July 10th, 2009
Sach O likes Brooklyn band! Alert the Press!
Are Chin Chin the best contemporary funk band on the circuit today? In a scene so amorphous as to run from indie darlings Hercules and Love Affair to Meters revivalists Baby Charles to Wu-Tang disciples the El Michels Affair, it’s hard to make a definitive claim, but last night Def Jux’ best kept secret made a strong run at the title over the course of their two outdoor sets at the Montreal Jazz fest.
Unleashing a wilder, rawer version of the smooth-R&B that kept their under the radar debut buzzing, the band may have done the impossible by updating post-disco funk without falling victim to cheesy jokes or bookish recreation. Opening their second set with a cacophonous psychedelic intro and proving that noisy psychedelia is no excuse for indie bands unable to play their instruments, Chin Chin progressively grabbed the ears, feet and hearts of the 1000+ outdoor mob and didn’t let them go until their time was up. To put it in perspective: it’s one thing to rock a crowd that came to see you and its another to make a few converts out of a receptive audience, but shutting down the MTL jazz fest from a small stage and inciting full on crowd participation and dancing? THAT’S showmanship.
Front-man Wilder Zoby brought his A-game, commanding the crowd with an energy and charisma belying his clean cut hairdo and pink shirt and his onstage antics from humping the stage to absolutely killing the talk-box made even the unfunkiest of festival goers take notice. By the end of the set, damn near the entire street was dancing leaving those who stayed for the late show, sweaty, satisfied and remembering their name. Two things are for sure: they’re worth every penny live and if ever I fall into some cash I’m roping these guys to play my wedding.
Chin Chin - Dontchusee
Posted in Sach O, Festivals | No Comments »
July 8th, 2009
Now in its 30th year, the Montreal Jazz Fest is only tangentially about Jazz or even music. As the city’s biggest annual event, the amount of tourist dollars riding on the event is enough to record Blue Note sides from now until infinity and the lineup is accordingly focus grouped and carefully weighed so as not to ruffle any feathers. Although the indoor shows tend to deliver enough adventurous material to keep open minded enthusiasts emptying their bank accounts (with names like The Bug, King Sunny Ade, Femi Kuti, Burning Spear and the Orb - none of which this blogger could afford to check out), the free outdoor events tend towards milquetoast world music or boomer superstars whose fan bases swarm the venue turning what should be a bargain deal into a nightmarish experience justifying the usual 100$ ticket price.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Sach O, Festivals | 5 Comments »
April 21st, 2009
Slowly, my brain is slinking its way towards sensible shape. Three days of Coachella are not for the faint of heart–if nothing else it requires a quarter-ounce of weed, an array of narcotic edibles from potcorn to cannabis cakes, several brightly colored pills of indiscriminate origin, copious spending money for wine, water, and whiskey, plus the heart of a three year-old Labrador to handle the strain. I’m not entirely ready to cop to that cliche, but had you seen the couple doing a hipstork mating call outside of Gang Gang Dance on Saturday night, you’d understand. It looked like a great fucking time.
So who am I to knock Coachella–it puts you in a position to win, and that’s all you can really ask of a coach or a festival. Even if the Clipse cancelled at the last second, that’s the brothers Thorton’s bad. Abandoning throngs of people waiting for Pitchfork approved trap-rap is an unwise move. Is Lupe Fiasco supposed to provide the kids with minimalist nihilism? Or maybe Clipse know that no matter how many new bad puns they devise involving the word, “brick,” they can’t match the freak show promised by Throbbing Gristle. After all, lead singer Genesis P-Orridge wears gold grills. She used to be a he. He once nailed piercings through his dick. That’s either the most incredibly hard core gesture possible, or the dumbest. Either way, Genesis is a better rapper than Paul Wall.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Festivals | 4 Comments »
April 19th, 2009
As I wriggled out of the teeming crowd that clotted for M.I.A, I eavesdropped on the Spalding basketball-bronzed sorority sisters speaking behind me: “If I was like a dude, I would totally want to do M.I.A.” Personally, M.I.A. doesn’t really do it for me, but I get where they’re coming from. After all, I’ve long suspected that at least a modicum of the unchecked praise tossed her way stems from the fact that hundreds of thousands of her fans, “totally want to do [her].” Big deal. “Pop star’s success aided by looks,” is a story so spavined that it could only be broken by the Onion.
