memorable moment of the whole festival. After Gozdilla and the dragon made their exit, Cheese played their last song of the night, Elton John's "Tiny Dancer." This was the climactic moment of this whole day. It was during the song's final chorus that the fireworks went off, creating an unforgettable moment that, for most of us in attendance, is still the first thing we think of when we think of Hulaween 2021.
When Cheese stepped off the stage, the night wasn't even close to over. Leon Bridges, a soul singer I'd listened to a little bit, started up his set on the Hallows stage. My friends and I didn't stay around too long, though. We went over to Spirit Lake to marvel at the laser-light holograms over the lake for a while, and when an artist I'd wanted to see, Claude VonStroke, took over the Spirit Lake stage.
Claude VonStroke has been in the house music game since the early 2000s and owns the label Dirtybird Records, yet somehow I only found out about him much more recently, while I was living in Germany. During the pandemic lockdown months, he did several livestreamed sets on YouTube called "Stroke Streams" which I listened to quite a bit through 2020 and 2021. The set here at Hulaween was even better than any of those. If you want a great house music set, you can't do much better than 90 minutes of Claude VonStroke.
There wasn't much music left on Saturday night, at least, not officially. Incendia featured someone playing a DnB set, and this was followed by Claude VonStroke, under his real name Barclay Crenshaw, playing a set that was different from his usual stuff.
Sunday
There weren't too many artists I wanted to see on Sunday, so I just kind of bounced around.
This was, I believe, Lamorn at the Amphitheatre stage.
Back to the Meadow for String Cheese's last Incident.
Eventually I found my way to Spirit Lake and the House of Lost Plague Church. It turns out this place was hosting DJ sets. I really liked what I heard here. It sounded like '70s-'80s soul music but remixed with a slightly more modern sound. Some of these songs I tried Shazamming--that is, because of the lack of cell service, I took short videos with my phone, played them at home weeks later, and Shazammed those--but the only ones that returned any results were Marvin Gaye "Sanctified Lady" and Apollo Heights "Revierie (Max Essa Mix)."
One of the last artists up on Sunday night, the last one on the Meadow stage, was Khruangbin. I'm not sure if they even fit into a genre at all. What I experienced from their set, which wasn't the whole thing, was nothing but a whole slew of covers which, interestingly, had no vocals. It was all instrumental versions with no words. This included just about everything under the sun from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" to the X-Files theme song to Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Jump On It" to Crystal Waters' "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)." Unexpected and memorable.
There were also plenty of renegade sets in the camping areas, where people who brought their own sound systems set up their own stages by their campsites. Definitely the most memorable of these was the one that was set up very close to where I was camped, at the Drum Circle. Like I mentioned before the Drum Circle was an outdoor theater with a projection screen, surrounded by several rows of benches in a semicircle. Sunday night, there was a DJ playing here, the screen was displaying laser light visuals, and the whole surrounding area became a dancefloor. So many people showed up for this set that the crowd extended out into the unpaved street.
Food and Drink
As expected, there was quite a diverse array of food stands throughout the festival. Most were near the two big stages, the Meadow and the Hallows. There were also a few back in the camping area. When I first made it into the festival, after the two hours waiting to get the wristband issue worked out, I was incredibly hungry and for dinner had some samosas from an Indian food stand.
There were at least two places there selling pizza by the slice. One of these is what I got for lunch on Friday. For dinner that day I had a tofu wrap from a stand near the Hallows. As I was enjoying this, I had an interesting idea: I would temporarily become a vegetarian on Saturday, and then a vegan for Sunday. With the wide variety of food options available, this wouldn't be too difficult.
So on Saturday I had some kind of vegetable burrito for breakfast and a black bean burger for a mid-afternoon lunch/dinner. Any dairy products I had were most likely in the coffee that day. Then on Sunday, which was supposed to be the vegan day, breakfast was likely another vegetable burrito, lunch was fritters from that Indian food stand...and then I totally ruined the whole experiment by getting Korean grilled chicken for dinner.
There was also a food stand near the camping areas called The Grilled Cheese Incident, probably the only food place I can remember by name. It looked delicious, though I never got around to getting anything there.
There were more than a few places to get some good coffee there, offering the usual array of coffee-bar choices: drip coffee, latte, Americano, cappuccino, mocha, various blended drinks, and such. One even had an "all-nighter" which I can't remember exactly but I think was made with at least two shots of espresso. Finally I also regularly consumed some delicious fruit smoothies at a couple of these stands, since this was my only way of getting any fresh fruit here.
As for the beer, the selection was a little more diverse than at most other festivals. Not only was there the obligatory Bud Light, but they also had Yuengling (which I probably drank more than anything else), Goose Island IPA, Stella Artois, and two or three others I didn't recognize, I think IPAs. Not only was there beer but, since Florida is apparently not as restrictive as Texas, there were bars serving cocktails as well.
Everything Else that Stands Out
The weather was pleasant during the day but got extremely chilly at night. This may be the Deep South, but it's still in the middle of fall. If you go to Hulaween, you can dress for summer during the daytime but you'll probably have to bundle up at night.
There was hardly any cell phone service at this place. Like any other festival, there's a Hulaween app you can install on your phone, but inside the festival it's almost useless because of the lack of signal. You can get a schedule and map on paper, and I got one of those and used it far more often than the app.
Looking at that printed program, there's a lot of other stuff I missed out on. At one place called Oasis Workshop, there were a number of activities such as yoga, ecstatic dance, and workshops such as "Native Plants and You" and "Science of Imagination."
Much like in Electric Forest where everyone says "Happy Forest" to each other, at Hulaween everyone says "Happy Hula."
Final Thoughts
This was my favorite festival of 2021. Electric Zoo was too much of a college party, ACL was great but still not the same immersive experience as a camping festival, and then Hulaween just did everything right. The music lineup which got me listening to more jam and funk bands, the art and everything in Spirit Lake, camping with friends, the renegade DJ sets...this felt like my real return to the fest life. This year, in 2022, I can't make it back, but I'm not ruling it out for 2023.
After Hulaween, another longer adventure awaited. Over the following week, I would be touring the historic cities of Savannah and Charleston.
