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| They got a lotta lotta lotta great desks and chairs. |
I went to Boston
Calling last week and skipped out on an opportunity to see The Replacements and I’m OK with this decision. I couldn’t
be less disappointed. And the Mats have been a popular discussion topic on the Internet this week, so I decided to add my fishgut perspective to that delicious, ill-informed and belligerent
chum.
It all started a few
months ago, when I foolishly purchased a $150 three-day pass to Boston Calling,
under the assumption the festival was going to be over Labor Day weekend. Of
course, silly me, I didn’t read that it would actually be the following
weekend, a non-holiday weekend, so I’d have to suffer at work Monday after a
three-day festival.
Then I found out The
Replacements were playing Sunday night, from 8-9pm. They were the only band I
actually wanted to see, playing at the most inopportune time possible. Could I
survive the weekend, see The Replacements, and make it to work Monday morning?
I drove up to Boston
from Providence Friday night, through shockingly little traffic on 93. I parked
in the Government Center Parking Garage, which was only $15, because I had
bought a fancy festival pass and printed it off the Internet before I drove up.
At 7pm, I walked over to City Hall Plaza, where the festival was being held.
After being tempted
by the $30 Neutral Milk Hotel shirts at the merch tent, I walked over to the
massive crowd that was already crammed in front one of the two stages. It was
hot and muggy and gross. That is a crucial detail to this story.
Future Islands were
first on the bill. I’d seen them a handful of times over the years and I wasn’t
particularly excited to see them. At best, they’d been a great party band, like
when they closed out Whartscape in 2010. At worst, their singer recalls of Jack
Black singing karaoke.
Surprisingly, Future
Islands have vastly improved, and were one of the top bands of the weekend. When
I last saw them, I thought they had great energy and stage presence, but didn’t
have the songs to back it up. I always feel uncomfortable when bands rock out
to music that isn’t equivalent to their energy level. It reminds me of air
guitar.
Yet Future Islands
have truly developed a great, unique sound that was unlike anything else that I
heard at the festival. Sam Herring, their wild lead man, jumps around stage
like Freddie Mercury, sometimes singing, sometimes growling, sometimes beating
his chest, and sometimes doing some weird dance moves that interconnect well with
the song. As far as synth-pop goes, this is top notch, a compliment that can’t
be given to many of the other bands I’d suffer through this weekend.
After a series of ill
communications with my friends who were at the festival, I found myself alone
in a massive crowd of people, yet fairly close to the front of the stage for
Neutral Milk Hotel. Since I was crammed in with a bunch of strangers, I figured
I’d start making jokes in order to make friends. Unfortunately, only two of the
dozen people around me laughed at my remarks. “I think this band is going to
make it big, guys, they’ve really got some potential,” I yelled out. “Play the
one about Anne Frank!” To me that was a certified gasser, but reasonable minds
can disagree, I guess. Holocaust yuks among strangers are a risky proposition.
Anyways, Neutral Milk
Hotel were disappointing this time around. Don’t get me wrong, I still got
choked up during the title track to “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” The line
“Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all,” always gets me, man.
Unfortunately, the 15-minute-setup
festival sound for Neutral Milk Hotel just wasn’t there, and they were not loud
enough to drown out the people singing along. This was the same problem they
had when I saw them at Prospect Park in Brooklyn last summer. They’re slowly turning
into an emo version of the Shea Stadium Beatles. The Prospect Park show was memorable
because there was a lightning storm and everyone had to evacuate The Bandshell
and we weren’t sure if they were going to come back and finish their set and
then, after a 45 minute delay, they came back out, and they played “Ghost” in
the middle of a weird on-and-off rainstorm, and it was just the most beautiful
moment. All the members of Neutral Milk Hotel were intently engaged, all at the
same time, as if electrically charged by the storm, giving the audience a
little extra for having sat through a fairly tense, and wet, situation.
And that was always
why I will always defend Neutral Milk Hotel: the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts. Of course, I’d also seen Jeff Mangum play when he first started
touring again. The first time, at the Jordan Hall Conservatory in Boston, was
magical and the second made me uncomfortable because it was at the rather cavernous
Lupo’s in Providence and the crowd only seemed to know the hits, and the mass
sing-a-longs reminded me of a Dashboard Confessional concert.
The Magic Tapes,
Julian Koster’s solo project, opened for Mangum at Lupo’s, much to the
confusion of most of the crowd, and Koster later came out to play singing saw
on a couple of Magnum’s tunes.
