Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival: August 28-30 2009

This is gonna be abreviated because I'm heading to NiN in an hour or so, so I'm gonna do this review in Bullet Point form!

Friday

• Wish I'd gotten there earlier. Zap Momma was cooking up some bluesy, jazzy magic at the Twin Peaks stage the instant I arrived. I didn't get to hear them for long since I wanted to see Built to Spill but it was quite a way to start the festival.
  
• I missed Built to Spill. That's what I get for "short-cutting" through the Beatles: Rock Band tent. I guess I forgot that I'm extremely distractable.
  
• Silversun Pickups are one of those buzz bands that's got a hit single and a lot of good press these days, but unlike most of those flavor-of-the-weeks, they actually deserve the hype. Their lead singer/guitarist looks like Caleb Followill and sounds like Billy Corgan, all while stalking the stage like a starving tiger. The bass-player was atypical as well, a pale girl with a purple sundress, gently rolled hair, and a shy-but-confident demeanor. She's one of those bass soloists and her style with the instrument is brisk and effortless. The drummer was a whirl of long black hair, speed and power, popping his drumsticks into the air and turning his shirt dark with sweat. The keyboard guy had a selection of instruments and a hat like the one John McCrea used to wear. This group was playing to a bigger crowd then they were used to and were plainly exhilarated by it: Singer guy said he'd had NO IDEA they were going to get to share a stage with Built to Spill ("One of the best bands in the fucking world!") Then he turned up the volume and rocked the house. This group was the first big surprise of the festival.
• INCUBUS! If you've listened to rock radio anytime at all since '99, you've heard at least one Incubus song, and they played them all that evening. The lead singer was the slim, beautiful boyish type and was stretching out while his band-mates picked up their instruments, so I knew we were in for some acrobatics. They weren't as intense as hoped, but they had roared through "Pardon me" and another song before stopping for break. The singer had a cold that day (he said) and was nervous about performing, so one of his bandmates suggested getting drunk. The crowd cheered, so he said "From your reaction I'm guessing you agree!" He raised his glass of wine and said "Isn't it great, the way we all look out for each-other?" He finished his glass and had stripped his jacket and shirt off before the end of his set as well for his rubber-jointed flailing, but his illness had made his voice weak and reedy and the rest of the band, though musically more-then-capable, were not engrossing enough for me not to loose the fight against my bladder, give up my spot and head for the bathrooms.
  
• Pearl Jam! The main event, and poor Eddie Vedder lost his voice! The golden baritone that has become one of the most famous (and oft-imitated) voices in music was more like the raspy tenor today as he sang around an octave above where he normally would. He apologized for this, saying it was the very end of a long tour and "it's pissing me off that my voice isn't what it usually is, so I'll take whatever help you're willing to give me." Fortunately the show itself seemed built around encouraging this: the setlist never strayed too far from a greatest-hits list, along with "Betterman," "Daughter" (which morphed into "Another Brick in the Wall") and other well-known tracks like "I Am Mine." "The Fixer,"and "Got Some," their newest singles, even got their slots. There were none of the tortured political anthems from their last few albums, no bellyaching, just Pearl Jam enjoying being Pearl Jam, with Eddie Vedder taking flying leaps off of monitors, Mike McCreedy playing the guitar behind his back, Stone Gossard doing scissor-kicks and throwing picks across the stage, Jeff Ament prowling in a circle, and Matt Cameron being the cool cat I totally didn't recognize that night at the Crocodile. Eddie said that a number of people from the Bridge School were there, off stage right, (they were the recipients of most of the flying picks), including Ben Young, Neil Young's boy which might explain part of why the band were so effin' excited. Eddie told the crowd a story about a night "kind of like tonight" about when the band were on their first big national tour and were all revved up and raring to play the same San Francisco polo field where they were playing tonight, when "I came down with the worst case of food poisoning I've ever had in my life." In short, Eddie was out of commission, disaster loomed, and Neil Young swooped in to save the day. Ever since then there's kind of been nothing Pearl Jam wouldn't do for Neil Young. They've been regulars at his annual Bridge School Benefit Concerts for over ten years and have obviously built up some relationships of their own with the students there, judging from the adoring vibes the band kept sending to the alcove just offstage. They rocked their hearts out. There was crowd-surfing. There was jumping. The last encore of the night was a barn-burning rendition of "Rockin' the Free World." All this while their singer's voice was completely shot. Pearl Jam are the real shit.
  

Saturday

• Street Sweeper Social Club: I won't lie. I love this band. Tom Morello can do no wrong in my eyes, and while I'm not entirely sold on Boots as a singer (his vocals still tend to get swallowed up in Tom's riffs) this show kicked ass. Converted the two rail-sitters I was sitting next to to instant fans within five minutes too, because it was that kind of show, and they are that kind of band. These guys are the real deal.
  
