Tag Archives: coachella

Tyler’s Favorite Albums (1983): Violent Femmes

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I could dedicate this essay to just praising the originality and uncompromising dark humor of the Violent Femmes’ definitive first album. I could tell you how Brian Ritchie’s bass solo in “Please Don’t Go” may be my favorite one ever recorded. I could also recount how “Kiss Off” is a sleeper for one of my favorite karaoke songs. I could also get into a one-sided argument about how, in a hardcore landscape facing the disintegration of Minor Threat and a takeover by meatheads, there was nothing more punk rock than scrapping anything electric or distorted and essentially busking for ten tracks. Instead, I’ll share a couple disparate memories related to the Violent Femmes which illustrate just how pervasive and timeless this record is, in spite of itself.

Flashpoint: 2003.
I went to the WBCN River Rave with my college girlfriend and some of her friends from the Boston area. I was already pissed because Blur cancelled, and in order to keep some seats we snagged near the pavilion, we had to sit though Saliva for 30 minutes. Now, my audience is so niche that I’m probably not off-base to write that anyone reading this already thinks that Saliva are one of the shittiest hard rock bands to ever (1) emerge from Memphis or (2) have a cross-over hit single. Because it was a radio station-sponsored music festival, a lot of the people there bopped up and down to “Click Click Boom” and cheered as Josey Scott ranted that the Dixie Chicks should have been kicked out of “our” country. After Saliva finally finished their set and got the hell offstage, we were more than ready for – “hey, who’s on next, anyway? …. JACK JOHNSON?”

Yes, the genius programmers at WBCN decided to follow a right-wing cheez-metal band with the most obnoxiously chill singer-songwriter to emerge in the twin frat-bro shadows of Dave Matthews and Brad Nowell. I didn’t know much of Johnson’s music at the time, and none of us had any beef with him, but like Matthews and Nowell, his fans hadn’t done his reputation any favors. Johnson himself was probably flabbergasted to have to follow Josey Scott’s talentless “Love It Or Leave It” boom-boom show, but the guy deserves a LOT of credit for resetting the temperature that day. As utterly inoffensive as Johnson’s music is, he helped dial things back a bit and put us all in a better frame of mind. Maybe that programmer DID think it through, in retrospect.

Anyway, the moment when my opinion of Jack Johnson shifted, permanently, came at the beginning of his third or fourth song, when he strummed the instantly-recognizable opening chords of “Please Don’t Go,” the third track on Violent Femmes. I perked up, probably vocalizing, “Is this dude really playing a Violent Femmes song? And a deep cut??” Turned out, that dude really was playing a Violent Femmes deep cut. He sang the first verse of “Please Don’t Go,” instantly making casual fans of every beleaguered music nerd in the amphitheater. It was still early enough so that the drunks were only tipsy, too, so I had yet to make a voyage to the bathrooms in a scene not unlike when Simon Pegg darts through a crowd of zombies in Shaun of the Dead.

Fast Forward 10 Years: 2013. The California Low Desert. Coachella Festival.
My friend Laura and I met up to car-camp with a couple friends of friends. Our site was surrounded by, on one side, a group of nice folks who drove out from New Mexico, and on the other sides, about 15,000 of the worst people on the planet. However, Blur were playing, and although I finally got to see them play in Hyde Park in 2009, I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to see them on US soil for the first time*.

As the first night finally arrived, we watched the Stone Roses sleepwalk through their set before she split to go watch How to Destroy Angels, whose set conflicted with Blur’s. For those who don’t remember, How to Destroy Angels was a Nine Inch Nails side project with a relatively brief shelf life. From what she told me at our campsite later, she managed to get pretty close to the stage, where she befriended a short middle-aged man who mentioned his son was over seeing the Wu-Tang Clan. She could not get over how a person in their 50s would be that amped to see a Trent Reznor.

Gordon Gano (Violent Femmes) playing at the Coachella Festival, April 2013. (Photo by Tyler S. for Sonic Geography).

The following afternoon, our group migrated over to one of the main stages to see the Violent Femmes. As they took the stage, Laura lit up, turned to me, and said “Oh my god – that nice old guy I talked to before How to Destroy Angels?? That was the singer from this band!”

My response was hardly understated: “You hung out with Gordon Gano and didn’t tell me!?”

Laura defended herself, reminding me that she didn’t know who he was – Gano didn’t even mention being there to play at the festival! What a humble guy, considering how he wrote some of the most timeless and quintessential camp songs of the 20th century. So humble for a guy who created the best record of 1983, mostly when he was still a disgruntled teenager, forced to ride buses around Milwaukee and occasionally getting locked inside his house by his own parents.

