Shaky Knees, Day Two, Reconsidered

Have You Ever Seen The Rain? - The Lumineers

It makes you a better person when you admit that you were wrong about something.  Anyone can take a position on some issue and then stick to that position and defend it, even as overwhelming evidence accumulates to the contrary.  But to step back and say that you realize now that you were wrong before is the mark of a better man or woman.  Sunday, amid all the mud, flood, and beer of the second day of Shaky Knees, I had several opportunities for humble self improvement.

Specifically, last Friday I took the position that the music festival didn't seem to be managed in a very professional way. This opinion was based on the fact that they had to send out an email to ticket holders clarifying that you did not have to go to the box office before the festival began to exchange your ticket for a wristband as suggested by some of their earlier messages.  And I still maintain that a bicycle valet is no substitute for parking in traffic-clogged and automobile-obsessed Atlanta.

But as it turned out, other than those faux pas, the festival was extremely well organized and professionally run.  The lines at the gate were short and quick, the security staff was friendly and non-intrusive (unlike the often surly security at The Masquerade), and the bands started their sets right on time.  In fact, in most instances, Band A would take the stage at the exact moment that Band B finished their set on another stage, creating a seamless, continuous concert experience.  So I'll admit it - my initial position was wrong and I now acknowledge that the festival was in fact very well organized and professionally managed.  I'll get to my other mea culpae later.

I had wanted to get there by 12:30 on Sunday to show some support for Atlanta's Von Grey, but still exhausted from the previous day, I slept until nearly noon so that didn't happen.  When I did finally did arrive at the festival grounds, the  weather couldn't have been more different than the day before.

The sun was out, the temperatures were warmer, and it was an all around better day than Saturday's chilling deluge.  There were still lots of  mud and puddles on the ground, but other  than that, it was as if the music gods were rewarding us for putting up with their tantrums of the previous day.

Over on the Old Fourth Ward Stage, South Carolina's Shovels and Rope were on stage.

The music of Shovels and Rope blurs the distinction between country and folk.  During their set, I had somehow managed to be oblivious to whatever line I had crossed and found myself stage side in the VIP viewing area.  When I left, security didn't seem upset or angry that one had slipped past them (see what I mean about friendlier staff?).

I got over to the North Avenue Stage in time to grab some rail space for the Heartless Bastards set.  The Bastards play an enjoyable indie rock with some great guitar work and the warm vocals of Erika Wennerstrom.  

At times, they gave off a sort of Drugstore Cowboys vibe, but with less of a folk-rock and more of a harder, garage-rock sound. 

A good-sized crowd had turned up to hear the band play. I met a couple at the rail next to me who not only drove all the way down from Calgary, Alberta, just for this festival, but specifically to hear the Heartless Bastards perform.  Although the audience was noticeably larger than on Saturday, I met no one who would admit to not having been there the day before.  But come on guys, there weren't nearly this many here yesterday, this has to be somebody's first day.

The next band up, Delta Spirit, played with a lot of enthusiasm and gave the audience lots of opportunities for participation (sing alongs, hand clapping, telling the band how you're doin', etc.).  The ubiquitous Kenny Crucial was noted in the audience during the Delta Spirit set. 

As they played, a lone dark cloud passed overhead and sprinkled a few raindrops on the audience.  It turned out to be only a sprinkle and didn't last for more than 5 minutes (about one song), but it got us all pulling out our rain gear and ponchos and hoods in anticipation of more.  However, by the time we were all geared up, the cloud had passed and it was once again a beautiful day.

Interesting note: Delta Spirit songs often employ two drummers (on other songs, one of the drummers moves over to the keyboards), and the band has as large a floor tom as any that I've ever seen.  I wasn't even sure how one would even play it, until near the end of their set when the keyboardiest/drummer grabbed a pair of maracas and started wailing on it.

Philadelphia's Kurt Vile came on stage for his set with The Violators wearing a Flaming Lips t-shirt and wasted no time launching into the title track of his new album, the appropriately-titled-for-the-day Walkin' on a Pretty Daze.  

Like yesterday's Roadkill Ghost Choir, Kurt Vile had a sort of War On Drugs sound, which is not surprising as Vile was a founding member of that band.  One could also hear traces of Neil Young and Crazy Horse and even a little bit of a Velvet Underground drone.

The Violators performed a sort of band reduction during their set, starting out as a quintet,

but after a while, they were reduced to a quartet.  Talk about jangle pop - the quartet version of the band featured three guitars, drums, and no bass.

Eventually, The Violators just became Kurt, solo.