But–of course–there’s more to Maya Arulpragasam than just looks. Her back-story was Slumdog Millionaire before it was a glint in Danny Boyle’s eye. Between the radical politics, the day-glo clothing, and a savvy iconography befitting a former visual artist, she’s emerged as the first true pan-global pop star–the type to send writers to their keyboards binding the viral nature of “bird flu” to the viral nature of the Internet. Like the faces of the overly tanned acolytes standing behind me: it’s a slam dunk. Critics love nothing better than a good narrative, and let’s not kid ourselves that globetrotting, caps lock-impaired, Tamil Tigress isn’t a whole lot more interesting than Katy Perry–or god forbid, Lady Gaga.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Festivals | 8 Comments »
April 18th, 2009
Bret Easton Ellis once pointed out that the inhabitants of Los Angeles never stop babbling about the freeways. Then again, he penned, Less than Zero during the comparatively halcyon Tom Bradley days, prior to the total arteriosclerosis of the 405 and 101. Nowadays, surviving requires a serenity towards the iron inferno of rush hour. Consider Coachella a proxy for the city itself–if you’re going to survive, you have to channel your inner Gautama towards the terrible, tortuous lines. Waits for everything: the asphyxiating grind down Jefferson to park, lines to pick up your press ticket, lines to enter the actual festival grounds, lines hoovered in the bathrooms of the VIP section. It makes sense–this shit’s held at the Empire Polo Grounds: do as the livestock do, learn to queue.
If you can accept this basic reality, the festival continually lives up to its reputation. Three days in the desert, a backdrop of swaying palm trees and chocolate cake mountains, and every diletantish Angeleno trekking east to partake in a bit of cultural tourism. Thankfully, there’s a VIP section to contain the anti-rabble, ostensibly to provide them with cleaner bathrooms, shorter lines, and a place to wear their fedoras unmolested. But really, the place is a Twilight Zone-type netherworld–the clubs of Los Angeles turned inside out and dropped in the middle of the Mojave.
I’ve made this analogy once before, but after sunset, the VIP section turns into a terrifying place, undercut by a river of foul pink slime oozing beneath the verdant sprawl. Think the hermetic bubble that covers the New York City museum of art in Ghostbusters II. Raw uncut malevolence, Carpathians, people launching bolts of lightning from their eyes. I think I saw Vigo there. He was wearing a pair of $1,000 sunglasses, his lank hair worn in a windswept comb-over, leering at 19 year-old girls in floral print vspring dresses. To get even triter, the place was one big pose, except no one knew that the cameras were off. But who am I kidding? I like clean bathrooms as much as the next neurotic.
The Bug ft. Warrior Queen
Predictably, I’ve squandered most of the day shaking the idolatry (Moz, McCartney, Cohen, oh my), and cobwebs out of my head. This is what I get for devouring a weed twinkie based on the tenuous assumption that Paul would want it this way. Those things will get to you–you think they won’t–but after about an hour or two, you become convinced that you’ve been scammed and your need to beat a hasty retreat to the Cannibis Club and harangue them for the the $15 you wasted on the edible. The next thing, you know it’s midnight, your limbs are unnaturally frozen, and you’re convinced you’re watching a Madame Tussaud’s wax statue singing “Hey Jude.”
So I’m going to be brief here, offering sincere apologies for the scarcity of content. Leonard Cohen, Moz, People Under the Stairs, and the Hold Steady were all marvelous, but nothing touched The Bug ft. Warrior Queen. We’re going to have to forget about the Bug, I wrote about him here, and hopefully it described his mien. Those raucous dance-hall dub-step beats sounded insane live–bass barreling out of the live speakers like a baby at nine months trying to kick his way of his mother’s womb. Drums like tocsins-exploding with nuclear brissance.
But Warrior Queen. Let’s just start with the nomenclature. The woman is in fact a warrior queen–Hippolyta if she’d been born Jamaican, an Amazonian built like gibralter, with a corona of caramel-colored hair, and a practically incomprehensible patois. In a black jacket, fishnet stalkings and dominatrix boots, the women essentially made it so that no one will ever be able to speak about Peaches or Lil Kim without using the word “fraud.” She doesn’t use sex as a weapon, she uses it as an extension of her idea of ecstasy, humping the speakers, herself, the audience’s imagination. Think Sharon Jones but far raunchier, a dervish whose stage presence couldn’t be captured by the best writer, let alone a hastily written first draft.
