It’s been 15 and 16 days now since Sub Pop’s 20th anniversary festival, and it just wouldn’t be MPL if I didn’t leave my public waiting for at least that long. I could explain why it took me this long to write it, but it’s basically a combination of OCD and me being scared to summarize such an amazing event with anything less than perfectness, which is maybe just another manifestation of my OCD.
I’ve got no more excuses today, though. Actually, I have a ton, including that there’s a job that pays me to do work and they want me to do a lot of it, and also that I am back in class now in the 10-weeks-condensed-to-4.5 format. Today, though, I post. Bwa ha ha.
I did actually think about how MPL should cover this monumental, once-in-a-lifetime event beforehand, and I decided to Twitter it. Of course, I didn’t tell any of you that, I don’t have the Twitter widget on this blog, and none of you follow me on Twitter. So that was brilliant, and all my Twitters went out to My Baby, her sister, and some unknown follower. So, we are now announcing that MPL is on Twitter. You can follow us, and see all of our SP20 updates (and by now our Capitol Hill Block Party updates as well), here. I suppose I’ll get that widget working here someday, right after I upgrade from this lousy design. Anyway, point is, I’m just going to work off of my Twitter notes here, so if you want the condensed version, just hit the Twitter page.
Anyway…I knew I couldn’t handle two full days of music festival, even one like this, so I skipped bands that were leading off that I wasn’t familiar with. I got there mid-way through Eric’s Trip on Saturday, and they were great. I always dug them, and spun that one disc of theirs quite a bit on my college radio station, but never owned anything by them. This has, as is so often the case in my collection, turned out to be a glaring omission.
Yeah, that’s Eric’s Trip, and yeah, my camera sucks. What really sucks, though, is this site design and how it shrinks up even medium-sized pics. So click on the pictures if you want to see them actual size.
Speaking of glaring omissions, I don’t have nearly enough Seaweed in my collection. I only have Weak, and so when they played next, and only played two songs off of that album (“Squint” and “Baggage”), I felt a bit left out. I was amazed at how much energy the crowd had in the mid-afternoon heat for these guys. I can’t imagine what their shows must have been like 13 years ago.
Seaweed was the last “must see” band I had for a while, so I got my feel for the grounds while The Helio Sequence played in the background. Marymoor is a beautiful park…this was easily the most beautifully-surrounded concert I’ve ever attended. I’ve said it before and it is continually reaffirmed as true: there is no more beautiful city in the continguous 48 when it’s nice. If only it were nice more than 50 or so days per year. Marymoor was excellently run, too, with tons of volunteers on hand to help you make sense of the recycling bins and to guide you out of the crowded parking lot at the end of the night. And get this…at one point on Sunday I noticed the men’s stall (there were tons of porta potties, but some plumbing bathroom options, too) was plugged up and overflowing, and in a few hours it was cleaned up. Wow.
Anyway, I should have paid more attention to The Helio Sequence, because even from a distance they became my New Favorite Band. It was a short-lived reign because Pissed Jeans, with their first few minutes, took the crown for themselves. They sounded exactly like you think a band named Pissed Jeans would. After about half of their 40-minute set I started to tire of them, but with a little more exposure I’m sure I’d start to appreciate them even more.
Fleet Foxes were next and…c’mon guys, can we stop buzzing this band? They are entirely mediocre. Yes, they have some fresh ideas and a bit of a new sound, but they have not put it together yet, and they are completely awful live. In their 40-minutes, I bet they played for 25 of them, and tuned and moronically talked their way through the rest. At one point they spent nearly five full minutes tuning their instruments only to start the next song horribly out of tune. I stand by my tepid review.
Low, from Duluth, Minnesota, was up next, and I still feel bad for them. Low is this super low-key sleepy band that is absolutely beautiful on disc. To put them on a large stage in between The Fluid and Mudhoney was absolutely cruel.
I have been to dozens of rock shows in my life, probably approaching triple digits. I almost never wear a t-shirt of a band to a concert, either one that is playing that show or another one. It just seems so ridiculous, like so often you’re trying to tell people how cool you are for listening to some band. But as I was headed out the door on Saturday, I just grabbed a shirt quickly, and it happened to be a Tomahawk shirt. I hesitated, but I was running late, so I just went with it. I got three compliments on it on Saturday, which felt really weird. I had no idea there were so many Tomahawk fans out there. But, oh yeah…so you also don’t want to be That Guy, who’s wearing the shirt of the band that is playing, right? Well, there are always dozens of That Guys around, but I decided officially that the That Guys at SP20 were the several people I saw wearing Nirvana shirts. Like, who is this Nirvana band? Other contenders were the two peeps wearing Mother Love Bone shirts on Sunday, but Green River was playing that day (duh), for the first time in, like, 20 years, so I give them a free pass…it was kind of a special occasion. My fave shirt for the day summed up the whole shirts-at-concerts experience: “I Listen To Bands That Don’t Even Exist Yet.” Perfect.