As his 60-minute set progressed, the skies were becoming darker and darker, and soon gusting winds picked up suggesting that a downpour was imminent.  The rest of the band came back on stage and joined Kurt in a fierce, loud, feedback-drenched, Crazy Horse-style finale, and as they hit peak intensity, a big gust of wind lifted up the stage-top canopy and dumped what looked like about 100 gallons of water onto the engineers' control panel. I hope no equipment was damaged, but it was pretty amusing watching the engineers frantically try to cover everything up with tarp and plastic sheeting as the band wailed away, and it was hard not to think that The Violators had just literally blown the roof off of the stage.

In any event, amusing or not, metaphorical or literal, a hard rain came down for about the next 10 or 15 minutes as Dr. Dog took over the Old Fourth Ward Stage.  The last time we saw Dr. Dog, they were in Candler Park in the middle of another drenching downpour, that one beginning while they were playing their song Swimming With the Sharks ("The rain is falling, it’s after dark, the streets are swimming with the sharks").  I used the time during their rain-soaked set this year to get something to eat and find a good spot to watch The Antlers at the North Avenue Stage.

The gambit worked out well, as I got a position just one person back from the pole.  Better still, the rain let up about a half hour before The Antlers' set time.

We've seen The Antlers several times before, twice in one day during MFNW 2011 and later that year at the adjacent (yet still godforsaken) Masquerade.

Back in 2011, they were still a band that had released one wildly popular, cult-favorite album, Hospice, and were out to prove they were more than "that Hospice band" by promoting an excellent new album, Burst Apart.  Now, having proven themselves to be the real thing, they performed with much more authority, even swagger, playing melancholy and atmospheric songs from both albums plus their newest EP, Undersea.  

In the I-Didn't-Know-That Department, keyboardist Darby Cicci said that he lives - or once lived - just a couple blocks away from the festival site and that the gig felt like a homecoming to him.  Didn't know he was from Atlanta.

Meanwhile, however, up in the sky, dark clouds were once again returning.  There was a bit of a race as to which would finish first - The Antlers' set or the calm before the storm.

The storm won and it started raining, hard, as The Antlers wrapped up their set with their usual closer, Putting The Dog to Sleep.  Twoard the end of the song, guitarist Timothy Mislock dramatically stepped out from under the cover of the stage to deliver the climactic guitar solo while heroically standing in the downpour.

The rain would continue for the next hour and a half, up until the very end of the set by the evening's headliners, The Lumineers.  It was my first time seeing the Grammy Award-winning, Colorado folk-rock band.

I've previously discussed the ambivalent feelings I and other indie-music fans have with success.  We want to cheer a band on, encourage others to listen to them, and so on and so forth, but as soon as they start getting  popular and getting lots of attention and heavy radio play, as soon as their songs start turning up in automobile and beer commercials on television, we tend to back off, claiming we were never really that big fans in the first place.  This has happened to a lot of bands, particularly folk-rock bands like Mumford & Sons and Of Monsters & Men.  It is happening now with The Lumineers.

Not that The Lumineers aren't almost asking for our contempt.  They're almost the Disney version of an indie folk-rock band, or perhaps a Hollywood parody of an indie folk-rock band, even though they're not from Hollywood.  Still, Central Casting couldn't come up with a better approximation of what middle America must think an indie folk-rock band would look and sound like.  They're actually from Denver, but they dress like they're 19th Century Irish immigrants.  They have an elaborate Prairie Home Companion-style stage set; in fact, there's very little about them that doesn't practically scream "PBS."  

And talk about derivative: Oh look, there's a mandolin, just like Head & The Heart and Blind Pilot.  Oh look, there's a female cellist, just like Other Lives and Ra Ra Riot (or for that matter, Murder By Death, who performed earlier on another stage while I was watching Heartless Bastards).  Oh look, there's a glockenspiel, just like everybody else, and in case you might not otherwise have noticed it, they seem to be incapable to play it without one band member holding it up theatrically while another member strikes a few notes with equal flourish.  

Even their signature tune, Ho Hey, sounds like it was written by a focus-study group analyzing popular lyrical motifs in indie folk-rock songs.  I could go on, but you get the picture and at this point I think I might have pissed off at least half of the people who've managed to come across this post and read this far down.

So now I'm going to piss off the other half with my second mea culpa, my second admission that I was wrong about something.  Despite all my misgivings, despite all my reservations, even despite my earlier plan to leave Shaky Knees after The Antlers finished their set, I have to admit that The Lumineers are actually quite good.  Despite all the hokum, everything works and they're all terrific musicians who put on a thoroughly entertaining show.  As soon as they stepped out on the rain-soaked stage and opened their set with an all-too-appropriate cover of Have You Ever Seen The Rain?, I was hooked.  I was then thoroughly entertained for the next 90 minutes as I stood in the downpour with the largest crowd of the entire festival.