Penultimate song, “Poison Dart,” brought the climax. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that sort of pandemonium in my life. The show was scarcely attended–maybe only a few hundred people. To think that Bright Eyes was going on at the same time was too much for my fragile skull to handle. Because Warrior Queen warped out of a different galaxy. I’d try to compare her to other dancehall artists, but let’s be real, my knowledge is limited to Mad Cobra, Shabba Ranks, Buju Banton, Sizzla, and the remaining flotsam and jetsam that guested on mid-9os dance tracks. After it was all over, they turned the lights on. Everyone shuffled out with an embarrassed but sated gait, as though they’d just had sex, and their eyes were awkwardly adjusting to the bright lemon light. The only way Karen O has a chance of topping this tomorrow night, is if she hires Ditta Von Teese, several midgets, a crate of dry ice, and a vat of silly putty.
Posted in Festivals | 1 Comment »
August 25th, 2008
Ted DiBiase knows a winner when he sees one. That’s how he earned the nickname “The Million Dollar Man” when those Cash Money clowns were still learning to ice their first teeth. And rest assured, Teddy B. would’ve inevitably proclaimed Day 3 of Outside Lands, the winner of the match, even if he would’ve declared it from inside the VIP area, a Johnnie Walker Black in his hand and several lovely ladies draped across his arms.
It wasn’t only about the music, though any time you can see Toots & The Maytals, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings, Little Brother and Wilco, back-to-back-to-back-to-back (in the back of the ack), you’re entering that sort of rarefied air where the only way to top it is to start throwing out dream scenarios. Like yeah, it could’ve been better if Jay-Z was backed by the Wailers and started making it rain with $1,000 bills and I grabbed one and then Ray Charles was resurrected and started flying around in a cape whilst singing “Georgia on My Mind.” For the most part, if you didn’t find something to like yesterday, your best bet is to become a Quaker, or a Shaker, if oatmeal isn’t your preferred breakfast.
Indeed, after two days of miserable, melancholy San Francisco gloom casting a pall over Outside Lands, the Sun finally started to dance right around the time that Sharon Jones took the stage, as though it was seemingly impossible not to sway to the Dap-Kings dazzling rhythms. But even before Jones and Co. came on, it was tough not to love the preceding set from legendary roots reggae outfit, Toots & the Maytals, led by the seemingly ageless, 62-year old, Frederick “Toots” Hibbert. Clad in a sleeveless black and rasta-colored leather vest and black pants, backed by three guitarists, two singers, a keyboardist and a drummer, Toots was catnip for the hippie-slanting audience, causing the predominantly Caucasian crowd to start shaking and shimmying with a off-beat series of moves best described as the “Help, I’m On Fire” shuffle. Really, that bad. But Toots was not as the set-list hewed closely to the band’s greatest hits, including ”Pressure Drop,” “Reggae Got Soul,” and “54-46,” which the crowd likely best knew via the Sublime cover, “5446 That’s My Number/Ball and Chain.”
Sharon Jones: Ain’t Nothing Wrong With That
Photo via Crowdfire
But legendary reggae artists included, when it comes to the art of live performance nobody in music can fuck with Sharon Jones right now. Maybe Erykah Badu. Maybe Jack White or Jim James. Maybe some other people I can’t think of at the moment, but really, there just isn’t any amount of hyperbole that could oversell how great Jones is on-stage. The Daptones’ neo-soul backing helps, sure. They’re razor-sharp, their horns precise and warm, their timing as fluid as the second hand on a Rolex. But Jones seemingly comes from another dimension, where the only comparisons seem to be people you weren’t old enough to have seen: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin in her prime.
Part of it is the voice, ostensibly so bottom-less than you could hear it at the other end of the world. Another part is her graceful dance moves, a spontaneous, limb-flying flurry of shoulder shakes, jazzy jukes, slick shuffles, wild arm gestures, toe-taps and something she calls her “Tina Turner Strut.” Did I mention she does this all in high heels? More than anything, it’s the sense of fun and celebration that Jones creates. At one point, she brought a guy out from back-stage who’d been trying to flirt with her and sang “Be Easy” to him, as a helpful minder on how to boost his game. At another, she summoned a goofball college kid in a buttoned up dress shirt out of the crowd to dance with her. It made for the day’s comic relief, with his stiff spasms so awkward that he seemed perpetually 10 seconds away from “rolling the dice.” Every time, I see Sharon Jones at one of these festivals, it seems like she emerges as one of the clear-cut highlights of the weekend. The woman has more swagger than 1,000 gun-toting rappers and if you haven’t seen her yet, I highly suggest that you bump her up in your shows-to-catch queue. It’s enough to make that old agage about ”they don’t make them like they used to” seem completely false.
