Bumbershoot: Day One Retrospective

In retrospect - and that's what this post is, a retrospective, the first of many, now that I've got a little distance and perspective on the past week - anyway, in retrospect, Day One of Bumbershoot was perfectly timed, not just for the picture-perfect Labor Day weekend weather, but in that I wound up seeing most every band from Day One again later in the week, so it served as a prequel, an overture if you will, to the music of the rest of the week.

Bumbershoot, just in case you don't know or haven't yet figured out, is a three-day music-and-arts festival in Seattle, Washington. Now in it's 43rd year, Bumbershoot claims to be the nation's largest arts festival, attracting over 100,000 people.  The  word "Bumbershoot" is some sort of variation on umbrella and parachute, and refers not to Seattle's rainy weather but to an umbrella encompassing all of the arts.  There's a lot going on in addition to music, including a film festival and an extremely popular comedy festival, as well as theatrical performances, visual arts, panel-group discussions, etc., but I was too busy with the music to bother with anything else.  The comedy would have been fun but the lines for the stand-up performances were way too long for me.

Seattle is also home to radio station KEXP, the University of Washington broadcast service.  KEXP has been a leader in video-, net-, and podcasting, and has become extremely influential on listeners across the country, including your humble narrator.  It turns out, quite coincidentally, that the station was right next door to my hotel, so I had to walk past it each and every day going to and coming from the Bumbershoot activities.

The orange-and-white mural on the building's sides are visible from Seattle's busy Aurora Avenue, and is fast becoming a landmark.  The mural was still in progress over the weekend and during the photo above, shot from the top of the Space Needle, although I understand it is now finished.

photo by Wakuda Studio

All this is relevant because one of KEXP's many activities is hosting on-air performances by selected artists, both those passing through Seattle while on tour and those performing at Bumbershoot.  The Bumbershoot performances are separate from and in addition to the artist's main performance at the festival, and are held in a small, indoor studio called the Music Lounge in front of a small, private audience.  KEXP usually posts well-produced videos of the Music Lounge performances on their own web site and on YouTube for all the world to see. 

The small, private audience is selected from listeners lucky enough to sign up on-line when announcements are randomly made over the air during the days before the festival, and I was lucky enough to win not just one, but three passes to Day One Music Lounge performances, in fact for the first three consecutive performances of the day.  So, in short, Bumbershoot 2013 started off for me with three KEXP Music Lounge sets, starting with Thao and The Get Down Stay Down.     

It's no secret to readers of this blog that Thao is one of my favorites - I rarely miss an opportunity to see her perform (as you will notice).  Suffice it to say, I couldn't have selected a better way to kick off the week than with this Music Lounge performance. 

Thao was in full Seattle grunge couture, wearing cut-off denim shorts, cowboy boots, and a flannel shirt, and before the set even started, while the KEXP dj was still playing some on-air music (did I mention that the Music Lounge performances are also broadcast live over the air and the net?), enlisted the audience in a small practical joke.  She requested that just as the dj cut away to the performance, we all laugh as loud as we could as if she had just told some hilarious joke, so that the radio and internet audience would think they missed out on something.  We complied, of course, and started fake-laughing on cue as soon as the dj announced the set, but the funny thing is that the laughter itself actually became kind of funny, and soon we were laughing for real, both over our complicity in Thao's little trick but also just for the plain silliness of laughing for no real reason. It was harder to get us to stop laughing than it was to get us to start, and it wasn't until she was several bars into her opening song Holy Roller that the laughing finally subsided.    

In addition to electric and acoustic guitar, she also played slide guitar, banjo, and 8-string mandolin on the songs Every Body, Kindness Be Conceived, Age of Ice, and We the Common (For Valerie Bolden).  

Like most Music Lounge sets, this one lasted about 30 minutes.  Afterwords, a jazz band (Matt Jorgensen) was playing outside in front of the mural at the Starbucks Stage.

The next Music Lounge set was by Oregon native ZZ Ward.  I hadn't heard of her prior to the line-up announcement for this year's Bumbershoot, but I saw that she's received a lot of good press with comparisons to everybody from Rickie Lee Jones to Tina Turner, so when the opportunity presented itself to snag Music Lounge tickets to her 1:15 performance, I went for it (to be honest, there wasn't much else that was otherwise compelling scheduled for that time).  

I was not disappointed.  Her music is hard to classify, a hybrid of blues-rock and soul with a dash of hip-hop.  She carries herself with a lot of confidence, even swagger, but can back that confidence up with her singing and playing, whether she's on guitar, keyboards, or just sitting on a stool. 

She would do well opening for someone like Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Grace Potter isn't opening for her.  ZZ Ward will be touring the next couple of months, including a date at Atlanta's misbegotten Music Midtown festival, although I won't be seeing her there, or anybody else for that matter (not a fan of the event).  The usually sedate Seattle audience in the Music Lounge seemed quite stirred by the performance and if she can get them up on their feet, she should be able to get anyone up and clapping.