So, I'll be the better person and just say it: I was wrong.  The Lumineers are a great band.  If  they're successful, it's because of their talent, not a case of mediocrity finding its own level.  And as for the costumes, as Frank Zappa once said "Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform and don't kid yourself."  If we're honest about it, wasn't every band conscious of what they wore on stage and the image it would project?  Weren't they all wearing uniforms of one sort or another?  Wasn't Kurt Vile's Flaming Lips t-shirt every bit as much of a "costume" as The Lumineers suspenders and hats?

During their signature Hey Ho, lead singer Wesley Schultz stopped the song midway and asked the audience to put down their cell phones and cameras for at least one minute and just enjoy the present moment.  It felt a little scripted, but it still was a surprising moment.

Okay, so they're the kind of band that can't introduce their members, saying "And on the piano, we have . . . " without said member literally jumping up on the piano.  I'm surprised they didn't use the old  joke about "the farmer, outstanding in his field" (although for all I know that line might be buried in their lyrics somewhere - I don't really pay too much attention to lyrics).  

What I'm saying is that it all works, and if you can't enjoy yourself at a Lumineers concert, I'm sorry to have to inform you that you probably can't enjoy yourself at all.  And how can you not love a band that ends the evening with a cover of The Talking Heads' Home?

In all, they delivered about a four- or five-song encore culminating with Home, stepping out of the lights to the very edge of the stage (the rain had conveniently stopped for them by that point).  They normally perform that last song without amplification, but given the size of the audience at the outdoor festival, wisely allowed their closing song to be heard by all.

So at around 10:00 pm on a soggy Sunday evening, that was it for the inaugural Shaky Knees music festival. The weather had been not just awful but god-awful, but that brought out the best in the fans, in the musicians, and in the volunteers and workers (including security).  It could have turned out terribly, with cancellations, long delays, and ineptitude, but instead it all came off without a hitch.

Except, of course, for the weather.  Which brings me to my final mea culpa - I realized from this weekend that I had the title of this blog, Water Dissolves Music, wrong.  If anything, it seems that music dissolves water, or to paraphrase the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, "Music will get you through times of bad weather better than weather will get you through times of bad music."

Final note:  The only reason that I'm including the following clip, another video digest from my camera, is because I posted yesterday's clip, and although the quality of this one is also pretty poor, it's at least slightly better than yesterday's.  It's not going to win any awards, not by a long shot, but at least it's a slight improvement over Saturday's and you can't say that I'm not, if anything, a completist.

Shaky Knees, Day One, Revisited

I've seen them before, hiking the trails of the sub-arctic rain forests of Alaska's Kenai Peninsula and bicycling the rainy streets of Portland, Oregon in February - people dressed in appropriate rain gear, protected from the elements, to whom drenching downpours do not matter.

With a forecast of 100% rain for the day, I briefly considered not going to the first day of the inaugural Shaky Knees music festival in Atlanta, but then, inspired by those whom I've seen before, decided to outfit myself appropriately and go for it.  Who was I to let a little wet weather get between me and a day of great music?  So I put on my best hiking pants, two Capilene t-shirts (one short- and one long-sleeved), a fleece vest, and not one but two raincoats, a lightweight hooded shell under a Mountain Gear raincoat I bought in Portland specifically for that city's rain.  I put on a pair of thick-soled Nike air sneakers that looked like they'd hold up against moisture, and headed across town.

Long story short - I was not dressed at all like one of those adventurers I'd seen in the past and got drenched.  I soon realized that the hiking pants had not been purchased for any water-resistant properties (they had none) but just for cool, light-weight protection for my legs when hiking on a hot summer day.  They got soaked and clung to my legs, even turning semitransparent for part of the day so everyone could admire the plaid boxers I was wearing underneath (my wardrobe malfuction).  Cold, wet, and clingy, they chilled me to the bone, leaving me borderline hypothermic by the end of the evening.

But I'm ahead of myself, and I'm quite sure no one came here to read about my sartorial selections, and that everyone else who attended that first day of Shaky Knees got just as soaked as I did.  Although I saw a few pretty impressive raincoats on some people, I also saw a lot of makeshift, trash-bag ponchos, the flimsiest of raingear, and a a lot of uncovered, wet heads, hair caked to their faces and scalps.  We all got soaking wet together, and that contributed to the spirit of camaraderie among the audience.  "Yeah, I'm wet, caked with mud, shivering, and looking ridiculous," we all realized at one point or another, "but so are you and so is everyone else here."  The few, the proud, the waterlogged.

By the time I arrived, a light rain was falling, the entry lines were short, and Roadkill Ghost Choir were on stage.  I had not heard of them before, but found myself enjoying them quite a bit.  Their sound reminded me at times of The War on Drugs, and they made good use of their several multi-instrumentalist players.

Their lead singer/guitarist said he was pretty impressed to see people outside standing in the rain to hear his band play music.