The next act was Little Brother, who did a commendable job in filling in the gap between the high water marks of the weekend: Jones and Wilco. The North Carolina-based duo get a lot of flak in certain quarters for being a little derivative and a little dull. On album, the complaints sometimes ring true. I like all three of their records, but rarely find myself going back to them. At times, they can also sound preachy and the decision to part ways with 9th Wonder was probably a good one, as his Fruity Loops-soul was starting to get repetitive. But when you see these guys in person, it’s pretty hard not to root for them.
Little Brother: Not Actually so Little in Person
Thing is, Phonte and Big Pooh do all the little things right. They’re passionate on-stage, bounding from one end to the other, constantly striving to stir the crowd. They don’t rely on hackneyed hip-hop cliches (i.e. Which side of the crowd is louder, when I say hip, y’all say hop,” etc. etc.) They’re well-rehearsed, both rapper’s chiming in with ad-libs at the right times. Plus, the fact that they love what they’re doing comes across in their humble but confident demeanor. In addition to cuts from The Listening, The Minstrel Show and Getback, Phonte and Big Pooh also rhymed over a variety of instrumentals including Prodigy’s “Keep It Thoro,” Lil Kim’s, “Crush on You” Outkast’s “Rosa Park’s” and Mobb Deep’s “Trife Life.” It was a fun 40-minute set that validated the Okayplayer set’s high appraisal of these guys. Even if they may never stack up to their canonized influences, there’s little doubt in my mind that Little Brother are one of the best rap groups to emerge during this decade.
Finally, Wilco, a band often called the American Radiohead, took the Twin Peaks stage to close out the festival two days after its British peer effectively kicked things off. (Jack Johnson was officially Sunday night’s headliner, but in the words of Gob Bluth, “C’mon.”) Placed in an (probably) inadvertant but direct contrast with Radiohead, Wilco more than aquitted themselves. Playing the “Who’s better Wilco or Radiohead” game is like doing the “Beatles or Stones” thing. Both bands are great and saying one is better than the other is pretty much retarded. Who cares? We’re lucky to have both. Yet if forced to pick between them, I’d always opt for Wilco, whose performace Sunday night was one of the best I’ve seen from the band.
In their Kicking Television incarnation, Wilco are practically a super-group and at any given moment, they can slide into the world-crushing Harlem Globetrotters thing, where Nels Cline makes funny faces and wanks off on 28 minute guitar solos and the band locks into their “aren’t we all amazing” jam sessions and you have to agree, even if you’re looking at your watch and wondering when all this overwhelming virtuousity is going to end. But last night, the band delivered a beautifully, understated performance. Tweedy, clad in a black-shirt, black shades and jeans came out on the acoustic guitar, with a simple steel pedal buffering the mellow, country-folk of “Remember the Mountain Bed” from Mermaid Avenue Volume II.
Who’s The Champion?
Photo via ppparasol
By song two, “You Are My Face,” the band started to press its foot lightly on the gas, with Cline delivering pin-point guitar licks and the band seemingly feeding off the laid-back but excitable crowd and the warm white sun setting slowly in the West. The highlight of the set came early, during “Spiders (Kidsmoke), usually a linchpin of the latter half of Wilco performances, but with only an hour and fifteen minutes allotted, the hypnotic Krautrock-infused jam was deployed early and with maximum effect. Particularly animated, mid-way through the dozen minute-song, Tweedy began clapping his hands and addressing the crowd.
“San Francisco. This is the home of the best concert goers on the planet. I know you guys can clap your hands….Even if you hate Wilco, it’s okay, I know you know how to keep rhythm.”