Mudhoney followed Low, and somehow got scheduled to be on That Stage, the smaller of the two stages (as opposed to the larger This Stage). Looking over the schedule and seeing who they had to get in the rest of the night, it kind of made sense that they would be fourth-from-last, just based on popularity, but still, Mudhoney, arguably the second-most important band ever on Sub Pop, on the smaller stage at SP20? That’s not right. They killed it anyway, easily the best performer of the day, with a setlist mostly from their two new Sub Pop releases: The Lucky Ones and a re-release of Superfuzz Bigmuff. Veterans that they were, there was maybe a sentence or two of banter, they knew you couldn’t spend anytime in a 40-minute set babbling about seeing Garrison Keillor (*cough* Fleet Foxes *cough*) at the same park when you were a kid, especially if you wanted to get through the extensive catalog Mudhoney has.
So from the uber-confident, rockin’-it-hard show of Mudhoney to The Vaselines over on This Stage, as dusk fell and the stage lights came on. Okay, here’s the deal, bandwagon: if Kurt Cobain had never said he liked The Vaselines and you had still somehow managed to hear them, you wouldn’t think they were The Second Coming. But you’re sheep so you do. They’re an adequate band, to be sure, and I understand why you treated the experience as if you were watching a Nirvana reunion show, but it wasn’t all that good. They were clearly uncomfortable in front of such a large, rabid crowd, they were a bit out of tune, and, well, once again, I stand by my tepid review.
Iron And Wine was next, and I was really let down by his show. He commanded the huge This Stage at first, even just by himself with his guitar, but he also suffered from the talking/tuning problem that Fleet Foxes had. I think he maybe played five or six songs. And everybody talked over his set. So, hmm, maybe Mudhoney would have been better there?
Flight of the Conchords closed out Saturday night, and they were very good. Like I said, it’s just not funny to hear the same jokes again and again…at least, it isn’t as enjoyable as hearing your fave songs again and again. But they mixed it up a bit, even the recorded songs had some new jokes in them, which was a positive experience. I’m sure I would have liked it more if I didn’t have the album.
It took me about an hour to make it from Marymoor Park to Showbox for that night’s Sub Pop show. That’s actually not that bad, considering that it took a methodical row-by-row search to find my parked-by-daylight car in the nighttime and that Saturday’s show was sold out, largely on the strength of Flight Of The Conchords and The Vaselines. Unfortunately, I missed Tad Doyle’s new band Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth, who I was really looking forward to. And then it took like 75 more minutes for Gutter Twins to come on. It’s crap like that that keeps me from seeing more bands live. They were fine, not great…I don’t really like Greg Dulli’s posturing, and dammit, I was just plain tired. I have less Twitter from this show because I didn’t want to wake people up with text messages about bands they didn’t care about.
Despite my exhaustion at the end of the night Sunday, and getting to bed at about 2:00, I woke up ready to go again on Sunday. Sunday looked like the much weaker lineup, in that there were very few bands I’d even heard of, much less had heard. I probably wouldn’t have even gone if it hadn’t been for Green River playing that night. But friend and most frequent MPL-commenter Beckers came with, even bring sunscreen and food, so that kept things fun.
I think I like Grand Archives, but given the recent Jawbox reviews, we know how confident I can be about thinking I like a given band. So we got there after Grand Archives, in time for most of Blitzen Trapper’s set, playing in the same time slot that Eric’s Trip had the day before. They were good, and I’m intrigued, but it was a bit of a mixed bag and I’m withholding my final judgment on them.
We had wanted to get there in time for Kinski because Beckers said they were good, and we have a High compatibility on iLike, so there you go. Kinski was like Motorhead (stand still with guitars and rock hard) combined with Kyuss (spacey stoner riffs). So, yeah, they were completely awesome.
Foals were next and intriguing. I liked their set, but I’m not completely sold on them. They had some real problems with their equipment, which clearly affected their performance, so I can’t really hold it against the band. They’re definitely worth checking out more.
