Arriving at Kutshers Country Club in Monticello, NY, I felt like I was living through an early 90's equivalent of Bergman's Wild Strawberries,
minus the awards ceremony: a pastoral dream-romp through one's past,
where the sights and sounds of one's formative years were brought back
and forced to clash with aging sensibilities. If ATP-NY was "about"
anything, it was about the canonization in the collective music
underground's memory of the alleged importance of early 90's
"alternative" music; a throwback to a simpler time when Bush Mark I led
to Clinton Mark I, and a long-burgeoning underground seemed to
overthrow the mainstream and allow "cool" stuff to invade America's
malls and major radio station playlists.
The first evening of
programmed performances at ATP-NY was, appropriately enough, an
ATP-programmed "Don't Look Back" series, where canonized performers
play, in order, a "seminal" album; we got there too late to catch Bardo
Pond's performance of their Lapsed
album-- while they were playing, we were busy checking in at the front
desk, and being blown away by the bizarre pile-up of culture clashes
going on all around us: you have a Borscht Belt Jewish country club
about three decades or more past its heyday being over-run by
Pitchfork-tenth-of-a-point-rating music fans, who are in turn
interfacing with a large contingent of Euro-eternal-partiers; all of
these people are being assisted in their check-in and parking lot
navigation by a large temporary staff who have clearly been shipped up
from New York City, meaning that during the festival one can walk out
of a Yo La Tengo set and come across a group of staff members jamming
out to Mariah Carey on a boombox (I'll delve a bit more on the
racial/socio-economic weirdness of this festival in my Day 3 write-up,
when I discuss EPMD's Sunday afternoon set). And remember, all of this
is amidst Hicktown upstate New York-- the closest retail node to Kutshers is... (drumroll).. a Wal-Mart. And on top of all of that, we are a mere 10 miles from Bethel, NY, the festival site of Woodstock (1969 version).
Oh,
but right, besides people-watching and societal analyzing, there is
also music happening. We check in in time to run down to the main
stage to catch The Meat Puppets, who are preparing to perform, in its
entirety, their 1984 album Meat Puppets II.
Curt Kirkwood walks out in a loose t-shirt and wearing fucking
sweatpants, as if to announce to the audience that this festival is not
about stage presence or any sort of intentional presentation. The
current "reunited" Meat Puppets lacks original drummer Derek Bostrom,
but does include
original bassist Chris Kirkwood, who lost a few years to serious drug
addiction and incarceration but seems to have emerged somewhat, uh,
jacked; his craggly face sits on his otherwise pretty fit body like,
say, Willem Dafoe circa Life Aquatic
wearing an ill-advised puffy blonde wig. The Kirkwood brothers make
strange contorted faces when they play that seem to be visual
indications that these two have had a lifetime of experiences with
hallucinations and altered states, but their musical abandon is
frequently interrupted as they have to remind themselves, you know,
which song is next, which key it's in, etc. MP II was a transitional album for the Puppets: their eponymous debut was a
pretty amateur affair, screaming cowpunk that sort-of made sense on
punk-tastic SST Records. MP II
began hinting at a more countrified and countri-fried direction that
would prevail over their discography for the next decade-- but it
wasn't until 3rd LP Up On The Sun that they would full-on jack-knife into arpeggiated home-on-the-range Garcia-isms. Meaning that MP II
is full of strange little squiggles of songs that they probably never
imagined that they'd be playing again, live, in a ballroom to thousands
of people in the year 2008. "Thoughts turn into waterfalls/with water
made of thoughts that call", from "We're Here", is the kind of lyrical
navel-gazing that made the Puppets make sense to a Cobain'd-out early 90's
slacker aesthetic-- and amidst that era's oversized sweaters and ski
hats in summer, a group of frazzled ugly dudes playing fried
psychedelic guitar rock fit right in there. When the Puppets go psych,
it isn't with the mastery of, say, J Mascis or Kevin Shields or Ira
Kaplan; it's with the seemingly-accidental naivety of, say, Daniel
Johnston, if he dropped the Brian Wilson bullshit and just started
hitting effects pedals. Which, really, was a certain important lesson
of early 90's rock: that drugs, pedals and giddy enthusiasm can make up
for quite a lot. By the time they got to "Lake of Fire", the Kirkwoods
were blazing: the song morphed into a spastic dance of hair-flying
aggression, as if one was listening to Zeppelin and Kiss when the
shrooms kick in, the posters on the walls start to melt, the record
starts skipping on the same groove, and your doofus grin makes you
unconsciously drool all over your bong. After the album proper, they
closed with a cover of The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" that really
showed where their heads were: ground zero psychedelia.