In turn, a sea of hands started keeping time and the band descended further into the jam, seamless in their transitions, effortless but never condescendingly winking at the audience. During “Hummingbird” Tweedy dashed around the stage with the youthful joy of a small child. On “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” he conjured the opposite emotion, making a very well-known song played in front of a massive audience sound incredibly personal and vulnerable, especially surrounded by the cracking tape loops and glitchy static. As for “Jesus Etc.,” it was pretty much miraculous, yielding the sort of transcendence you really only get from the truly great songwriters. Sure, Sky Blue Sky might’ve been a little staid compared to Summerteeth, A Ghost is Born and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but even the Million Dollar Man would be hard-pressed to buy a better band than Wilco.
Posted in Festivals | 9 Comments »
August 24th, 2008
The crowd was older and tamer yesterday. No wholesale destruction of chain link fences, no claustrophobic clusterfucks trying to get across the endless expanse of festival ground, no scofflaws streaming into the VIP section to taunt the fools that squandered $700 a ticket for nicer bathrooms and a slightly more refined environment in which to purchase over-priced wine and beer. No, things seemed to run smoothly after that initial shell-shock of day one, with its chaotic tenor and reports of public transportation meltdowns for those who stayed to the bitter end.
Outside Lands is about as far as you can get from the hippy spring break of Bonnaroo, whose Superfly promoters this event shares. Camping isn’t even allowed. Instead, there’s a “Wine Haven” tent where you can sample a voluminous array of vino, numerous gourmet food vendors and even a stand hawking BBQ’d oysters. Judging from the quick once-over I gave them, the oysters seemed fine, but really, few more dicey moves exist than ordering shellfish at an outdoor music festival. That’s the gastronomical equivalent to drinking a bottle of MD 20/20, picking up a hooker and swerving past a police station.
Instead, I opted for a super-burrito from Zona Rosa in the Haight and walked into the park just in time to catch the set from Liars, playing on the tiny Panhandle Stage in Speedway Meadow. I’ve never seen the Australian weirdos before and judging from the off-kilter eclecticism of their albums, they seem like the sort of band where you never know what sort of set to expect. But in their too-short 35 minute performance, they definitely impressed me, running the gamut from noisy, garage band Stooges-type riffs, hypnotic Can-like grooves and all-out full bore thrash. If there was a problem with the set, it had little to do with the band itself. Ultimately, bands like Liars aren’t really festival bands meant to be compressed into a half-hour where you play the singles, nod your head politely and get out. They seem like the sort of band that thrives in smoky, cave-like spaces, where they can stretch out their jams and lock in. But it was over before that had the chance to really happen.
Help! This Jacket is Cutting Off the Circulation to my Neck
Next was Lupe Fiasco, whose set solved fears that The Roots’ fan-base would disintegrate were a gigantic fireball of Mojo magazines to ever come to earth and incinerate ?uestlove (this being contingent upon a Ghostbusters I-like scenario where like Ray Stantz, the Roots drummer is forced to confront destruction from the thing he loves most). In the two years, since Food and Liquor confirmed his place as one of the best young rappers on a major, Lupe’s turned himself into a masterful performer.
I haven’t seen Kanye’s “I Am The Great Neon Gatbsy” tour, so I can’t really speak definitively, but as far as what I’ve seen, Lupe might be the best performer in rap right now. His backing band is funky and loose, his set-list is strong and as a front-man, Lupe is wildly charismatic. He scatters across the stage in this sort of nimble, tip-toed glide, in perpetual motion, throwing his arms towards the crowd, rattling off tongue-twisting rhymes, a total ham but rarely histrionic. The largely melanin-free crowd went beserk, hippies kicked around hacky-sacks during “Kick Push”, the brah contingent got their hip-hop quota, their sorority girlfriends sang the hook to “Superstar.” It was kind of gross actually, but Lupe was great and even if I still don’t want to smoke a blunt with the guy, I’m sold on him as one of the best rappers of his generation.
But on this bland and bitter Bay Area day, the biggest draws seemed to be Dinosaur rock. After Fiasco, I caught about thirty minutes of Steve Winwood, ex-frontman for Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and Blind Faith. This being San Francisco and there always being a ready supply of aging hippies ready to wax nostalgic and teenagers ready to pretend, the Winwood set went how you’d expect: lots of fluttery dancing, half-rembered sing-a-longs and joint-smoke poured out for all those that couldn’t be here. At 60, Winwood’s voice is still as powerful and incredible as it was when he was a teenaged prodigy and really, I won’t lie, I was just lying in wait for “Dear Mr. Fantasy.” When he closed the set with a 10 minute version of that most famous Traffic cut, I was a happy man and ready to head for shelter during the three three hour gap between Winwood and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. After all, I was starting to do that Thriller stagger again, my legs as wooden, rickety and useless as Mitt Romney. So yeah, I missed Ben Harper, Primus and Cake. Then again, last time I checked this isn’t the year 1995.
