Sun Kil Moon: What Actually Happened

The internet's been buzzing the past couple of days, at least my little music-nerd corner of the internet, over Sun Kil Moon's on-stage tantrum at the Lincoln Theater during the Hopscotch Music Festival.  I was at the performance, in fact I was right up front leaning against the stage, and saw the whole thing go down.  Most of the accounts I've seen got it mostly right, but here's what actually happened, at least as I recall.  Like with all memories, I can't verify that this account is 100% accurate and exactly as it all occurred, but this is my most honest and best version of the actual events. 

There was a weird energy in the Lincoln Theater even before Sun Kil Moon's set.  It was getting close to 1 am on Friday night/Saturday morning, and many people had been celebrating Hopscotch, which is to say drinking, since early afternoon.  There was a fairly long break after the last set by the fabulous Mark McGuire, and people were chatting loudly among themselves, drinking beers with friends, and taking selfies with their cell phones.  In other words, a typical boisterous late-night Friday crowd.

I'll also point out that the Lincoln is one of the chattier clubs I've been to.  It has a long balcony that stretches from the far back of the club right up to near the stage, and it's easy for people up there to forget that they're in the same club as the performer on the stage, and that the performer can hear them just about as well as they can hear him.  I was there the night before, and was annoyed by people talking loudly throughout the sets by American Aquarium and White Laces, before The War On Drugs finally drowned them all out with sheer volume.

An announcer took the stage to tell us that Sun Kil Moon would be on in just a few minutes. Applause and cheers.  But you could tell that the announcer was nervous when he tentatively added, "You might not like me so much after the next thing I have to tell you."  He said that at the artist's request, we were not to use our cell phones during the performance, but that was greeted with more cheers and applause from the audience.  "That went a lot better than I imagined," the announcer quipped, and after reminding us one more time that the show was about to start, left the stage while he was still ahead. 

Most of the audience returned to their loud conversations, so a lot of folks may not even have noticed when Mark Kozelek took the stage for the start of Sun Kil Moon's set.  Worse, when the band (two drummers, keys, and an electric guitar) and Mark finally came on stage and Mark sat down on the chair by his acoustic guitar, it seems that no one had checked during the set up to see if his microphone actually worked (hint: it didn't).  He "tested one-two" a couple of times, tapped on the mike, and fiddled with the pedals and boxes on the floor, but no sound could be heard.  Worse, no one from the sound booth came on stage to assist him and they just left him to die out there, all alone and without a working microphone, while most of the club was still oblivious to his presence on stage as they chatted among themselves.

Finally, Mark got up and walked across stage over toward the sound booth,  He was just a few feet from me and I could hear him talk to the person in the booth. "You," he said angrily, "Don't you just look down and ignore me.  What's your name?  You!  Get out here right now!"

A young lady who didn't look to be much more than 20 came onto the stage from behind the soundboard.  She looked so scared you could practically see her knees knocking together.  I don't know what she was doing in the sound booth (an intern?) but she clearly wasn't the one in charge or responsible, and fortunately for her, before Mark could ask her another question, the sound man finally appeared on stage from wherever he had been with a replacement microphone, which finally worked.  The few people who were paying attention applauded, but Mark went up to the edge of the stage, and cupping his hands to his mouth announced that there were technical difficulties and that he'd be back in five minutes.

Once again, the audience went back to drinking and talking and selfies, and once again, only those near the front of the stage noticed when the band returned and Mark sat at his chair behind a now-functional microphone.  He sat there for a moment or two waiting for the noise to subside, and when it didn't he strummed a few notes on his guitar to announce that he was ready to start.

Some people started "shushing" the louder folks in the audience, but as the shhhh spread across the room, some people started "shushing" back in sarcasm.  Soon, even as Mark launched into the first song, the theater was awash in a sea of sibilance, as the shushes and the shhhhs made the Lincoln sound like an outtake for Snakes On A Plane.     