The rain picked up throughout their set, and continued to fall through the following set by LA's Vintage Trouble, an old school r&b/funk outfit that provided the perfect antidote to the lousy weather.  Despite the downfall, the band had people dancing, and lead singer Ty Taylor even put on a pair of galoshes and wandered out into the audience, belting out his song in the rain.

The band wore suits, bowler hats, and ties, which seemed a bit corny, but they made up for it in enthusiasm.  Their high-energy performance was exactly what the audience needed at that particular hour of that particular rain-soaked day.

Even my camera lens, like everything else, was getting soaking wet.

Despite the feel-good nature of their set, I left early to get a good position to see another LA band, Hanni El Khatib.  The gambit worked well, and I got a spot right at the front rail.

Hanni (the name is Palestinian) plays a fuzzed-out brand of garage rock that sounds equal parts street tough and psychedelic.  This was one of the acts I was looking forward to seeing, and part of my reason for braving the rain to make it out to Shaky Knees to begin with.  I don't think he's played Atlanta before, but I loved his song Loved One and posted the video of it on my other blog a year or so ago.  I was pleased to hear him end his set with an extended version of the song, hiding it with another before breaking into the distinctive guitar riff.

By the time his set was over, the rain had broken through all of my so-called wet-weather gear and every item of clothing I had worn was thoroughly soaked. Like most of the rest of the audience, though, I just resigned myself to being wet and cold, and marched to the next stage for the next act.

An amazing thing happened during that next set.  For a brief moment or two, the rain actually stopped, the only time during the entire day that it had let up, and as Wales' The Joy Formidable played, the sun actually peaked through the clouds, if even for a nanosecond.

We've seen The Joy Formidable before, at the Wonder Ballroom during MFNW 2011 and at Music Midtown the same year. Since that time, they've released a new record, but they still played a mix of their more familiar, older material (Austere, Cradle, etc.) along with their new music during their set.

After all these years, guitarist/vocalist Ritzy Bryan still manages to look surprised to find herself on a stage playing electric guitar to an audience.

 They can still create a wall of sound that raises in swells like waves that crash over the audience.  They're a terrific band live, and another good reason for attending Shaky Knees.

I needed to recover after the thundering climax of The Joy Formidable's set, as well as get a bite to eat, so I wandered around the festival grounds looking for a suitable food truck.  While wandering, I came across the Chicago band The Orwells:

the Memphis band Lucero:

and lots and lots of mud:

Refueled after devouring a nice Cuban panini, I watched the set by the current master of the electric blues, Gary Clark, Jr.

The rain was relentless.  After teasing us with a minute or two of respite during The Joy Formidable's set, it returned without a moment's relief, ranging from a steady drizzle to an outright downpour.  In all, nearly three inches of rain fell during the day.

We were not deterred.  A large crowd had gathered in front of the Masquerade Music Park Stage to see Jim James play at sunset.

We last saw Jim James playing with My Morning Jacket at a memorable concert, also at sunset, in Edgefield, Oregon.  James has a unique ability to mesmerize an audience, and even performing new material from a new album in front of a wet and freezing crowd, he was able to create and sustain his magic for a full 90-minute set.

The rain and the lights were playing havoc on both my auto-focus and my auto-exposure, making it difficult to take an even halfway decent picture of a performer playing no more than 20 yards away from me.

When James started playing the saxophone, you began to wonder, "Is there nothing he can't do?".

It's hard enough trying to perform after a Jim James set, but the rain didn't help things any as it continued at the medium to downpour level throughout headliners Band of Horses set.

We last saw Band of Horses at MFNW 2011, and on Saturday night they played a 75-minute set.  When they finished, the crowd, or at least a paying portion of the crowd, was finally allowed inside of The Masquerade and out of the rain for a late-night set by the enigmatic Swedish band GOAT and The Black Angels.  Soaked from head to toe, splattered with mud, fatigued from being on my feet since at least 2:00 pm, and literally shivering with cold, I got inside of The Masquerade and made it to the upstairs Heaven Stage, only to realize I had another 45-minute wait of standing around, dripping and shivering, before GOAT even took the stage.

There was no way I was going to make it.  Even if I did get through the 45-minute wait, as good as both bands are, I wouldn't have enjoyed the sets in my present condition.  Giving in to exposure, fatigue and old age, I called it a night and bagged it.   I would have loved to have stayed and seen both bands, but I also wanted to be able to appreciate them, and besides, I had another whole day of music ahead of me tomorrow.

So that was that.  It was still raining, hard, when I left The Masquerade, as I drove home, and as I got out of my wet clothes and finally into a warm bed that night.  Not to get ahead of myself again, but it was still raining when I got up the next morning.

I thought long and hard about whether or not I should even post this, but here's my poor battered camera's rain-soaked video digest of the day, raw and unedited and with atrocious audio quality (you might want to just turn the sound off entirely, if not just skip the video altogether).  You've been warned.