Get ready for the clumsiest complex sentence ever.
Don’t you hate it when you see someone you used to know and it takes ten minutes of talking to them before you remember who they are and they end up being much nicer and more intelligent and creative than almost anyone you know?
I saw a beautiful woman at Pitchfork who greeted me warmly and I did not recognize her. I thought she that she was a teacher that I had lunch with when I taught at Columbia College, and we exchanged teaching ideas. But now I think she might have been a bartender/owner of a bar I used to go to.
I also ran into an interesting and friendly guy I used to know from Hotti Biscotti days (they used to have a great film series there every Saturday), but I did not recognize him at first. His name is Andy Oloffson and he is a skillful keyboard player. He gave me a CD he played on, and it was better than ½ of the bands I saw at Pitchfork. The CD is Called Varelse Dans and the band he played in was called Grun Tu Malani (at first I thought it was the other way around.) The name came from Henderson the Rain King, a novel by the great Chicago writer, Saul Bellow. The music on the CD is a relaxed, cool, tasty and meaty kind of post Bitches Brew fusion. Here’s some samples of their work. The songs on the CD are named after animals. I particularly like the song “Chupacabra.”
Like I said, I went to Pitchfork Festival this year on Saturday (I only missed one or two Pitchforks and I even went to the Intonation Festival). I got there late and the first group I saw was Digable Planets. The trio sounded a bit less jazzy and not as festive as the last time I saw them, but they were still more than all right. They closed with “Rebirth of the Slick (Cool like That)” their only hit, which alludes to No less than the jazz great Miles Davis and the blaxploitation icon, Cleopatra Jones and it includes a great Art Blakey sample.
The audience loved the stuff from the first CD, but some of the darker, lesser known stuff from their underperforming second DC, “Blowout Comb” is just as good. Digable Planets also contributed some great stuff to an AIDs benefit/rap-hip-hop CD titled Stolen Moments: Red White and Cool (they teamed with the great Lester Bowie) and the CD also includes Don Cherry, The Roots, Pharaoh Sanders, Branford Marsalis (who does a good version of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”) and Joshua Redman.
Here’s the Pitchfork version:
Of course I also enjoyed Jenny Hval and the Savages, both of which were more contemporary and experimental. Hival was pleasing and somewhat bizarre sounding. She came off as exotic and her arty pop reminded me of a harder edged Bjork in songs like “Female Vampire,” “The Battle is over,” and the erotically charged “Silence is Kinky” which could have been used in the Masters of Sex cable TV series. Her recorded versions of the songs are much softer than the concert versions.
Savages are a great London Based all-female band whose work recalls the post punk sounds of The Delta 5, Gang of Four and Au Pairs. They create ambient, off putting guitar sounds that make me feel uncomfortable and excited at the same time.
I have their first Silence Yourself only, but the stuff of their second CD sounded just as good live.
Here’s a taste of their music. The vocals here sound a bit like Siouxsie and the Banshees.
This song video for one of their best songs “Shut Up” contains a spoken word section before the song.
I studied up on Blood Orange a bit, and I expected to hear a pleasant alt country band. I later read that they broke up in the ‘90s, and the blood orange guy I saw was an ok British Rand B influenced vocalist who previously worked such musicians as Florence (from Florence and the Machine) and Faris Badwan (from The Horrors), and Alex Turner (of Arctic Monkeys) under the name of Lightspeed Champion.
The Welsh band, Super Furry Animals presented a pleasing and potent mix of Psychedelia, Alternative rock, indie rock, power pop, neo-psychedelia, electronica, and Britpop according to Wikipedia. To me they sounded like a straight up good folk/psychedelic pop band.
Of course I also saw Brian Wilson, and he was the main reason I went to the fest (I had already seen about four of the other acts before). Paul McCartney himself said that “God Only Knows” was his favorite song ever, and it brought tears to his eyes.
But Jimi Hendrix hated the Beach Boys and he disparagingly said that the band was nothing but a psychedelic barbershop quartet (he also somewhat famously called the Monkees’ music dishwater.)
To tell you the truth when I was a kid I hated the beach boys too. I saw them as terribly square compared to the Doors or the Stones (I still kind of cringe when I hear the band’s mindless ode to conformity ‘Be True to Your School” which is the musical equivalent of a bad pep rally.)
But I have grown to love Wilson’s complex vocal architecture and sophisticated production techniques. I have been addictively listening to both Wilson’s finally completed Smile and The Beach Boy’s 1967 masterpiece, Wild Honey, in which the boys daringly took a right turn and tackled more soul and Motown influenced songs. And of course both Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations” are among the greatest works in all of pop music history.