Femmes drummer Victor DeLorenzo (who I’ve seen play with the band twice in between his stint being kicked out) opened their set on that blazing sunny afternoon announcing, “We’re going to play our first record for you, from top to bottom!” That’s the Violent Femmes for you – giving the people what they want! If only more foundational underground bands could be so thoughtful. 

Victor DeLorenzo (Violent Femmes) playing at the Coachella Festival, April 2013. (Photo by Tyler S. for Sonic Geography).
Brian Ritchie^ (Violent Femmes) playing at the Coachella Festival, April 2013. (Photo by Tyler S. for Sonic Geography).

Liner Notes

*I found out, years later, that the 2003 run supporting Think Tank was a nightmare for them, since Graham Coxon was no longer with the band, Simon Tong wasn’t a suitable replacement, and Dave Rowntree was going through coke-rage to the point where he was a tyrannical asshole to Nardwuar during their Vancouver stop. Rowntree did apologize and Nardwuar accepted, but goodness what an uncomfortable video if you find it.

^Am I the only one who can’t help but think about this when they look at this picture?

Your “Stay Home” Sonic Sunday Spiel

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A week ago, when I was writing about the Replacements, I couldn’t have anticipated we’d be here. I don’t have a whole lot to say about the ramifications of this moment in history that’s any better than what Mike Davis wrote (see my previous entry).

Considering how COVID-19 inspired the cancellation of multiple major sporting events, including March Madness, the next few weeks are going to help shift into focus just how necessary many of these “unalienable” institutions truly are. South By Southwest and Coachella both cancelled, and as obvious as the lost revenues will hurt many individual artists and (yes, some) vendors, both events were unquestionably bloated and appeared to have been teetering on the edge of sustainability for years.

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The euphoric experience of seeing New Order in a giant tent at midnight with thousands of other people wasn’t enough to cancel out how there are so many things wrong with this picture. (Coachella, April 2013)

To be fair, I’ve only been to Coachella once and I’ve never made it to SXSW, but the former presented a brutal overuse of already-constricted resources in California’s low desert, and the latter… well, I have many friends who’ve enjoyed attending it, but most of my Austinite friends and musician friends (who actually work or play at South-By) hate it. Mega-events like these represent the late-capitalist culmination of generations of corporate commodification of pop culture. As Simon Frith put it over three decades ago,

The rock era – born around 1956 with Elvis Presley, peaking around 1967 with Sgt Pepper, dying around 1976 with the Sex Pistols – turned out to be a by-way in the development of twentieth-century popular music, rather than, as we thought at the time, any kind of mass-cultural revolution. Rock was a last romantic attempt to preserve ways of music-making… that had been made obsolete by technology and capital (‘Music for Pleasure’ 1988, p. 1).

Cut to: A scene I think about a lot. When I was 18, I stood in the back of the crowd at the Warped Tour Main Stage, watching Henry Rollins scream about how some corporation had the nerve to charge $4 for a soda. Nearby, a young kid grabbed a Gatorade from an ice barrel, and the middle-aged vendor screamed “Hey! Put it back, you little shit.”  Corporate America had co-opted youth culture (again, in another vein), and they were making it increasingly clear that they would only tolerate the youth so long as they kept their cash flowing. It astounds me when people (mainly my age and older) wonder “why kids today don’t care about rock music.” Moreover, I can’t help but imagine that experiences like those accelerated Rollins’ departure from the music business.

As festivals got increasingly abundant, expensive, and bloated, I always wondered where the tipping point would be. Well, here it is. A lot of pundits thought it came in the form of the failure of the Fyre Festival, but (hilarious as it was), that fiasco didn’t appear to result in Goldenvoice and LiveNation stepping back and taking a long, hard, look at what they were doing. All Fyre Festival did was prove that rich idiots were still able to sell snake oil to other rich idiots.

I do not want my propensity to excavate silver linings from the most dire and ahistorical of situations to make light of how the COVID-related halting of certain institutions has already profoundly impacted millions and will likely hit millions more. It is why I will end this post with a series of links to check out to help support those in financial or physical need this month. However, I hope more than anything that those who stand to benefit from this in any way (even in terms of valuable lessons learned), do.

Scorched Pop Music and Representation in the Desert

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As difficult as finding time to even breathe much less update this site has been this week, I would be remiss if I didn’t share a couple of thoughts about my experience at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival last weekend.

