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asimplechordThe last week was all about the music.
Indigo Girls and Brandi Carlile were fabulous at Stubb's. Right venue, right time and place for that music. (When I said that to the friends we were traveling with this weekend, they were like, "Lesbian music?" I was maybe a bit bitchy in my rebuttal. I meant that Stubb's was fairly small, and that that crowd appreciated the folk rock. Nothing to do with sexual orientation.) I can't even tell you how much I love Amy Ray and Emily Saliers and their voices and lyrics and harmony. Add Brandi Carlile to that...
Brandi debuted a song they'd never performed live before.
Amy & Emily did a couple of new songs that will be on the album that is slated to come out in February. :D
Seriously, they did Hope Alone, one of my favorite songs (which I'd never seen them do live) and of course Closer To Fine and bunches of stuff from the last couple of CDs, plus a fair amount from Shaming Of The Sun, oddly. First time I saw them that they didn't do Chicken Man.
I drove home from Austin, slept for three hours, then went to work, then home to pack and head to Bonnaroo. (Not a good scene at all. I required much coffee.)
Thursday night we flew to Nashville; we stayed there rather than driving out to Manchester immediately so we wouldn't have to pitch our tents in the dark. Got to Manchester (the organizers FAIL, there were NO SIGNS coming from the west, and the website said to follow the variable signs that would be posted), pitched our tents, then headed into the Centeroo. We wandered among the various tents and stages to see Steel Train and Drive By Truckers and Umphrey's McGee and Stephen Marley and The Raconteurs, then we staked out blanket-space for the Chris Rock/Metallica gig.
Chris Rock makes me laugh because of the way he skewers racial stereotypes and behaviors, but his schtick about Hillary Clinton was obviously dated and the same thing he did for the rest of his tour, and it made me uncomfortable.
OK, Metallica. Let me say first that I love Metallica, right? I've only seen them three times (not counting this time), but I have all their albums. If they hadn't been in the lineup, I wouldn't have been willing to camp (CAMP, you guys; I can't even describe how utterly filthy we were - it RAINED, and it was muddy and gross and we had to slog from the camping area to the Centeroo, and there weren't showers, okay?) for the weekend.
OK?
Having said that? I would not have scheduled them as headliners for this festival. They are not a jam band, which is really the main flavor of the festival. And I think that the crowd was decently interested in them, but not as excited and enthusiastic as they were for Pearl Jam.
I thought their set went well. It went the scheduled two hours, and they did mostly older stuff, from Kill Em All to the black album. I didn't keep a set list, but I don't remember that they did much of anything off St. Anger, and the only song from Load/Re-Load was Memory Remains.
But the overall tone of Metallica's music is so overtly angry and aggressive (and so is Hetfield's presentation) that it seemed inappropriate in the hippy, so-stoned-they-could-barely-mosh atmosphere.
Then, at the end, when they were doing Seek And Destroy, sound died. Completely. For probably a good twenty seconds. And they didn't notice it. It sorta killed the mood.
AND. HAhahaha, remember how Gerard Way talked about My Chemical Romance in the third person at one point during the St. Louis (I think?) show, and then he said that people who talked about themselves in the third person were assholes? Hetfield TOTALLY DID THAT. He kept telling the crowd, "Metallica loves you."
JUST SAY "WE", DUDE. WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
My Morning Jacket did a four-hour jam after that, then we stumbled to our tents (in the pouring rain) and collapsed.
Saturday we saw Two Gallons, Against Me! (I'm so stoked to see them again at Warped), the Sparrow Quartet, and Gogol Bordello (!!!) before staking out a spot (right at the barricade behind the pit) for BB King, Jack Johnson, and Pearl Jam.
BB King = love. I want to love my work as much after doing it for 60 years as he does.
Jack Johnson's stuff is not normally my kind of music. Too mellow, you know? But he was pretty awesome, and Eddie Vedder came out and performed a song with him, and then it was all a wait for Pearl Jam.
Who ROCKED, okay? I like them, but I've never been a big enough fan of their music to try to see them, so I have no basis for comparison, but one of the people we were with is, and he said they did way more of their "hits", because the audience wasn't solely the normal hardcore Pearl Jam fans. So, lots of stuff from Ten and Vs. and Vitalogy, some from No Code and the self-titled album.
And. AND. Eddie Vedder did No More, which I totally heart, and I had to explain to the folks we were with (who are as apolitical as it is possible to be; I don't even know how they manage that) about Body of War. One of them was all, "I hate it when artists get all political" when Vedder talked about the war and the election and change, which made me bite my tongue. Hard.
They were willing to keep playing as long as the crowd wanted them, and originally I think the schedule had been set up with that in mind, because there wasn't supposed to be anything else on that stage, but Kanye West got rescheduled from his second-stage gig earlier in the night for a 2:45am jam, so the organizers made Pearl Jam stop at 1 am so they could herd us out of that paddock (like the cattle we clearly were) and clean it before Kanye.
AND THEY ENDED WITH ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER. Best Dylan song EVER.
Blah. Phil Lesh even ended up shutting down his jam so it wouldn't interfere with Kanye's deal. What a diva.
We skipped it. Went over to one of the smaller tents and listened to Sigur Ros before we finally collapsed in exhaustion.
Seriously, fifteen hours of music in one day? My ears hurt. But in a good way.
:D
Wandered around Nashville this AM since we'll be able to see most of today's acts at ACL in September.
All in all? BEST CAMPING TRIP EVER.
Indigo Girls and Brandi Carlile were fabulous at Stubb's. Right venue, right time and place for that music. (When I said that to the friends we were traveling with this weekend, they were like, "Lesbian music?" I was maybe a bit bitchy in my rebuttal. I meant that Stubb's was fairly small, and that that crowd appreciated the folk rock. Nothing to do with sexual orientation.) I can't even tell you how much I love Amy Ray and Emily Saliers and their voices and lyrics and harmony. Add Brandi Carlile to that...
