No Age shows here, historically, have been a crush of sweat and scream-alongs. The show had a curious pall for a band that has enjoyed such a fast ride to fame, and it exacts a toll from the already-exhausted boys. Randy explains, “What was weird last night was that we were in our home, but there were a bunch of strangers in it. Normally we might yell out to our friends in the audience, but there were so many strange faces.”
“It was just weird. It was The Smell, but it wasn’t,” says Spunt. “Me and Randy were pretty much just hanging alone. It was fine, it was cool, but it wasn’t our friends. I wasn’t concerned with [the] amount of people. It was just… All of our friends were busy—Mika Miko was playing a show, Abe Vigoda was doing stuff, everybody is doing stuff on a bigger level, so…” He trails off. As the No Age’s profile has risen, so has that of some other Smell bands, namely Mika Miko and Abe Vigoda. Lately, the press has portrayed both bands as No Age’s retinue rather than the close-knit cabal they are.
“After last night, I was bummed. This morning I was trying to get clarity on it and I cried. It’s not that I’ve lost my friends—but doing this was fun because we were doing it all together,” Randall confides. “Being gone so much, you miss the parties, you miss birthdays, and then after a while I’m not expected to be there, so no one is bummed when you don’t show up. I have lost certain community ties, friends.” He continues, “Last night I was thinking, ‘What makes you think you can just come home and expect everyone to show up?’ Who am I to ask for that when I am not there?” He sighs, “The reason I cried was the sacrifices. There’s been too many. Too many little things that I didn’t know were on the line.”
It is Jim Smith, more than anyone, who insists that all the attention on No Age and The Smell is not having a corrosive effect. Despite what naysayers may predict, The Smell isn’t losing its vortical tension. While a lot of the regulars insist that shows regularly sell out now—which would have been a freak occurrence in the past—Smith is reluctant to cop to any discernible shift, in attendance or otherwise. “Sure, The Smell is in transition,” he says, “but it’s always been that way, since the beginning—evolving and growing. Fundamentally, nothing is different. We still operate on the principles by which it was founded. The energy is still there. We have remained intact.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE DESERT:
COACHELLA
Chicago Reader, May 2005
As soon as my friend and I got out of the car to begin our mile-and-a-half-long walk from “Coachella: The Parking Lot” to “Coachella: The Music Festival in the Desert” a couple weekends ago, I could hear them, faint but instantly recognizable and uniquely heartwarming to a girl of a certain age: Ponies. Ponies neighing. Coachella kicks it upscale—instead of spreading out a zillion-band lineup on the sticky blacktop of a sports-arena parking lot, the fest rents 78 acres of manicured fields from the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. And before you get to the bands, or even to the long snaky line for the sun-ripened Port-O-Lets, you walk past the barns and corrals that house the scene’s year-round residents. When I got there, they were stamping and saying hello to a few of the roughly 96,000 people who’d come to pass out face down in the grass, relive their goth teenhood, and/or see the Arcade Fire.
The line for admittance, even for press, was half an hour long. I immediately lost track of my friend and wound up tagging along with Kelefa Sanneh, a pop critic for The New York Times. Once inside the festival grounds, we started making our rounds like dutiful interns, visiting the main stage, the side stage, and the three performance tents—Gobi, Sahara and Mojave. Our conversations went like this:
Me: “What band is this?”
K: “The Raveonettes” / “Snow Patrol” / “Eisley.”
Me: “Really? They’re awful.”
K: Makes razor-sharp joke referencing the band’s audience, influences or publicist.
(Repeat for three hours.)
I noticed that Kelefa was barely taking notes on the groups we were watching, and because I didn’t want to look like a fastidious cub reporter by comparison, I only pulled out my own notebook once all afternoon. When I opened it again to remind myself what I’d been inspired to write down, all I found was “Jamie Cullum: piano = awful.”
I decided to skip U.K. hype victims Razorlight, since I felt like I already knew everything I wanted to about them—sitting behind me on the flight from Chicago, they’d spent the entire time talking loudly about how fucked-up they’d gotten at such and such a party and which extremely famous persons they’d been hanging out with. Instead I went to the VIP area, where I saw the very-sweaty editors of several major American entertainment magazines shaking hands with the bassist from Snow Patrol. Then I overheard a couple of them trying to decide which one of the two black dudes wandering around the tent was the black dude from Bloc Party.
