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