Hey, When Did David Spade Learn to Play Guitar?
So Petty. You can’t hate Tom Petty. It’s practically impossible. You can be apathetic about him. You can find his songs overplayed by Classic Rock Radio. You can even hate those ridiculous hats the guy wears. But Petty himself, is practically impossible to loath. Petty and the Heartbreakers are the ultimate “pretty good” band. Their Greatest Hits is rock-solid, their live set proves that Mike Campbell is probably one of the ten most underrated guitarists ever and also, that these guys benefited heavily from being a good, popular band during a decade in which most major label rock was mostly unlistenable, well unless you’re Cam’ron. Spandau Ballet, anyone?
The Heartbreakers’ head-lining set was what it needed to be. Slick, professional, filled with the songs that everyone wanted to hear. During “Free Fallin,” I half-expected people to start sparking campfires and roasting marshmallows. Mid-way through,, they brought out their Palaeozoic peer, Stevie Winwood, to play the old Blind Faith song, “Can’t Find My Way Home,” and followed it up with the old soulful Spencer Davis Group staple, “Gimme Some Lovin.” It was a fitting touch and by the time Petty finished with the one-two combo of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” and “American Girl,” they’d eloquently stated their case. I might never be a Petty die-hard, but you’ve got to respect them. They certainly deserve their fanbase and judging from the crowd that stayed until the very end, that’s a whole lot of people.
Posted in Festivals | 3 Comments »
August 23rd, 2008
Don’t expect much. No one with an iota of common sense would attend a music festival after being struck by the snarling combination of African Sleeping Sickness/Mono/Ricketts/Gout/Scurvy that waylaid me for a full two weeks of misery and and continues to leave my left leg swollen and tubby as though it belonged to William Howard Taft. After one half-day of Outside Lands, my knees are wailing like banshees, the cartilage attenuated and frail, my calves feel like a madman autopsist got to play slice and dice and this coffee that I’m drinking is weak and dirty and nowhere near providing me with the jolt of energy that I need to spin out this gibberish before 10:00 a.m. Gadzooks.
I have no one but myself to blame. But what are you supposed to do when the plane tickets are booked and the press credentials secured and Radiohead and Beck are playing back-to-back on Friday night? Of course, you go, even if you’re walking like a zombie in the Thriller video and are sporting a devil’s haircut received last week that’s left you wishing you had an 80s Jacko jheri curl instead. So despite this tenuous condition, I found myself limping up the hill to Outside Lands last night, under the slate-colored San Francisco sky, one of those cold, clammy bay area nights, full of thin, penetrant fog and 60,000 people swarming ant-like in every direction through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Give the Outside Lands organizers credit. Few places in the world make for a better venue than the 1,000 acre verdant sprawl of Golden Gate Park, site of dozens of hippie love-ins and a place that the moment you enter has you stifling the almost insatiable urge to start making jokes about the usage of the words “groovy” and “far out,” and of course, the Scott McKenzie-sanctioned desire to start rambling about “wearing some flowers in your hair.” I didn’t see anyone with flowers in their hair last night. As far as crowds go, this one was decidedly normal. Not the hipster hordes of Pitchfork. Not the hippy haven of Bonnaroo. Not the LA sleaze of Coachella. Just normal, decent-seeming people, willing to go completely Escape From New York, the moment it appeared that the Woodstock ‘99-sized security staff wasn’t looking. Indeed, yesterday, the vibe was mildly anarchic, with people alternately wantonly hopping the fence into the VIP section and breaking down the frail, chain-link fences to create alternate, impromptu paths through the park, over fallen trees, up slippery dirt hills, not the sort of thing fit for a half-incapacited journalist just getting over a Bubonic escapade.
