High-Five Your Neighbor

The sold-out Belly Up show saw a front-row throng of doe-eyed hippy chicks in tangled hair casting quixotic glances at Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros singer Alex Ebert while eight other performers sing and play along. The distinctly barefoot sound is straight out of a different era (the Summer of Love comes to a head in rural Minnesota), stirring nostalgia for a post-utopian farm life which most of us have never lived.

Nora Kirkpatrick swirls hips behind a keyboard in cool, patient gyrations of bottomless feminine vitality. Jade Castrinos sits cross-legged on the stage in white dress, singing salvation, desert visions, and love. The music is a heady wine, invoking visions of its own, an American Daisychain Daydream, revised: cornpone freedom, a cavalier messiah, the benevolent highway, eternal dusk.

"Everybody high-five your neighbor," Ebert says.

He invites everyone on stage for the last song, so maybe 30 of us pile into each other's laps, smiling and chatting like old friends. After the show, as if to exemplify the archetypal death of the Dream, it is announced that someone has stolen a musical shaker. It only takes one ass to spoil the party for everybody. This anti-rebellion of vibrant youth.

• Concert: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
• Date: April 15
• Venue: Belly Up Tavern
• Seats: standing front row, on stage