The talking and the noise didn't stop, and Mark was visibly annoyed.  At the end of the song, he got up and addressed the audience as "Everybody, all you fucking hillbillies," telling us to "shut the fuck up."  This was not well received.  Someone shouted for him to "Shut the fuck up!" and he retorted, "No, you shut the fuck up!"

Well, at least he now had the audience's attention, but not in a good way.  "I'm about ready to walk off stage," he threatened "I don't give a fuck if I get paid or not, I'm gonna walk."  Some voices in the audience let him know that they thought that would be a good idea, and Mark then furthered alienated himself from the audience by announcing that he was from San Francisco ("Who cares?") and that some members of the band were from Toronto and had driven all the way down from New Jersey just for this event ("Get back on the Expressway!").  

"They don't represent us!," someone yelled, and it wasn't clear if they were referring to the hecklers in the crowd or the band on the stage.

Mark stood there silently for a few moments, presumably calculating his next move.  Sure, he could probably afford to miss the paycheck, but what about the band?  Could they afford to miss a payheck, or would he have to pay them for blowing the gig?  And what about the gas money, and had they checked into the hotel yet?  Finally, he apparently decided it was worth it to stay and perform for an audience he clearly despised, and many of whom now clearly despised him.  

He sat down and announced that he'd give us one more chance to pay attention and listen, and then, perhaps provocatively, launched into one of the quietest and most delicate songs of the entire evening, even though the heckling and the "shushing" still continued.  "He's just a cranky old man," someone near me observed.  

It was until the third song, the sexual self-confession Dogs, that he let his powerful baritone fill the room and the twin drums kicked in, and finally the audience quieted down. There was loud applause at the end of that song and no heckling or shushing afterwards, either because the rowdier element had left in anger by then or because he had won the audience over, or because of some combination of the two.  "So it takes a song about fucking and oral sex to win you guys over" he observed and went on with the rest of the set.

The audience was properly quiet and cell phone-free for the remainder of the evening, but I felt a tension the whole time that everything might unravel at any moment if even one idiot were to shout something out.  Mark sang several songs walking the stage with the still functioning microphone in hand, and at one point decided that someone had stacked some empty beer cans too far onto the stage. He handed one empty can to someone at the front of the crowd, and then pushed the other two aside with his foot, and you sensed that once again he was right on the edge of losing it.  Fortunately, the show continued pretty much without incident, and toward the end, he even thanked the remaining audience for being respectful and quiet, and then tried to walk back his earlier outburst, joking about the "hillbillies" thing and saying that he always considered the term one of endearment or honor.

He sang several songs from his long career, as well as several off the new album Benji, including Micheline,  Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes, I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love, and I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same.  He declined a request to perform Ben's My Friend, but managed to use the opportunity to insult the audience one more time, noting that he wants to quit playing indie rock and join Ben Gibbard in the band Death Cab For Cutie because he's so tired of playing to audiences of all guys and wants to play in a band that girls actually come to see.  Finally acknowledging that there were some girls present in the audience that evening, he added "Yeah, but you're all with ugly guys with beards."  

The set ended without an encore.         

The next morning, there was angry graffiti on the sidewalks of Raleigh.  I don't think Sun Kil Moon's going to play there again for quite a while.

Mark might have intended the "fucking hillbilly" comment as a joke, but it was stated in anger and, frankly, wasn't funny.  The offensive part to me was that he made it apparent that he had already profiled the audience and typecast us all by the worst elements present ("they don't represent us!"). I'm sure that there are no shortage of hecklers or assholes in the audiences of his beloved San Francisco or Toronto or New Jersey, and that there are plenty of angry epithets for citizens of those cities that he probably chooses (wisely) not to use.  But in Raleigh, it's hey, it's after 1 a.m. and the show's been delayed, but if the audience is restless and talkative, they must be a bunch of hillbillies. 

Speaking personally, what I observed was an ugly episode of anger from a temperamental artist.  But he doesn't, in my opinion, owe the people of Raleigh an apology. We were being loud and disrespectful, or as one of his songs might put it "We were being a brat."  But he does owe an apology to that poor little girl he terrified in the sound booth, especially if he ever wants to be in a band that girls would want to come see.