Shooting stars
My close encounter with William Hung and Buckethead at a hot, hippie-packed extravaganza. Plus: Reconsidering a band -- because you told me to.
By Thomas Bartlett
June 16, 2004 | I'm currently on tour, playing keyboards in Mike Doughty's band, and last Friday our travels took us to the gigantic Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn. Before arriving, I'd been sad that my touring schedule necessitated leaving the festival first thing Saturday morning, but after a few hours there, Saturday morning wasn't nearly soon enough. The heat (pushing 100 degrees), the crowds (90,000 hippies), the incessant noodling (Bonnaroo is jam-band central), the drum circles (yes, drum circles), the sounds of Dave and Ani (Matthews and DiFranco need no last names in this crowd) floating across the fields -- it was all a little much for me.
My sanity was salvaged by Yo La Tengo. Forty-five minutes is usually about my maximum tolerance for concert length, even if it's a band I love, but I was in bliss for Yo La Tengo's entire hour-and-a-half-long show. They've folded shoe-gaze, Eno atmospherics and noise improvisation into their delicate pop songs to create one of the great sounds in contemporary music. The interplay between the band's three members, switching off on drums, guitar, bass, Farfisa and other keyboards, is unbelievably finely tuned -- they've been playing together for so long that they're able to put on a show that is perfectly tight and coordinated but has the malleable quality of free improvisation. Nothing else I heard at Bonnaroo came close.
My brief Bonnaroo experience ended with a surreal sight: my bandleader, Mike Doughty, standing on a Mardi Gras float a few feet away from William Hung (gamely bumbling his way through "She Bangs" for the thousandth excruciating time), as, off in the distance, Buckethead (amid tasteless flurry of notes) looked on through his helmet.
"Sweet Virginia," Gomez, from "Split the Difference"
A few weeks ago in this column, I mentioned my disappointment with Gomez's new "Split the Difference." I got a number of messages in response from Gomez loyalists urging me to keep listening to the album, suggesting that it would grow on me. This I was happy to do, as I'd enjoyed some of Gomez's past music so much, and I'm pleased to report that they were right. "Split the Difference" is less stuffed with ear candy than some of their earlier efforts, more of a straight guitar rock record -- but few other working bands could put together a guitar rock record this inventive and vivid. I'm amused by "Don't Know Where We're Going," which plays almost as a parody of the manicured "punk" that's so popular right now -- it sounds as if the singer's vocal cords have been hacked to pieces with shards of broken glass (the same shards he's about to cut his wrists with, of course), but before dying he had time to digitally pitch-correct the performance into artificial perfection. My favorite track, though, is the Lennon-esque waltz "Sweet Virginia," which has more of the sonic playfulness that Gomez is so good at. (iTunes, RealPlayer, MusicMatch)
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