Truth be
told, though, The Meat Puppets weren't really cool enough for the
alternative rock days, and they didn't seem cool enough for ATP either:
lots of people walked in for one song and bailed; inept covers of
Johnny Cash's "Tennessee Stud" probably isn't quite what Fuck Button
fans took a Friday off of work to stand around watching, right?
Tortoise packed the ballroom significantly tighter for their set; and I
dunno, I gave it a few tunes, but it was pretty rough. I mean, I like
lots of wanky 70's prog, and own more than three Mahavishnu Orchestra
albums, and yet even I was put off by the jazz-rock wankery on
display. I have been told that Tortoise are "an awesome band to listen
to whilst doing something else"-- this is a motto that popped in my
head over and over during this festival. Being curated by My Bloody
Valentine, after all, you couldn't help but notice that, a few
stragglers aside, most of the bands performing are much better known
for their sound than for their songs, which is to say that the appeal of so much of what we were to witness was primarily of a "sonic" nature.
Except,
oddly enough, for Thurston Moore's set. If the Brothers Kirkwood
developed an indie archetype of the grizzled far-out pair of uncles
rocking out to flashback rock, Moore has tended to go the other way--
into the womb, or at least some sort of mutant dada-informed "mucky wucky" baby-talk thing. Moore's set this evening is a re-creation of his 1995 solo LP Psychic Hearts,
which, he informs us from the stage, he and drummer Steve Shelley wrote and
recorded in one day-- take that, major label dude that released the
album! Moore stuck it to the man, i.e. the ATP "Don't Look Back"
gestapo, as well by daring to not play the album in order, but I can't
imagine that too many people noticed or cared; he began with "Elegy For
All The Dead Rock Stars", which is one of those 20-minute end-of-cd
instrumental things that 90's bands tended to do when cd's first came
out (see: Nirvana's "Endless Nameless" at the end of Nevermind, or perhaps the hidden track on Mudhoney's My Brother The Cow,
which consisted of the entire album played backwards).
I
remember at the time thinking the album was pretty awesome, if a tad
heavy on the overt Patti Smith worship. As it so happens, Ms. Smith was at ATP; I didn't see her during the
set, but the next day I saw her strolling around the grounds with Kevin
Shields-- no doubt their conversation had to do with the shamanistic
properties of feedback and what that meant in terms of rock's
liberating power on the consciousness. Wow, if there was ever a sight
to tie in the festival's straddling of 60's Woodstock bullshit with
90's alt-rock slacker ennui,
it was seeing those two walking around together. But anyway, back to
Moore: the man would be an imposing figure if everything about him (the
way he comports himself, his hairstyle and the way it flops around, his
predilection for big loose hoodies, the stickers on his guitar, etc.)
weren't so relentlessly goofball-ish. The whole set I kept picturing
what he would look like in a well-tailored suit and a really spiffy
haircut, and it was freaky. It's what's awesome about Thurston, it's
what's loathesome about Thurston. The next day, the theater on grounds
would show a rare screening of still-not-on-DVD 1991: The Year That Punk Broke,
with director Dave Markey answering questions. My question was if
Thurston's consistent cut-up persona was at all manufactured in the
film, or whether he was just a funny motherfucker all the time; Markey
gave a pretty half-assed answer, but it was clear that Moore is, at
heart, a pretty goofy dude-- but it's all so well-intentioned, and he
always knows the right time to be serious, that you can't help but love
the little rapscallion. Imagine how awesome it would be if he was your dad;
come to think of it, I wonder how many kids in the audience that night
were thinking that very thought? In any case, as the set came to a
close I was aghast at the thought that Moore was going to exclude the
title track on the album; but he actually came out for an encore and
rocked it out-- the song is a shockingly serious and dare I say
anthemic tune from a man more at peace with proto-Malkmus pithy
mirthful wordplay: "Sadness is and sadness was/And sadness will always
be because/Comfort comes around from the strangest of men" is not the
sort of thing he normally comes up with, which was why I was impressed
with the album at the time, and still kind of am. The really odd thing
about the set was the presence of second guitarist Chris Brokaw--
mostly because he was playing songs that were so relentlessly simple;
you got the impression that Brokaw just kind of showed up an hour
before the set and said "Uh, which album are we doing again" and then
just blazed through it perfectly, because he's Chris Brokaw.
The headliner of the evening was Built To Spill performing their album Perfect From Now On, but I skipped it entirely to watch the end of Louis Malle's 1957 masterpiece Elevator To The Gallows,
and I stand by my choice. I heard that they were really great. Also
apparently Steve Albini was manning a poker table all night (more on
that in my review of Day 2), and I'll assume that your average indie
doof who checked that out hoping to play ironic card games with a rock
celebrity was probably somewhat surprised to find that the man is
fucking serious about games of chance.