Around 7 p.m., just as Wilco was starting up, the sun began to set over the mountains that surround the Coachella Valley. Maybe people just needed a rest after spending hours cooking in the desert sun or getting sloppy with the mamis in the beer tent, but it seemed like everyone was prone on the grass, taking in the scenery. Wilco’s breezy sound, trilling Hammond organ, and soft-thrill solos turned out to pair well with sunsets and swaying palm trees—I felt the majestic rightness of it in a sudden easy swell, my first “Ahhh…Coachella” moment of the weekend.
Biplanes circled in the purpling sky, towing banners reading “NEW GORILLAZ ALBUM OUT MAY 24” or “SIRIUS (heart)s WEEZER.” That was the only way they could deliver those messages—the festival’s promoter, Goldenvoice, refrains from slutting the audience out to corporate sponsors. More than anything, this is what separates Coachella from major U.S. festivals like Warped, Ozzfest and Lollapalooza: no Yoo-hoo truck, no free Slim Jims, no Army recruiters, no 20-foot inflatable women doubling as water slides. The relatively few booths were far from the stages, and most were pushing stuff at least tangentially related to the main event (music magazines, silk-screened concert posters). The only vendors you could find near the main stage were selling churros and lemonade.
After sunset, three-story TV screens flickered to life on either side of the main stage, each displaying a rotating Weezer logo. It looked like almost everybody at the festival had crowded around the stage, and they were screaming—nay, roaring—for the band. I watched Weezer do “Undone - the Sweater song” from the bathroom line in the press section of the backstage area, three quarters of a mile away.
Wandering the grounds, I had a hard time crediting Coachella with being America’s only European-style festival, as it’s often described; instead, the nobody-asked-for-it eclecticism of the many small attractions called up the ghost of Lollapaloozas past. (It was also pretty much guaranteed to be lost on folks who’d driven across six states to see Coldplay.) A quick sampling of the random crap on offer: 50 garbage cans decorated in outsider-art style, a DIY playzone with a bike-powered merry-go-round, a “chill-out tent” with giant misting fans and a soundtrack of the sort of lite house you hear in the dressing rooms at Express, and a wacky-hippie amusement consisting of a large metal sculpture and an armload of mallets. Lower-tier bookings, especially club acts, played to mostly-empty tents whenever the headliners were on. The outdoor film screenings drew similarly sad crowds—maybe two people were watching the Minutemen movie, We Jam Econo, at 11:30 p.m.
Like the Pixies last year and the Stooges the year before, Bauhaus was the big story at Coachella. Gossip about the band circulated like currency among the band’s fans: that Peter Murphy is now a Sufi Muslim and lives in a village five hours from Istanbul, or that the other members of the band, though they all live in Southern California, hadn’t played together since the 1998 reunion tour and only decided to when Coachella offered them a giant pile of cash. (Based on what the other big names got paid, it had to be well into six figures—the ticket money really adds up at $150 a pop for a weekend pass.) Bauhaus had wanted to release 50 bats during their set but abandoned the plan, provoking an unfounded rum
or that the city of Indio had intervened by stretching an ordinance that forbids bird releases at night.
I was never goth. I’ve never liked Bauhaus enough to own one of their records; that said, the band’s performance at Coachella was unfuckingbelievable. They hit the stage obscured by fog and white light and struck up the descending bass line and graveyard rattle of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and everyone was craning their necks because you could hear Peter Murphy, but not see him. He finally entered stage left, suspended upside down eight feet off the ground with his arms folded like bat’s wings, being towed slowly sideways toward center stage on almost invisible cables and crooning, “Undead undead undead.” It wasn’t until Murphy had been pulled back offstage, still upside down, and returned on foot that I first noticed his outfit, which was probably astronomically-expensive designer stuff but looked like ‘70s ski pants and a top from Jacques Cousteau’s clubwear line. He gave up the zillion-watt drama nonstop, brandishing a long staff that looked like a martial-arts weapon—he slung it around for emphasis and almost took out bassist David J twice. Whatever Coachella paid these guys to reunite, it was worth it.