Brandi debuted a song they'd never performed live before.
Amy & Emily did a couple of new songs that will be on the album that is slated to come out in February. :D
Seriously, they did Hope Alone, one of my favorite songs (which I'd never seen them do live) and of course Closer To Fine and bunches of stuff from the last couple of CDs, plus a fair amount from Shaming Of The Sun, oddly. First time I saw them that they didn't do Chicken Man.
I drove home from Austin, slept for three hours, then went to work, then home to pack and head to Bonnaroo. (Not a good scene at all. I required much coffee.)
Thursday night we flew to Nashville; we stayed there rather than driving out to Manchester immediately so we wouldn't have to pitch our tents in the dark. Got to Manchester (the organizers FAIL, there were NO SIGNS coming from the west, and the website said to follow the variable signs that would be posted), pitched our tents, then headed into the Centeroo. We wandered among the various tents and stages to see Steel Train and Drive By Truckers and Umphrey's McGee and Stephen Marley and The Raconteurs, then we staked out blanket-space for the Chris Rock/Metallica gig.
Chris Rock makes me laugh because of the way he skewers racial stereotypes and behaviors, but his schtick about Hillary Clinton was obviously dated and the same thing he did for the rest of his tour, and it made me uncomfortable.
OK, Metallica. Let me say first that I love Metallica, right? I've only seen them three times (not counting this time), but I have all their albums. If they hadn't been in the lineup, I wouldn't have been willing to camp (CAMP, you guys; I can't even describe how utterly filthy we were - it RAINED, and it was muddy and gross and we had to slog from the camping area to the Centeroo, and there weren't showers, okay?) for the weekend.
OK?
Having said that? I would not have scheduled them as headliners for this festival. They are not a jam band, which is really the main flavor of the festival. And I think that the crowd was decently interested in them, but not as excited and enthusiastic as they were for Pearl Jam.
I thought their set went well. It went the scheduled two hours, and they did mostly older stuff, from Kill Em All to the black album. I didn't keep a set list, but I don't remember that they did much of anything off St. Anger, and the only song from Load/Re-Load was Memory Remains.
But the overall tone of Metallica's music is so overtly angry and aggressive (and so is Hetfield's presentation) that it seemed inappropriate in the hippy, so-stoned-they-could-barely-mosh atmosphere.
Then, at the end, when they were doing Seek And Destroy, sound died. Completely. For probably a good twenty seconds. And they didn't notice it. It sorta killed the mood.
AND. HAhahaha, remember how Gerard Way talked about My Chemical Romance in the third person at one point during the St. Louis (I think?) show, and then he said that people who talked about themselves in the third person were assholes? Hetfield TOTALLY DID THAT. He kept telling the crowd, "Metallica loves you."
JUST SAY "WE", DUDE. WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
My Morning Jacket did a four-hour jam after that, then we stumbled to our tents (in the pouring rain) and collapsed.
Saturday we saw Two Gallons, Against Me! (I'm so stoked to see them again at Warped), the Sparrow Quartet, and Gogol Bordello (!!!) before staking out a spot (right at the barricade behind the pit) for BB King, Jack Johnson, and Pearl Jam.
BB King = love. I want to love my work as much after doing it for 60 years as he does.
Jack Johnson's stuff is not normally my kind of music. Too mellow, you know? But he was pretty awesome, and Eddie Vedder came out and performed a song with him, and then it was all a wait for Pearl Jam.
Who ROCKED, okay? I like them, but I've never been a big enough fan of their music to try to see them, so I have no basis for comparison, but one of the people we were with is, and he said they did way more of their "hits", because the audience wasn't solely the normal hardcore Pearl Jam fans. So, lots of stuff from Ten and Vs. and Vitalogy, some from No Code and the self-titled album.
And. AND. Eddie Vedder did No More, which I totally heart, and I had to explain to the folks we were with (who are as apolitical as it is possible to be; I don't even know how they manage that) about Body of War. One of them was all, "I hate it when artists get all political" when Vedder talked about the war and the election and change, which made me bite my tongue. Hard.
They were willing to keep playing as long as the crowd wanted them, and originally I think the schedule had been set up with that in mind, because there wasn't supposed to be anything else on that stage, but Kanye West got rescheduled from his second-stage gig earlier in the night for a 2:45am jam, so the organizers made Pearl Jam stop at 1 am so they could herd us out of that paddock (like the cattle we clearly were) and clean it before Kanye.
AND THEY ENDED WITH ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER. Best Dylan song EVER.
Blah. Phil Lesh even ended up shutting down his jam so it wouldn't interfere with Kanye's deal. What a diva.
We skipped it. Went over to one of the smaller tents and listened to Sigur Ros before we finally collapsed in exhaustion.
Seriously, fifteen hours of music in one day? My ears hurt. But in a good way.
:D
Wandered around Nashville this AM since we'll be able to see most of today's acts at ACL in September.
All in all? BEST CAMPING TRIP EVER.
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Date: 2008-06-16 04:47 am (UTC)I think if I heard "Closer to Fine" live, I'd probably cry. Ugh.
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Date: 2008-06-16 04:50 am (UTC)And hahahaha, we've got fuse on right now, and Aaron was like, "Check out Jack White. I swear he's got a potato or a sock in his pants, or he's really hung." I must've missed that when we were sitting way the hell back in the field, but it shows up bright and clear on TV. I think the cameraperson noticed and couldn't look away.
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Date: 2008-06-16 06:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-17 12:04 am (UTC)Missed you. Heard awesome music. Got work, which is not fun at all. Then fic-writing AT LAST!