Les Claypool to lead dazzling line-up of musicians at SalmonAid Festival: 2-Day Celebration to highlight unique value of wild Pacific salmon
By Dan Bacher
May 19, 2008. Oakland, CA – Bay Area alternative rock royalty and Primus front-man Les Claypool, whose thumping bass lines and unique worldview have become the calling cards for a number of wildly successful and influential albums in the last two decades, will lead a diverse roster of twenty bands on two live outdoor stages at Oakland’s 2008 SalmonAid Festival. Claypool, The Zydeco Flames, Stacy Kray, Sizemo, Saul Kaye, Captain Zohar, Tia Carroll, Manaleo, Captain Mike & The Sea Kings, Asheba, John Craigie, The Bobby Young Project, Eliyahu & Qadim, and other performing artists promise to provide loads of fun when they join West Coast fishermen, tribes, restaurateurs and conservationists on May 31 and June 1 in Oakland’s Jack London Square to celebrate wild Pacific salmon.
The purpose of the free and family-friendly, two-day event is to highlight the urgent need to protect the river habitats of these iconic fish. SalmonAid will feature top music acts, educational forums, children’s activities, speakers and a chance for the public to enjoy wild caught salmon served by some of the West Coast’s finest restaurants.
“Pacific salmon is an icon and inspiration for a lot of us the West Coast, and it’s one of my favorite foods,” said Claypool, who regularly sport fishes for salmon off the northern California coast. “But today we’re in danger of losing this incredible fish. The bands at SalmonAid are playing to help ensure that wild Pacific salmon will always be around, and to help protect the rivers where salmon live.”
West Coast restaurants, including Fish. in Sausalito, CA, The Basin in Saratoga, CA, Flea Street Café in Menlo Park, CA, and Local Ocean Seafoods in Newport, OR, are also banding together for the festival. Due to the total closure of the 2008 ocean salmon season from the Mexican border to the Oregon-Washington line, Alaskan commercial fishermen will be donating the wild salmon served at the festival.
In recent years, salmon fishing has be closed or significantly limited along most of the West Coast because fish populations from three of the most productive salmon watersheds in the world – the Sacramento, the Columbia-Snake, and the Klamath river basins – are collapsing. The problem is not overfishing. Out-dated dams, runaway water diversions, and government inaction are taking a lethal toll on wild salmon. The grim result are some of the most sweeping fishing closures in West Coast history, costing the region’s economy hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of family-wage jobs.
Federal judges have been forced to become involved in managing all three rivers because the federal government, which operates dams and water diversion projects on all three rivers, repeatedly produces inadequate salmon protection plans and refuses to follow the science that says wild salmon need cold, free-flowing rivers and streams to thrive. When salmon habitat disappears, so do the wild salmon.
Despite the bad news of recent years, the festival’s goal is to highlight the economic, cultural, and culinary value of salmon.
At a rally on Sunday, June 1, SalmonAid participants will call on Congress to help ensure the future of healthy populations of wild salmon and the rivers upon which they depend.
To learn more about the musicians playing at SalmonAid, visit www.salmonaid.org