Still, Bauhaus wasn’t all I’d come to see, so mid-set I raced back to the side stage and caught the end of Mercury Rev’s epic space-rock blast. They were dressed like pirates, if pirates could order from International Male—lacy women’s blouses are the new look for dudes in bands this season. Spoon was up next, and doled out terse, gorgeously ragged versions of both old and new songs for an impressive crowd. Between tunes you could hear Chris Martin of Coldplay—at that moment headlining the main stage—rhapsodizing about the band’s new record to the 70,000-deep crowd, suggesting that it might be the greatest album of all time. I took this as my cue to call it a night.
I didn’t make it back out to the festival till 4 p.m. on Sunday, but of the 16 bands I missed, I’d seen half of them recently and hadn’t heard of the other half. I checked out the Fiery Furnaces for two songs and then managed to get within 30 feet of the Gobi tent for M.I.A.—the only act I saw do an encore all weekend. In fact, there might’ve been a minor civil disturbance if Ms. Arulpragasam hadn’t come back on for another few minutes of her Neneh Cherry-goes-favela-funk bassplosion—clearly she shouldn’t have been stuck in the littlest tent, which was kind of like a 500-capacity yurt. I ate some more churros, caught Tegan and Sara’s hit song, then sat in the shade and ignored The Futureheads from a half mile away.
A friend commandeered a VIP golf-cart transport by convincing the driver that he was in Bright Eyes, and we sped across the grounds in hopes of making it to the Arcade Fire’s side-stage set. The entire back side of the stage was 30 or 40 people deep with members of other bands, and out front the audience was as huge and ebullient as it’d been for Weezer. Trent Reznor whizzed past us on another golf cart, a girl tucked under each arm.
Sunday’s sunset slot belonged to the reunited Gang of Four. I almost didn’t watch, afraid that my teen-years favorite might suck. The guys in Gang of Four are nearly as old as my parents, but took the stage spry and lively and jumped immediately into “Damaged Goods”—a song that is, more than a quarter century later, the template for dance punk as we know it. Frontman Jon King threw himself around the stage in a slate-gray suit, wild-eyed and vitriolic, spitting “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust” as Andy Gill’s guitar slashed—and then, when the frenzied final choruses stopped and switched to the outro, bassist Dave Allen flubbed it, not only playing through the pause but continuing to play the wrong part. The rest of the band glared at him. And he kept fucking up—by halfway through the fourth song I was disgusted with him. His subpar playing was forcing Gang of Four to fake their way to the ends of the tunes, band-practice style, in front of 50,000 people. I left too early to catch the set closer, but it was in a local paper, the Desert Sun, the next day: King destroyed a microwave with a baseball bat.
I went to see Aesop Rock on the side stage, and with Mr. Lif as hype man he was better than usual—an audience of a few thousand yelled “Life is a bitch” along with him. The wind picked up, bringing in the aroma of the Port-O-Let villages. By the time Nine Inch Nails took the main stage it felt like a sandstorm was in the making, and I was headed back toward the parking lot. I turned and saw, a mile away, Trent Reznor’s snarling head, as big as a house on the Jumbotrons and framed by illuminated palm trees. Over the distant din, I heard ponies.
PART FIVE: FAITH
THE PASSION OF DAVID BAZAN
Chicago Reader, July 2009
“People used to compare him to Jesus,” says a backstage manager as David Bazan walks offstage, guitar in hand. “But not so much anymore.”
It’s Thursday, July 2, and Bazan has just finished his set at Cornerstone, the annual Christian music festival held on a farm near Bushnell, Illinois. He hasn’t betrayed his crowd the way Dylan did when he went electric—this is something very different. The kids filling the 1,500-capacity tent know their Jesus from their Judas. There was a time when Bazan’s fans believed he was speaking, or rather singing, the Word. Not so much anymore.