Outside, another jazz band (Ernie Watts) was playing, and a bunch of middle-aged white guys were trying to jazz dance in front of the stage. 

Seeing about as much of that as I could take, I left the sunshine and went back into the Music Lounge darkness for my third set, this time by the extraordinary Charles Bradley.

We saw Charles Bradley at Bumbershoot before, performing in 2011 at the Fisher Pavilion.

Looks do not deceive - Charles Bradley is a throwback soul singer of the classic Stax/Motown variety.  For years, before finding his own voice, he worked as a James Brown impersonator, and despite his age, still has the moves to prove it.

Bradley has had to overcome many obstacles in life, including a difficult childhood and struggles as an entertainer, and now seems genuinely grateful to be receiving the recognition and appreciation he has so genuinely earned.  He ended his set by hugging each and every member of the audience, working his way across each row, until he was able to thank everyone who was there supporting him.  I've heard that he's done this before, but that fact made it feel no less genuine.

Charles Bradley played a Bumbershoot main stage later that day, as well as MFNW the following week, but due to scheduling conflicts, this was the only set by him I got to see.  Much gratitude to KEXP for making it happen.  

By the end of Bradley's set, it was 3:00 pm and I had been inside nearly all day.  Fortunately, it was also the last of my Music Lounge passes, so I joined the crowd outside waiting on the Fountain Lawn for Thao and The Get Down Stay Down's main Bumbershoot set (I told you Day One was a day of preludes to future performances).

Early in her set, Thao acknowledged that when she had recently played at Seattle's Neumo's nightclub, she had worn the exact same purple dress, and apologized if she had shattered anyone's illusions that folk-rock musicians had extensive, ever-changing wardrobes.  

I didn't point out that back in March she had worn the same dress at Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta, too.  

Thao brought a larger band onto the Fountain Lawn Stage with her than she had in the Music Lounge, including a two-man horn section:

And the violinist Alex Grey, who we saw perform as Led To Sea when she opened for Laura Veirs at The Earl back in 2010.

The additional musicians gave her set an additional bounce, and made it not-at-all-boring to hear the same band twice in one day.  In fact, we should all be so lucky as to hear Thao twice in one day (spoken like a true fan).

After Thao's set at the Fountain Lawn, I saw able to catch Seattle's Beat Connection at the Fisher Pavilion.

Another band that's a little hard to classify, the Beat Connection play what might be called electro-dance-pop (if one was inclined to use terms like "electro-dance-pop").  Bonus points to BC for bringing along the three-man Butternut Horns.

We will see Beat Connection again during MFNW.

I stayed at the Fisher Pavilion stage after Beat Connection's set, rather than wander over t whomever was playing at that moment, to get a good position right up front by the stage for the next act, Sacramento's !!! (pronounced chk-chk-chk).

The band has been described as disco-punk and funk-rock, both of which, while accurate, still don't capture the chaotic fun of their set.  While the band lays down some sturdy, dependable dance grooves, singer/frontman Nik Offer has a hyper-sexualized stage presence that electrifies a crowd. His stage moves were one part Mick Jagger (note the Some Girls shorts), one part Prince, one part Little Richard, and the rest all his own.

Their song One Boy/One Girl has a crucial female vocal part in it. 

I don't know who the fine singer in the video is, but whoever it was they brought onstage with them to sing the part was every bit as good, and had a stage presence that almost rivaled Offer's.

But his is a tough act to keep up with (even if you wanted to), and after a few songs Offer had the stage to himself again.

They closed their set with a rousing verion of their song Slyd.  We will see !!! again during MFNW.

We won't see Watsky again, however, not because we didn't like him, but just because his schedule didn't take him from Bumbershoot to MFNW.  

I didn't expect to like Watsky and almost skipped his set (you haven't heard me mention any time out for food yet, have you?).  I listened to some of his music on Spotify in the weeks prior to Bumbershoot to get familiar with his work, and found his songs to be annoying and puerile. But following !!! at the Fisher Pavilion, I wandered over to the Fountain Lawn for his set anyway while it was still in progress, and was quite surprised to find myself not only liking his set, but actually being moved by his life-affirming and sincere raps.  Maybe it was my mood, maybe it was the setting, maybe I was just more receptive to what I had been closed-minded about in the past.  But I won't deny that I liked it.

One thing that set him apart from so many other hip-hop acts was that he was backed by a full band, including a ferocious drummer, rather than just a laptop and a bunch of samples.  But he also spoke with sincerity and honesty, sometimes about difficult and complex issues, so that even when it was time to put your hands up in the air, I just didn't care.

I didn't care much for the set by England's Gary Numan, either.  Back in the late '70s and early '80s, when Numan's Cars was an MTV heavy-rotation staple (back when MTV used to play music), I had already heard enough Kraftwerk and Bowie and Eno to recognize his sources and consider him a second-tier imitator.  That's to say, I wasn't a fan back then, but still wouldn't have minded hearing some of his krautrock-influenced New Wave again, just for old times sake. 

