Live music is back in Sacramento. But this is not the ‘hot vax summer’ we were promised

Ruth Cisneros and Adrianna Jarquins were conspicuous at Cal Expo’s Heart Health Park.

The friends were there Aug. 6 for the Summer Sad Festival featuring Emo bands, one of the city’s largest gatherings since the start of the pandemic.

It wasn’t their rose-gold-and-green plaid masks that made them stand out from the crowd. It was the fact that they wore masks at all while they hung around the outskirts of the crowd.

“We wear our masks to make other people feel safe, the way we feel safe when other people wear masks,” Cisneros said, wearing a custom mask made by a friend.

This summer was supposed to be a celebration of the vanquishing of COVID-19. It was supposed to be a maskless, do-as-you-please, “hot vax summer” – a summer with scant talk of social distancing. At the festival, some people sounded reluctant to surrender that dream, leading to a mixed atmosphere: This is a ton of fun but is it OK to be doing this?

Cisneros drove a little under two hours from San Francisco to the event after booking a ticket with Jarquin, a Sacramento friend. Neither had seen their favorite band, All-Low, perform in person before. Cisneros said that when they bought tickets a month ago, the country seemed to be entering the end phase of the pandemic. But last week, with COVID-19 spiking in Sacramento, the lack of masks made the pair uneasy.

“We’ve been wearing masks for most of the pandemic, I don’t see why people can’t do it or are making a big deal out of it now. We’ve been doing this for a year,” Cisneros said.

The 116-by-74-yard soccer field was spacious enough to contain the crowd: a collection of mostly maskless people, many garbed in fishnet stockings and black band T-shirts, with their hair styled pink and chopped, or bleached and pokey like a puffed-up blowfish.

SadFest featured rock bands such as All-Time Low, The Maine and Grayscale. In some ways, it was a normal show: The bands boomed their songs so loud that you had to talk directly into someone’s ear just to be heard. After postponing all its tour dates last year due to the pandemic, the festival debuted in Sacramento before moving out across the biggest cities in the country.

“We’re in the thick of live music,” the leader of Maine, Jon O’ Callaghan, told the cheering crowd from the stage. “We’re back!”

Public health data suggests otherwise. Per a report from the California Department of Public Health, the COVID-19 virus has been amped up by the more contagious delta variant. Sacramento County’s COVID-19 cases quadrupled over July – the seven-day-case rate shooting from 113 to 437 over four weeks, according to the public health tracker. And 84% of those cases were from the delta virus, the Sacramento Bee previously reported.

That didn’t seem to matter at the show. People closer to the field entrance seemingly attempted social distancing by spreading out their blankets on the grass. Closer to the stage, people clustered together, chest-to-back, to get a better glimpse of the performers. Mosh pits formed in the crowd like whirlpools, sweeping fans into a messy circle of sweaty and colliding bodies.

A spokeswoman for the festival said workers were mandated to take precautions against COVID-19 and all staff were required to be vaccinated, with vaccine cards that were checked.

Fans enjoyed more flexibility. The festival released a Q&A and a guideline leading up to the festival that encouraged people to get tested for the coronavirus and vaccinated, but it was not required to attend. The document also asked for non-fully vaccinated people to wear masks.

Laura Sestito rolled out to the festival with two friends from high school to see the bands perform. She found the lack of restrictions freeing, given the frustrating, fluctuating policies of COVID-19 safety protocol over the past year. For Sestito, halting concerts and live events wasn’t the answer to the pandemic – “You’ve got to let people use their own judgments to come out or not.”

“I’m being cautious, of course,” Sestito said, standing a few feet beyond the outskirts of the crowd. “If I don’t feel well, I won’t show up. Like any other hygienic thing. But here, with the live music and no masks, it feels like the first time things are normal.”

Sestito’s attitude and the message from health officials the past few weeks are at odds. California has restarted coronavirus safety restrictions including indoor masking, with few exceptions . Federal health officials are considering reinstating mask mandates for everyone as the delta virus surges.

But with more concerts from top artists expected to come to the city, it seems large events are here to stay.

“Are you happy to be back at the shows?” Grayscale singer Colin Walsh asked the audience.

The crowd’s response: “Hell yeah!”

This story was originally published August 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.