As front man for Pedro the Lion, the band he led from 1995 till 2005, Bazan was Christian indie rock’s first big crossover star, predating Sufjan by nearly a decade and paving the way for the music’s success outside the praise circuit. But as he straddled the secular and spiritual worlds, Bazan began to struggle with his faith. Unable to banish from his mind the possibility that the God he’d loved and prayed to his whole life didn’t exist, he started drinking heavily. In ‘05, the last time he played Cornerstone, he was booted off the grounds for being shit-faced, a milk jug full of vodka in his hand. (The festival is officially dry.)
I worked as Bazan’s publicist from 2000 till 2004. When I ran into him in April—we were on a panel together at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Music in Grand Rapids—I hadn’t seen him or talked to him in five and a half years. The first thing he said to me was, “I’m not sure if you know this, but my relationship with Christ has changed pretty dramatically in the last few years.”
He went on to explain that since 2004 he’s been flitting between atheist, skeptic and agnostic, and that lately he’s hovering around agnostic—he can’t flat-out deny the presence of God in the world, but Bazan doesn’t exactly believe in him, either.
Pedro the Lion won a lot of secular fans in part because Bazan’s lyrics—incisive examinations of faith, set to fuzzed-out guitar hooks—have a through-a-glass-darkly quality, acknowledging the imperfection of human understanding rather than insisting on an absolute truth. As the post-9/11 culture wars began to heat up, Pedro the Lion albums took a turn toward the parabolic: an outraged Bazan churned out artful songs about what befalls the righteous and the folly of those who believe God is on their side.
Bazan’s relationship with the divine started out pretty uncomplicated, though. Raised outside Seattle in the Pentecostal church where his father was the music director, he hewed closely to Christian orthodoxy, attended Bible college, and married at 23. Now 33, he didn’t do a lot of thinking about politics until the 1999 WTO protests. “Growing up, Christianity didn’t feel oppressive for the most part, because it was filtered through my parents. They were and are so sincere, and I saw in them a really pure expression of unconditional love and service,” he says. “Once I stepped away, I could see the oppression of it.”
Bazan’s Curse Your Branches, due September 1 on Barsuk, is a visceral accounting of what happened after that. It’s a harrowing breakup record—except he’s dumping God, Jesus and the evangelical life. It’s his first full-length solo album and also his most autobiographical effort: its drunken narratives, spasms of spiritual dissonance, and family tensions are all scenes from the recent past.
Bazan says he tried to Band-Aid his loss of faith and the painful end of Pedro the Lion with about 18 months of “intense” drinking. “If I didn’t have responsibilities, if I wasn’t watching [my daughter] Ellanor, I had a deep drive to get blacked out,”
he says. But as he made peace with where he found himself, the compulsion to get obliterated began to wane. On Curse Your Branches, Bazan sometimes directs the blame and indignation at himself, other times at Jesus and the faith. He’s mourning what he’s lost, and he knows there’s no going back.
“All fallen leaves should curse their branches / For not letting them decide where they should fall / And not letting them refuse to fall at all,” he sings on the title track, with more than a touch of fuck-you in his voice. On “When We Fell,” backed by a galloping beat and Wilson-boys harmonies, he calls faith a curse put on him by God: “If my mother cries when I tell her what I discovered / Then I hope she remembers she told me to follow my heart / And if you bully her like you’ve done me with fear of damnation / Then I hope she can see you for what you are.”
The album closer, “In Stitches,” may be the best song Bazan’s ever written. It’s the most emotionally bare piece on the album, and works as a synopsis of the story:
This brown liquor wets my tongue
My fingers find the stitches
Firmly back and forth they run
I need no other memory
Of the bits of me I left
When all this lethal drinking
Is hopefully to forget
About you
He follows it with an even more devastating verse, confessing that his efforts to erase God have failed:
I might as well admit it
Like I’ve even got a choice
The crew have killed the captain
But they still can hear his voice
A shadow on the water
A whisper in the wind
On long walks my with daughter
Who is lately full of questions
About you
About you
The second “about you” comes in late, in a strong falsetto, and those two words carry his entire burden—the anger, desire, confusion and grief.
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Page 11