But times change and people change, too, and Numan is no longer a Kraftwerk/Bowie/Eno imitator.  He's now a Robert Smith/Trent Reznor imitator, which only confuses things.  If you're not going to be original, at least be unoriginal in the way people expect and for which they have come to see you.  We wanted recycled Tin Machine, not recycled Cure.

Age seems to have set upon him nicely, though, I'll give him that.  The hair's an obvious wig, but the physique has filled out nicely and he presented a more muscular, full-bodied appearance on stage that the androgynous waif of the MTV videos.  

Yes, his tour did take him from Bumbershoot to MFNW, but no, we won't be seeing him again.  I do note with some wry amusement, though, that much of the Seattle press was raving about Numan's appearance, and that he was given a KEXP Music Lounge spot (I didn't go).  But the good thing about a festival like Bumbershoot is that if you don't like a particular act, there's always someone else playing somewhere, or another act to follow, so there's no use in getting upset.  

One act I have wanted to see for a long while now but always have manged to miss for some reason is Georgia's own Washed Out. What started as a laptop, bedroom project for Ernest Greene, the pride of Perry, Georgia, eventually grew not only into the band Washed Out, but a whole genre of music dubbed chill-core.  And yet, even though he's played all over the South, I've never been able to catch him.    

He did not disappoint.  Playing with a full band and accompanying himself with guitar and electronics, Greene played a warm and lovely set of his signature music and songs.  The stage and instruments were festooned with flowers and lights, and what appeared at times to be home movies were projected behind him, while the music floated out from the stage and across the audience.   

It was a truly lovely set.

At this point of the night (it was now approaching 10:00 pm), it was starting to get quite believable that 100,000 people were in attendance.  Although I had managed to get right up next to the stage for !!! by waiting between sets, I couldn't get anywhere close to Watsky or Gary Numan later.  I had a bit of luck with Washed Out - although there was a large audience present, I managed to work my way in to about the front quarter of the crowd by coming in from the side, rather that starting all the way in the back and trying to move forward.  But that was sheer luck.

The last act of the night was Crystal Castles back at the Fisher Pavilion and by the time Washed Out finished at the Fountain Lawn, there was no getting anywhere even remotely close to the stage.  From the far perimeter of the closely packed crowd, I could only see the projections on the screens surrounding the stage, but not the actual performers themselves.

Not that being close to the stage would likely have made much difference, anyway.  There was so much smoke on the stage and the lights and strobes were so blindingly bright, the performers appeared mainly as silhouettes even to those right in front of the stage.  Of course, singer Alice Glass, as she so famously does, frequently dove off the stage into the audience, to have them lift her up by her ankles so she could stand and even walk over the crowd as she continued to "sing."  

I put the word "sing" in quotations not because I think she has a bad voice or cannot sing, but because I wouldn't know. No one would.  Her microphone is fed through the laptop and electronics of fellow Crystal Castles band-member Ethan Kath where her vocals are so heavily processed and altered that at times they're barely recognizable as human.  In the song below, the ear at first fixes on a recognizable voice, but are those background "voices" human or electronic?  Eventually, foreground and background begin to merge and you're left lost in a labyrinth of layers.    

But this is not bad - actually, it's pretty damn cool.  It's deus ex machina, the complete and final synthesis of man and machine, the human and the computer, the real and the virtual.  You lose track of where one ends and the other begins.

It's one thing to do this with recordings in the studio, but with their fog machines, strobes, and banks of Marshall amps, Crystal Castles has managed to perfect a way of doing this live and on stage, to the point where one cannot distinguish the performer from her image until she's literally standing right on your head.

Case in point: the picture below. Is that a giant Alice in front of a tiny audience?  Or is that a crowd screaming and cheering in front of a video screen?  In either case, the distinction between the orgainc and electronic is blurred, and why is she giving them the finger?  

There's also a strong undercurrent of eroticism shot through all of this.  Watching Glass give herself up to the layers of light and sound, one can imagine a form of sensual submission, not to mention when she throws her body repeatedly into the audience where she's undoubtedly groped and mauled.  Yet there's also a post-feminist angle to this - she winds up being the master of the situation, standing high above the crowd, in charge and in control, even as chaos swarms around her.    

I slowly worked my way forward throughout the set, but still didn't get close enough to see anything more than an occasional glimpse of the actual performers and not just their projections.  But I was still able to hear everything just fine and to feel the frenzy of the crowd.  I still felt like I had the Crystal Castles experience, and I can check that one off of my bucket list. Good, now I don't have to go to a Crystal Castles concert again.

And that was it for the first day of Bumbershoot.   I walked back to my hotel, passing the KEXP studio on the way, and called it a night.

It took a lot longer than I had expected to write all of this, and I suddenly find myself more than a little overwhelmed as I realize I have eight more days of Bumbershoot and MFNW still left to document, but at least I've now made a start.