This gave me the
impression that Mangum was ready to get the band back together, which was a
moment I’d waited for since I was an angsty 17-year old suburban nerd senior in
high school, when the tragic exquisiteness of “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”
made me realize that all of popular culture was predicated on arbitrary
corporate tastes and controlled by boring dummies and how music that actually
contained substance and creativity was largely ignored by most people.
Basically, that album
flipped my world upside-down and made me kind of an asshole during my senior
year, like when I rooted against my own shitty class during spirit week, but
intimate knowledge of Aeroplane and my newfound insistence on its cultural
inheritance made college a helluva a lot more fun that it would have been, and
I appreciated all the cool kids I met.
When, ten years
later, Neutral Milk Hotel finally got back together and announced they were
playing at the Orpheum in Boston, I scored front-row balcony tickets. I’d seen
many shows over the years at this charming little theater and this was the best
one of them all. The band was tight, having fun, and overall sounded superb, loud
and crisp, and drowned out any singing from the crowd. I danced my fucking ass
off, much to the chagrin of the people behind me. I didn’t care. I was finally
seeing Neutral Milk Hotel, motherfuckers!
The Elephant 6
Collective always struck me as a bunch of weirdos who had bonded over Beach Boy
records and decided to make music because they had nothing better to do and
weren’t really accepted anywhere else and otherwise just wanted to have a good
time and not get harassed. I used to watch old shitty-sounding YouTube clips of
Neutral Milk Hotel shows, and it always seemed like they were having a ton of
fun and I was always jealous of the person who was taping them because I wasn’t
there jumping around. It’s really as shame the “Jeff Mangum: recluse” narrative
over-shadowed the greatness of the group as a whole.
The National played
next and they were the only group of the weekend who seemed to have ever played
a festival before. Yes, they are one of the ultimate Dad Rock bands, and only roughly
70% of their songs are worthwhile, but you can’t deny the intensity of their
lead man, Matt Berninger. During that night, I realized that he is a master of
standing at the precipice of some daring, primitive rock and roll gesture, and,
right when you think he’s about to let it rip, he comes back at the last
moment. He knows how to use tension and anticipation to his theatrical
advantage.
At the end of the
night, he finally unleashed the aggression he’d been hinting at, culminating in
him running through most of the crowd with microphone in hand while singing
“Terrible Love.” People in the crowd promptly ruined the moment by whipping out
their phones and taking selfies, and it made me hate America.
Have you ever seen a
person standing in front of you at a concert or other event hoist their phone
above the crowd and take a 360-degree video while grinning stupidly and
unconsciously, as if they could only view the world through their phone? This
happened to me dozens of times at this festival as well as many other concerts
over the past year. It’s a hideous, despicable practice, proving that people
cannot and will not live in the moment, and have already let the robots take
over. They just prefer to live in a digitally separated bubble, experiencing
life as a walking Twitter account. My impulse to smash people’s phones at
concerts grows stronger by the day.
OK. Glad I got that
off my chest. Besides almost getting into fight a drunk bro, that was my Friday
night in a nutshell!
On Saturday, we
arrived in time to see the tail end of S. Carey’s set. This was a little before
3 o’clock and it was still hotter than Hades. Of course I didn’t know who the
fuck this was, and I was informed S. Carey was a member of Bon Iver. Of all
bands in the history of the Earth, I have made more jokes about Bon Iver than
any other band. “Q: How many members of Bon
Iver does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “A: Bon Iver can’t screw anything, they’re
too busy sucking.” S. Carey sounded like Sufjan Stevens with synths.
Sky Ferreira saved me
from a certain festival-induced nervous breakdown. I’d just watched Blondie’s “VH1: Behind the
Music” and was quick to point out Ferreira sounded like Debbie Harry. Her band
did a cool kraut-rock number at one point and someone behind me complained
because they “were just playing the same chord, over and over.” I had just seen
a Phish shirt in the vicinity and knew I was in trouble.
The next group was
Bleachers, or, better known as Lena Dunham’s boyfriend’s side-project. I
couldn’t help but imagine her, naked, diving off the stage and attempting to
crowd surf, naked, and having the people in the crowd decide not to help her do
that. Lena Dunham, in my imagination, is always naked.
