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Tibetan Freedom Concert-------
SECOND OF TWO REPORTS day Two of the Tibetan Freedom Concert: Before we continue, we should look around a bit. Downing Stadium (or, according to some signs, "Triboro Stadium,") is a disused heffalump of a WPA project plopped down on a small island in the East River, midway between Manhattan and Queens. Randall's Island (or, according to some signs, "Ward's Island") seems to be used mostly as a pontoon for the massive, triple-spanned Triboro Bridge, with the odd public golf course and baseball diamond shoehorned in underneath as though by afterthought. It's a real New York landscape. Behind the stadium, the Tibet Concert erected a tent-city of concession stands and information booths, the centerpiece of which is a real, canvas-peaked Tibetan Buddhist temple -- an oasis of cool and peace amid the choking dust and oceanic crowds. The crowds were, of course, a good thing. There'd been rumblings in the New York Times over the past couple of weeks about problems that the concert's organizers (the Beastie-affiliated Milarepa Fund) were having in selling out the event, due to their policy of not soliciting corporate sponsorship. Saturday's crowd seemed to bear that out. The stadium was filled to something like one-sixth capacity, with only another scattered couple of thousand milling about the tent-bazaar. Sunday, it was a mob scene. You're picturing a mob scene right now, but that's not it. Imagine a thick pile carpet, except every fiber is a clutch of high school friends from some town in Long Island. Take that, corporate sponsorship. I'd missed Pavement, and De La Soul, and everything else on the early part of the bill (besides the extreme tail end of Lee Perry's set, which was whompingly great) because of a festival-sized traffic snarl leading to the stadium (take that, Mr. Too-Cool-For-Trains). Taj Mahal, who mounted the risers next, played his denatured lite jazz-blues for a while, and then stopped and went away again. And then it was time for Blur. Blur's self-Americanization campaign seems to be paying off. While their sound has gotten kinda dulled and skronky and a lot of their recent songs seem suspiciously like arch alternative-rock parodies, they seem to have whooped up some major hipness points over here. Opening with "Beetlebum," and closing with "Song Two" (the yee-hoo song), with the waved-out "Boys And Girls" in the middle, they got more crowd action than anything on the first day, including U2 and Patti Smith. There were bigger crowds today, to be sure, but Blur is also riding a younger wave. These newer Brit bands are pros onstage: ace showmanship with airtight performances. My crummy credentials wouldn't get me backstage, or let me use any of the secret paths that more important people were using to get from place to place, so by around 2:30, when movement started to become impractical, I staked out an aerie in the stands. Voila Michael Stipe and Mike Mills, doing a loose, relaxed, drumless set. It's cool they came, and it was doubleplus-cool when Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready popped onstage for a jam. But musically, they were about as exciting as a dial tone until they wrapped up with Suicide's "Ghost Rider" and Iggy Pop's "The Passenger." Our major rock stars have all been seeming rather lazy and overfed lately. And today, whenever one appeared, it was a little too obvious how much of a favor they knew they were doing for Milarepa. As Alanis Morissette said, when she took the stage a bit later: "It's not about artists' egos, it's about, about ... uh, doing something." You're the one who mentioned egos, Alanis. Whoever pulls her strings was obviously hedging to keep the Tibet show from affecting the New York market for her own concerts. She sang seated, in hang-around-the-house clothes, with an all-acoustic band. And she didn't do any hits at all. It's a wonder they didn't pose her with a coffee cup. Björk did everything up to the nines, with a string octet and guest conductor, and pulled all the thunder away from the left-hand stage, where Alanis and Band had just faded back into the woodwork. It's been obvious for a while that Björk was a rising star, but who knew how fast? And who knew that someone like Blur could blow the tag-team of Michael Stipe and Eddie Vedder off the stage? There's a valuable lesson here. Speaking of valuable lessons, there was a guy I overheard while watching a procession of Buddhist monks who said to his friend, "Lookit the mountain chinks." I pulled one kid out of the crowd that was stampeding away from the stage when a speaker, Palden Gyatso, came on. "Excuse me," I said. "I'm a journalist with important credentials, and I'd like to know what you think of this man having been tortured and imprisoned for 33 years." Said he, "It sucks?" This is about what you can expect from a normal bunch of kids who are being forced to assimilate strange and difficult information -- and that's all right. The crowd here has already voted with its $40-a-day, and any knowledge or commitment that anyone takes home with them is pure cake-icing for Milarepa, and for Tibet itself. Neither you nor I, though, have voted with a dime. I covered some of the rudiments of the Tibetan situation in part one. Today, here's a link to the Milarepa site. Don't be a schlub -- go there. Rancid was up next. They're the punk-rock Sha Na Na, and every little nuance of their sound is a baldfaced, obvious steal from some forgotten band like Stiff Little
Fingers, which makes them genius. Rounding out the evening came the
Beastie Boys, wearing red pajamas. A cordon of saffron-robed monks
looked on from backstage. When the beats started, the enormous crowd
went amok, crashing the security barrier in front of the stage, storming
the VIP bleachers and chucking food, dirt and water bottles into the
air. When the food and bottles ran out, they chucked shoes. Then they
threw people. Occasionally, a pair of pants -- or a piece of underwear -- went flying over the crowd. The monks seemed to take it all in good humor.
-- Gavin McNett Gavin McNett is a regular contributor to Salon. |