Beck: “I Did The Robot One Too Many Times and Look What Happened”
But like I said, Beck and Radiohead back-to-back, with Wilco slated for Sunday. Had the organizers thrown Belle & Sebastian into the mix and re-animated Elliot Smith and Kurt Cobain from their graves, they could’ve had a shot at getting all of the premier 90s rock genius’ in one three-day swoop. Alas, reclaiming people from Hades is a bit much to ask of a festival organizer. After all, Stevie Winwood is playing this afternoon and I’m afraid that’s the closest we’re going to get. I mean he did die once or twice between Traffic and “Higher Love,” right?
Back to the music, right, the music. Once I finally got my bearings in this massive, labyrinth, spread out across six stages and innumerable VIP areas, double-top secret VIP areas and the hand-crafted throne of skulls that serves as Radiohead’s trailer, I caught the final few songs of Britain’s great reggae group Steel Pulse. Steel Pulse is the ideal outfit to kick off a festival like this, a mellow energy (despite the heavy, politicized nature of their catalog), great tunes, the right sort of act to spark that first joint of the weekend. Of course, with the sky the color of spit and that mean San Francisco wind barking in your ears, Steel Pulse’s spliff on da’ beach lilt seemed a bit misplaced, though they certainly sounded excellent.
Navigating from stage-to-stage is a bitch, so I lamentably missed the chance to catch Vancouver sludge-psych masters, Black Mountain and Angeleno favorites, The Cold War Kids, in favor of snagging a good spot for Beck, whose new album, the 60s pysch-oriented Modern Guilt, is probably my favorite thing that he’s done since Sea Changes. It’s nowhere near a perfect album, there seems something a bit soulless and robotic to it, the work of a prodigiously talented craftsman on auto-pilot, capable of churning out great song after great song as though it seemingly took no effort. Yet removed from the context of “another Beck album in 2008,” it’s probably better than almost any guitar rock album made this year, even if it is a little dull and lacking in joie de vivre.
Krang: A Huge Fan of “Devil’s Haircut”
But that seems to be the Beck we’re getting these days, at least if his Outside Lands set was any indication. I had the opportunity to catch Beck once in his Midnite Vultures incarnation and there’s really no comparison between the two. That Beck was an animal: writhing, preening, swaggering, splaying himself across a gigantic bed-on stage, selling you on the theater, a weird blend of irony and id that made for one of the best showmen I’d ever seen. This boring black-hat, black suit Beck just sings his songs, polite, timid, and competent, as though he were being controlled by Krang. The set-list hewed heavily to material from his last three albums, though he threw in “Loser,” “Devil’s Haircut” and a cover of Dylan’s “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat,” and I can’t say that it wasn’t a “good set.” At this point in his career, Beck has too many lights-out, incredible songs to do anything less than that but there was something missing, something flat and with about 15 minutes left in his set, things grew so dull that I bailed in an effort to beat the fierce flood of people steady mobbing it to Radiohead.
So this Radiohead band. As Randall Roberts said in the latest edition of the Weekly, there just ain’t all that much to say about these guys anymore. And even if there was, I probably wouldn’t be the ideal guy to say it. See, a little confession here, I’ve never been a big Radiohead fan. During the 90s, when The Bends kick-started their world-beating streak, I was buried in a pile of Source magazines, Maxell tapes full of Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang and Maurice Malone shirts (don’t ask). Liking an effete, whiny, British band was the furthest thing from my mind. Give me Liquid Swords any day long, the cold world manifesting itself in shogun decapitations and the GZA’s rugged slang, no need for that karma police prattling. In recent years, I’ve grown to respect Radiohead a great deal. I own all the albums you’re supposed to own and I like each of them, but out of any of the bands I consider great, I don’t think there’s another one I actively want to listen to less than Radiohead.
Shiny, Happy People
This parodox was on display during the band’s nearly two hour long set on Friday night (see set-list here). I can’t say that it wasn’t a great set. Few bands have ever been more innovative than Radiohead and even fewer have amassed such a deep discography. There wasn’t a dud song in their entire performance (save for some sound problems that marred things at times) and Thom Yorke is certainly a passionate performer, whipping his neck back in anguish, staggering around with a sprightly, elfin hop, letting that celestial howl slice through the billowing layers of fog. At this point in their career, Radiohead are consummate professionals, flawless in their execution, you just can’t sweat the technique.