Bleachers are a
synth-pop group. Dunham’s boyfriend wore short-shorts and danced about. I think
he played a keyboard or a synth of some kind. He might have just danced around
and not played anything and simply jabbered into the mic. I usually block out
the details of these sorts of memories.
I escaped mid-way
through and snagged some mediocre-yet-not-totally expensive concession stand
food.
The Hold Steady played
next, and they rocked and played a tight set and avoided their pretty rough
last album. Sorry guys, it sounds like you recorded your guitars in a shoe. Yet
they were crucial to my sanity that day, and washed out much of the mediocrity
that I had suffered through.
Right after they got
off stage, a man made an announcement that, due to an incoming severe lightning
storm, we would have to all evacuate. “This again,” I thought to myself. Luckily,
after The Hold Steady, we’d gone to get more food, and were close to an exit.
We sheltered at a
local bar and I kept updating Twitter, hoping we’d be let back in soon, or at
least that something notable had occurred, like a riot breaking out or
something. At least college football was on, which is secretly so much more
entertaining than the NFL because there are way less commercials and the games
are a lot more unpredictable and hilarious and the rampant corruption seems
sweetly quaint compared to the downright disturbing nature of the monolithic NFL.
At this point in the
day, I started melting down a little. My energy just wasn’t there. The heat had
gotten to me.
I also didn’t care
about anyone else performing that day. Truthfully, I kept updating my Twitter
secretly hoping the rest of the night would be canceled so we could just stay
at the bar and watch college football the rest of the night. At this point, my
luck ran out, and the next part of this long-winded story explains why I didn’t
see The Replacements.
Since I kept updating
my Twitter, I drained all the power from my phone. It eventually died, and I was staying with
friends, so I had to stick by them the rest of the night. My car was
unreachable. The crowd was so big that I couldn’t even go sit somewhere, like
down the street, without losing my crew. And to boot: they wanted to see Lorde
and Childish Gambino. I didn’t want to see Lorde and Childish Gambino.
The screams of joy
emanating from the crowd revealed that Lorde was the biggest act of the weekend,
which is a head scratcher until you remember how often she’s been on the radio
this year. I’ll give her this: she kept my attention for most of her
performance. I understand her appeal, and there’s no denying “Royals” as a pop
gem. I won’t complain if she ever comes on at a wedding or if someone decides
to put her on in the car, but I’ll never try to listen to her again on purpose.
Danny Glover, better
known as Childish Gambino, on the other hand, needs to stick with his day job: acting
in Lethal Weapon movies. Glover’s got the energy and 6-pack of a rock star, but
none of the talent. He can’t decide what to sound like and instead throws shit
at the wall and nothing sticks. Glover would bust into a bad D’angelo or R.
Kelly impression mid-song, then start rapping like a JV Kanye. He had a backing
band AND a backing track, but no turntables.
At this point in the
night, I’d just about had enough. I kept jumping up and down on my feet and
crouching because my legs were so sore from standing. I was fighting off
exhaustion. Mid-way through Childish Gambino, I knew Boston Calling had beaten
me into submission. I already knew I would not make it to The Replacements the
next day.
But I’ve made amends
with this decision, based on the fact that the main appeal of The Replacements
is still alive in many of the great bands that are around today. I’ll be seeing Ty Segall at the tiny Great
Scott next week. White Fence and King Tuff are coming through in October. Parquet
Courts are touring with Thurston Moore. Ian Svenonius still brings it with Chain
and the Gang. They revived my interest in live music two summers ago and were
even better this past summer. Dinosaur Jr. are still ear-bleedingly extant. I
saw Black Pus, the drummer from Lightning Bolt, perform under a bridge near the
Samuel Slater mill in Pawtucket. It was magnificent. Bad Sports played at the
VFW Elks Lodge in Cambridge and sounded like The Exploding Hearts and The
Buzzcocks. I saw Guided by Voices at the historic Toad’s Place in New Haven,
Conneticut. They were surprisingly and undeniably the best show of the year.
“I’m 56 and I’m still kicking all of your asses,” Robert Pollard sneered at one
point. He wasn’t kidding.
Liquor
Store played two nights in a row in Providence and they’re the best pure
rock group around, in the most classic sense. They blew their tour mates, Titus
Andronicus, out of the water. Their most recent record, “In the Garden,” will
be declared a lost classic twenty years from now, when revisionist history
comes around and, hopefully, when they
headline a festival it won’t be on a goddamn Sunday night.