"Move along, nothing to see here..."

“Move along, nothing to see here…”

For the uninitiated, Coachella has steadily become the most expensive, grandiose, bombastic, and popular music festival in the United States and could one day be that for the world. It has grown in clout each year upon its inception in 1999 (with one key exception being 2000, when it was not held). At this point, the mere mention of the sun-scorched festival at the bizarrely-greened Indio polo club (Ian MacKaye publicly questioned the presence of Palm Trees and grass in the middle of California’s low desert) evokes a series of emotions from even those who’ve never ventured out. My own opinions about the corporate structure of these overblown musical events aside, I decided to cross over to the other side and check what the fuss was about this year. Also, my love of the band Blur outweighs my common sense (the Descendents, too).

When they announce the official lineup for Coachella every year, the internet goes kaboom. This is equal parts fans expressing their support, the cynical expressing their cynicism over the only four bands they find cool to not be billed, and as producer Chad Clark referred to it, “ahistorical stupidity.” 

The geographer, however, would look at it differently. Given how much of a premium the festival brass put on booking the top sellers and greatest hype-accumulators (and minimizing international flight expenses), a vast majority of musical acts across the six stages over the three days were North American. The biggest handful of exceptions were British (Blur, Stone Roses, New Order, Franz Ferdinand, Hot Chip, the XX, Alt-J), but a few other areas of the globe were represented, too, including Iceland (Of Monsters and Men), Australia (Tame Impala), Italy (Benny Benassi), and Japan (Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra).*

Oh, Canada... Scene at night from the car campground.

Oh, Canada… Scene at night from the car campground.

Given the festival’s international scope, it attracted a great array of visitors from all corners of the globe. All across the campground and sprinkled throughout the crowd, one could find innumerable markers of nation-state (and national) identities. I was too distracted to keep a tally, but I saw a large number of Canadian, Australian, British, Mexican, Taiwanese, Chilean, and other flags. I had great conversations with visitors from cities spread as far away as Calgary, Perth, and Tokyo. Here are a couple examples of other places that found a temporary home in the California wasteland.

MEXICO CITY
During Cafe Tacvba’s set on Saturday afternoon, an interesting phenomenon occurred. The band’s lyrics and onstage banter (almost entirely in Spanish) coalesced with the fervor of their fans (decorated with Mexican regalia) and the seething desert afternoon heat to simulate the place of a music festival that could have easily stood South of the Border. Of course it helped that many festival goers either spoke Spanish or were visiting from Mexico as well.

The crowd to see Cafe Tacvba on the main stage on Saturday afternoon, 4/20.

The crowd to see Cafe Tacvba on the main stage on Saturday afternoon, 4/20.

BOSTON
It was also noteworthy seeing Boston represented in the desert via the Dropkick Murphys’ frenetic set. The recent Boston marathon tragedy provided a sympathetic layer to the band’s usual reconstruction of their hometown through skinhead anthems, Irish musical threads (several waving Irish flags were visible, though none of the band’s members have ever been Irish nationals to my knowledge), and blatant name-checking of places in Massachusetts. Hearing these songs in 96 degree low-desert heat felt particularly strange, especially considering how much time I have spent in Boston in my life, but whether or not the crowd members yelling along to “Caught in a Jar” had actually been to Boston felt inconsequential. Few things could better testify to the band’s consistent expression of love for their city (other than perhaps how their first singer, Mike McColgan, left the band to become a firefighter).

For some reason, Palm Trees and celtic punk don't mix. Dropkick Murphy's on the Coachella main stage. 4/20/13

Palm Trees and Celtic punk don’t mix, but the band didn’t let that tone them down. Dropkick Murphy’s on the Coachella main stage. 4/20/13

Unfortunately, that’s all I have time for right now. As much as it would take a lot to subject myself to the experience again, I’m glad that I can now say I went. As much as my head still aches, it was a genuinely enriching experience of sorts.

CONFERENCE THIS WEEKEND

Not that I’m back in conference condition (if there is such a thing), but for those of you interested, my esteemed colleagues and I will be heading up to San Luis Obispo for the 67th annual California Geographers Society meeting. I’m presenting research (on emotional geographies of place in influencing LA record shop development over the past few years) on Saturday at 2:30 in Session 4C – Room 03-201… which I assume will make sense when I actually see the campus.

* Apologies to the bands and countries represented who I couldn’t mention due to lack of time and space. The full line-up is listed at their website here.