So yes, at times, you’d look up at the dirt-blue sky beginning to blend to black, then affix your eyes towards the soft purple glow of the light floating from the stage, then close them and just listen to the stuttering guitars and patient, prodding drums and Yorke’s heavenly wail and think that it doesn’t get better than this. But as good as I think they are and as much as I appreciate them, I will never love Radiohead. For me, their sound will always be a little chilly, a little too hermetic and serpentine. This isn’t about whether they’re brilliant or not. They obviously are, but to me, Radiohead will always feel like a tank full of beautiful, exotic, tropical fish, dazzling to look at and consider, but ultimately, I’ll always prefer a dog or a cat, maybe a bit more mundane and simple, but warm-blooded and amiable.
Thing is, Thom Yorke could turn a sing-a-long of “Happy Birthday” into a lugubrious dirge and while there’s something to be said about that, after an hour and a half, I’d had enough. It didn’t help matters that my legs felt fit for amputation and my blissed-out Southern Californian naivete failed to pack appropriately for the cold. Wanting no part of an exit strategy that had 60,000 people about to throng the un-prepared mass transit system, I ducked out before the encore, hopping onto the most crowded bus I’ve ever been on, complete with a Goliath-like sociopath with a Dillbert tatoo on his neck and a pair of giant eyes tatted the back of his bald pate. He threatened to kill anyone who dared cross his path, at least six people, including several recent Asian immigrants who didn’t speak a lick of English. Just like the karma police, they’re never there when you need them.
Posted in Festivals | 5 Comments »
April 29th, 2008
By the third day, we were knocked out, loaded. Hungover, weary, wandering the festival grounds like lethargic lemmings, queuing in lines off instinct, jostled, aggravated and in no mood for the weird Aramaic gibberish spouted by the kid seeing God underneath the Tesla Coil. Three days of this is too much to handle, unless you’re either steadily downing a diet of amphetamines, booze and hash; 16 years old, and/or Keith Richards at 16 years old.
To make matters worse, Sunday’s lineup had no chance in hell of topping Saturday’s Prince/Portishead extravaganza and everyone knew it. Scalpers couldn’t give tickets away and out of the five years I’ve been to Coachella, I’ve never seen fewer people on the field. It actually would’ve been nice, had my brain not felt it was composed out of hardened tapioca pudding and squelched grape fruit. The performance enhancing drugs, the miles of walking, and the dry desert heat have a way of sapping any and all energy you may have left after two days. Yeah, seeing Chromeo and Justice would’ve been nice, but the P.C.E. * levels would’ve been far too high. The followers of Vigo the Carpathian, scourge of Moldavia, were still out in masse, tucked away from the scrum, creeping their way through the VIP section. Even Carmen Electra was there and something told me that she and her ilk weren’t staying late to see Roger Waters.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Festivals | 2 Comments »
April 27th, 2008
I ran into a guy I knew from high school standing in line for the restrooms in the VIP area. I hadn’t seen him in a decade but was about four glasses of $7 wine deep and feeling good. No reason not to be friendly, after all, I no longer harbored a grudge from that time in the 11th grade when he tried to tell me that Magoo was a great rapper, a moment in which I knew that our friendship was well on its way to being up-jumps-the boogied.
“Hey Vargas,” I greeted him. (Names have been changed to protect the insolent)
“Hey Weiss,” he responded with a dazed, bovine look on his face. “I’m so wasted.”
“Cisco?”
“No. I didn’t see him here. But I think I just saw Mischa Barton and I definitely saw Paris Hilton.” he said,
“I meant…never mind…so have you seen anyone good today?”
“No, just some friends. We went to the Spin party, it was awesome.”
“I mean like bands. Have you seen any good music.”
“Ha…” he chucked drunkenly, leaning in towards me and spewing hot boozy breath all over me. “I don’t know anyone who’s playing. But they sound good from here!
“You can’t hear anything from here.”
He ignored the question.
“This place is an awesome party! Have you ever seen this many hot chicks?”
“Once, in an incubator.”
“You’ve still got the same sense of humor, huh Weiss?” he slapped himself on the forehead, doing my work for him.
“It’s not me, it’s the drugs,” I smirked and walked off, bobbing and weaving my way past the “hot chicks” re-intepreting Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” as “Coach-ella-ella-ella.” Needless to say, if one were ever to start recruiting a Fourth Reich, he would be wise to begin conscripting the thousands of ding-bats lurking past the velvet rope, er chain link fence.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Festivals | 6 Comments »