Still, Wilson was not the best act I saw that night. His voice was weak, and it sometimes got drowned out by the music; also he sang so little that he usually seemed like a backup singer in his own band. Still it was great to see him do all his classic Pet Sounds songs (he or rather his band performed the whole CD) even if the crowd was disrespectful and kept talking over the songs. I think Wilson’s symphonic pop would probably sound better in a club with an older crowd. And of course he is an absolute Phil Spector level genius in the studio.
At one point during the Wilson set, John Cusack got on stage and joined the band in a song. Cusack of course played the older Brian Wilson in the great and underappreciated biopic Love and Mercy which also contains a winning performance by Elizabeth Banks (Paul Dano was terrific as the young Brian Wilson).
Despite his great music legacy I get the feeling Wilson is not interested in contemporary music anymore. In a recent interview, the host asked him what he thought of punk. When Wilson replied that he had never heard of it, the host explained it was fast, uptempo and angry rock. Wilson said he wouldn’t like it and that he enjoys mid tempo stuff like the Spencer Davis Group. This band has not had a big hit since around 1967 (at least in America.)
I think I only used this once but here is an assignment I once made up revolving around the closing act, Sufjan Stevens and a letter from Chicago based rock critic, Jessica Hopper.
First listen to some downloads from Sufjan Stevens’s monumental Illinois Cd (viva le revolution against U2 and Coldplay) see http://music.download.com/sufjanstevens/3600-8575_32-100606251.html or another site for free downloads. Then read Jessica Hopper’s fan letter which originally appeared in Village Voice. Use it as a model when you write your own educated fan letter to an artist) songwriter, poet, lyricist) reacting to his or her work of art.
Sweet Things
by Jessica Hopper
Sufjan Stevens – Come on Feel the Illinoise
Dear Sufjan, I enjoy your new album about my city and state, and I enjoy your marriage of the ecclesiastic and the vaguely erotic. I am wondering if you are available, one day in the future when you are less busy being a newly famous Christian troubadour, to drive around Chicago and listen to “Sweet Thing” by Van Morrison over and over, and see who cries first, you or me. I do not know what “losing” would consist of—crying first or not crying. It wouldn’t be a date or anything weird like that, just a contest. Then I could show you the cool things around town that you did not sing about on your record: drive under the Green Line tracks where a car chase from The Blues Brothers took place, the fern room at the Garfield Park Conservatory, the top-floor atrium of the Harold Washington Library where the floors are marble and cool and very clean and no one is ever there so you can lay on them and look up into the downtown sky or just read the books you checked out, the Soul Vegetarian vegan soul food restaurant run by the African Hebrew Israelites, the Baha’i temple in Willamette which gets a lot of god in the architecture and has seven gardens. If you are not scared of dark isolated places there is always the train-line land bridge that runs through the industrial corridor to downtown where there are tons of baby rabbits and great discarded things—last time I was up there there was part of some old fair ride and the sign to some mid-’60s hair salon with those sequiny letters. We can sneak onto the elevators at the Drake Hotel and look at the lake at night—and if it’s fall they have apples in baskets in the hallways that are for decoration, but if you are me, they are for stealing and eating.
Maybe you wrote songs about that stuff for yr Illinois record, but they did not fit on the album, or the choruses were weak, or the song about Decatur was more fun to sing because of those half-funny half-rhymes (“aviator”?!). If you did not already write those songs, you are going to wish you had.
Yours very truly,
JH
Chicago, Illinois
I very much enjoy Sufjan’s work and I have played his Illinois disk a million times, and I also love his latest Carey and Lowell. He emoted well in his folk influenced and occasionally shockingly techno tunes and I also loved the bizarre outfits he and his band wore, but to tell you the truth I could not fully enjoy or appreciate his brilliance because I was too damn tired. I used to go to all day shows four days in a row when I was in my 30s, but now that I am in my 50s I get exhausted whenever I have to stand a few hours no matter how good the music is. It might also have something to do with my diabetes.
Also it kind of depresses me that 10 years ago I had the world at my fingertips. When I was reviewing for newspapers I got multiple passes free so I could get my friends in too. Also I liked writing in the press box and getting free food plus it was great interviewing the performers (except Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls who was horrible to me.) I was hoping to break into a big publication, and these shows serve to remind me how much potential I squandered.