• Portugal: The Man: An indy rock outfit from Wasilla, Alaska that got an unwitting popularity boost when someone else from Wasilla, Alaska became a political superstar over-night and the band took to their blogs to try and warn the country about what they were getting into. I really want to like their band, if just for that reason. Their brand of rock is quirky and dreamy, and the lead singer sounds like a girl. I couldn't figure out if I liked it or not.
  
• Mastodon. Alright, ladies, grab your pom-poms! Now gimme an M. Gimme an E! Gimme a T! Gimme an A! Gimme an L! What does that spell?! METAL! Now throw your fucking devil horns in the air and ROCK OUT!
  
• TV on the Radio, and I'd thought Boots Riley had some happy feet. I didn't know nothin'. This band of odd-balls make funky psychedelic soundscapes that are creepy and vaguely apocalyptic. They kept tossing the lead vocals around and switching instruments. Pretty cool.
  
• The Mars Volta, sharing the headlining time-slot with Dave Mathews, couldn't have been LESS like Dave Mathews if they were from another planet altogether. Think a cross between Pink Floyd and Metallica, with some Latin seasoning and a lead-singer with 80s hair who will get into a fight with his own band's name-placard and loose, right before putting his foot right through it. And at least a dozen crowd-surfers. It was demented, and I was hooked 30 seconds in. Wow.
• I can't tell you how Dave Mathews was because by the time I got to the crowd, I realized I had dropped my camera and spent the set running around shining my flash-light at people's feet, but my friend David is a huge Dave Mathews fan, and was watching on the Webcast so when he says it was a great show, I'd believe him. I still haven't contacted my two rail-sitting friends, who were looking forward to seeing them on Facebook, because I can't believe I've lost ANOTHER camera. That makes a total of four. I am NOT getting another one until I figure out who put this Camera-Jinx on me and how to fix it.
  

Sunday

• Bettye Lavette said, during her mini-bio "when I was sixteen this was the first song I cut. And when I was sixteen, not only did I know I was a singer...I also thought I was a star." Well, she might not have been famous when she was sixteen, but she was always a star. She was born a star. In an alternate universe, she was as big as Aretha Franklin. She even moved away from the mic to bellow out her song from the Main Stage and everyone HEARD her. What a powerful voice on that woman. Her guitarist, a long-haired man who had to be around half her age, introduced some truly searing guitar work to the soul anthems, joining her center-stage for a little dance number at one point. So even though she might have looked more at home in a glittering dress in a smokey nightclub then in jeans and a leather jacket on an outdoor stage at 1am on a foggy day, but she guided her set with the unshakable hand of a born star. In another world, she would have been as big as Aretha Franklin. She has the goods.
  
• Modest Mouse were trying hard, they really were, switching instruments and bellowing through different microphones, and they inspired lots of smiles and head-bobbing, but they distinctly failed to electrify the crowd. Maybe they were having an off-day (their old guitar-player has left), but they didn't help their case by not playing any songs anyone knew. Really, I go see Modest Mouse perform, and they don't play "Float On?" Really? But I've heard from other sources that live performance is just not a strength for Modest Mouse, which is a shame because they have some genuinely interesting stuff in their catalog.
  
• M.I.A, on the other hand, WAS electricity. This woman brings the idiosyncratic fashion without the class-baiting, richer-then-thou flavor of Lady Gaga, and with her two female backup singers, two blue-suited male backup dancers, and beat-meisters all decked out in Micheal Jackson T-shirts, she ruled the stage. She threw horns into the audience. She made it look so easy. AND she played "Paper Planes" to close, so whatever aversion Modest Mouse has to their own hits, she didn't share. She's amazing. Sunday was a good day for the ladies at Outside Lands.
  
• Tenacious D (aka "Jack Black's Band") filled in for the Beastie Boys and were (as a friend of mine had predicted) hilarious and fantastic, just not headliner-caliber fantastic. Lots of people were grumbling at the D getting the headlining slot when there were plenty of other acts on the bill that could easily have been bumped up to headliners (M.I.A could have done it easily), and it turned out to be pretty justified. That's not to say their act isn't funny: but if you've seen "Pick of Destiny" you've seen pretty much all of Tenacious D's material. I hope Adam gets better soon. The Beastie Boys were missed that night.
  

Alright, that's my bullet point synopsis. Time for NiN.

CAKE at the Fox Theater: Pomona 8/27/2009

Since I'm heading to Outside Lands tomorrow, this one will be a quick one.

Something was up with CAKE. I mean, I love CAKE. Their brand of architectual pop rock blues with a trumpet and John McCrea's chilly, detached speak-singing make them a band unlike any other you'll ever hear.

But something was up with them tonight.

The monitors were irregular, there were problems with guitars requiring roadie assistance, and tense conversation between band-mates. The show took a while to take off, probably because of the general strained attitudes of the performers.

And curiously enough, there was a "break." A period of fifteen minutes or so when they brought the curtain down and let everyone go to the bar or the bathroom. Now, the only other time I have been at a live show that had a break, I went to see a Jam band that'd been playing for hours already.

If I had to bet, I'd say the break was due to a technical problem that required more re-setting-up then the roadies could do otherwise. When they took the stage again, to a roaring cover of "War Pigs" the mood seemed more relaxed. By the time the show finally wrapped up, things had finally started to take off, thanks to a funny interlude about a tree that people were doing push-ups for, since the normal question of "what kind of tree is it" was a bit redundant considering the lemon growing on the tree.

And CAKE are a cool band. They all wear checkered shirts and look like your neighbor, especially the relentlessly normal multi-instrumentalist who has a different thing in his hand every time you look at him, and when he doesn't have a thing, he dances. The drummer hunched over his kit like he was worried someone would see him. Bassist played like he'd been born with a bass in his hand, and the guitarist tapped his heal, rocked his hollowbody, and swaggered like a guy who knows he is good at his job. And John McCrea was a real ringmaster in terms of orchestrating the audience sing-alongs, and he was in fine voice.

So I still love CAKE. But I can't help but wonder what the deal was that cast such a spell over the evening. I doubt I'll ever find out.

Kings Of Leon at the Forum: Inglewood CA, 8/22/2009

It's difficult to know where to start with this one, so I'm going to start at the beginning.

I took my sister to this show. We bought the expensive beers. We ate our respective salty carbs. We ended up sitting in a place very similar to where Mom and I saw Bruce Springsteen, so we were close, but would be looking at lots of shoulders, as opposed to faces, which gives the show a different feel but (as my sister pointed out) provides a perfect, rare chance to watch the drummer. Try patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time if you want a glimpse of how hard drumming really is. It's amazing to watch.

The opening act, the Whigs, were an impressive power-trio hailing from Athens, Georgia and boasting of some serious athletics. These guys are powerful musicians, in every sense of the word. They are amp-hoping, two-stepping southern rockers who make a much louder noise then you'd think three people could, more like the noise of Lynyrd Skynyrd then the alt-rock, grunge retro headliners. Later on in the show, Caleb Followill would call these three his friends and declare "Someday they'll be headlining here!" and I would hope he's right: it won't be for lack of talent if these guys don't make it.

Kings of Leon have clearly made it. Their fascinating amalgamated brand of rock comes on like a hurricane and never lets up, and I swear, spirits were running so high that in comparison, they might as well have been asleep the last time I saw them.

Iggy Pop once said of the Stooges sibling rhythm section "You can't get a bond like that without blood." And although a lot of fantastic bands haven't needed blood, the Followill brothers + cousin have been playing together since they were children and it shows. I got the feeling an earthquake couldn't derail this crew.

And Caleb Followill, who had barely a sentence to spare for the audience last time I saw them, was positively glowing. "I was so nervous I was throwing up all day, but now that I'm here, and you're a great crowd, I'm having a great time!" Then he downed his red plastic cup and yelled "I'm getting drunk!" Everyone cheered. The reason for the nerves was made apparent when he said that he had lots of family and friends in the crowd, here to see them to finally play the big venues "we get to play everywhere else" and how "rarely enough these days" every last person in the band was having a blast.

They seemed to be. Guitar picks were flicked. Nathan's drumsticks went flying across the stage more then once. No one but Caleb said anything, but the band's high-spirits were evident in that sort of intangible quality the best live music has, the kind that just sets the place on fire. There was just pure exhilaration in the air.

"You guys, you guys are great but some of you, some of you I know are sitting down. This is for you, stand up, let's have a party!" And he rocked into the fuzzy, dirty bass-line of "Crawl." I didn't see anyone sitting. Although some of Caleb's attempts to get the crowd to take over vocal duties were more successful then others (Everyone was singing along to "Use Somebody"), the crowd was loud and enthusiastic and quick to clap and cheer and scream. It was a crowd anyone would be proud to have their mom see them play to.

There was even a sign-waver: "Caleb can I hav ur hankie?" Unfortunately he didn't manage to throw it that far. There's a reason why he's a musician and not a pitcher.

Caleb's sign-off was heartfelt, about how "We're up here, we're playing music, we get to play music with family... and that's the most important thing in the world." He thanked everyone again (he'd been thanking us all night), and declared, "standing up here, looking out at all you...you make this boy from Tennessee very happy." He meant it too.

The Rock n' Roll dream lives.