Les Thugs, one of the least-buzzed of all the bands that should have been buzzed, was on next, over on That Stage. They easily took the crown away from Kinski for best performance of the day, and wouldn’t relinquish it until Green River. Les Thugs is always mentioned as the Sub Pop band people are most surprised didn’t explode huge, and now I know why. Garage punk from France…you wouldn’t think it would be completely awesome, but you would be wrong. I love those guys so much.
No Age was next, and WTF? Why the hell are these guys on This Stage while Kinski and Les Thugs are on That Stage? It’s completely inexplicable. The cool discussion about No Age on the blogs now is whether or not you get them. If you want to be cool, you say you get them, or that you didn’t get them at first but now you get them. I didn’t get them, and I still don’t, but I may in the future. I’m not going to write off a band on a 40-minute set, especially when they had to follow the awesomeness that was Les Thugs, but what we heard was enough to make us go grab a drink and reflect on what wasn’t happening at our 15-year reunion that wasn’t taking place that very day.
After that it was Red Red Meat and Comets On Fire, who entirely blend into a sea of forgotten-ness. Part of it was that they probably just weren’t that memorable, though I remember kind of liking both of them, but the bigger reason was that we were starting to zero in on Green River’s set, and the emotional management I’d been rigorously implementing all weekend because I couldn’t afford to say completely jiggered up for an entire weekend was starting to bust at the seams. All I could think about was how awesome Green River was going to be and how the Four Horsemen must be just over the horizon, because God hates me. By the time Beachwood Sparks came on, I was done. Sux to be them, I guess, but I just couldn’t stand to watch any band at that point that wasn’t Green River, so we went for another drink.
…wait for it…
…wait for it…
“Down by the river,” the first line off their first song (“Come On Down”) off their first album (Come On Down, on Homestead, not Sub Pop), Mark Arm shouted to start Green River’s set, and I couldn’t help jumping up and down, bringing my knees up to my chest in the process.
I rarely get close in concerts anymore because I’m old, but for now it was 1988 again and I bounced forward into the crowd. Of course the first several layers of people were all well spaced out so it wasy easy to get ahead of them. Then, of course, the mid-rangers, who are kind of close to each other by most people’s definitions, but have also left plenty of space in front of them for a rock concert. So they grumble a bit, for some dumb reason, but once you push between them there’s plenty of room for you, and soon enough you’re a few rows past them, and what was the point of them grumbling because now it’s like you’re not even there? As I got closer, people were really weird about it, though, holding out their elbows, as if I couldn’t move forward to the clearly stand-in-able area in front of them. I don’t know why you would go to a Green River reunion concert in 2008 and be a dick, but people did. Passive-aggressive behind me and way-too-passive in front of me, I had Seattle’s bipolar disorder, which is also kind of Minnesota’s bipolar disorder, surrounding me. I was perfectly content just to be smushed up there with a few densely-layered rows of people in front of me, but now I have incontrovertible proof that Seattleites are just way too nice. Without even trying, beyond putting my feet into the gaps that opened all too readily, I ended up front and center. That’s right, I had one of the two or three most primo spots to view this show from, at most a person or two off center and right up against the front railing, with only occasional mild pressure from behind. When drummer Alex Shumway went crowd-surfing at the end, I was one of the people who helped him over the railing. It was surreal. (Those heads in front of me are press in the press pit.)
Arm, Stone Gossard, and Steve Turner:
Bruce Fairweather, Jeff Ament, Alex Shumway, and Arm:
Shumway about to rush the crowd, Arm, Ament on drums, and Gossard:
And of course watching Green River was completely surreal, too. Gossard and Ament would walk towards each other and play off each other, and you’re thinking, “You guys are in Pearl Jam together,” and here they were, after that crazy journey to their self-defined top, back in Green River. To emphasize the surreality of the situation, the backstage/offstage portion of the stage, which was in clear view of the audience, had maybe 30 people there watching the band. Whereas most bands prior to this point in the weekend had two or three people, it seemed like everybody who had the chance was there to watch Green River. And they all stood there with huge smiles of joyful amazement on their faces, mirror images of what I know I looked like. I was home. I had found my community. Honestly, I must have spent just as much time watching those folks watch the show than I did watching the show right in front of me. It was the best way to validate that the show was really happening, that I really was watching Green River play again, to watch those people figuratively pinching themselves just as I was doing.
And it was good, too. I’m not even going to bother describing the show because I wasn’t even taking mental notes because I wanted to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime experience (except it wasn’t, I guess, because they did this secret show…). Suffice it to say that it was better than I expected…and I had great expectations. The band was tight, played a fantastic set with very little banter (Arm introduced the band by saying each member was from the band he was in prior to Green River (Ducky Boys, Mr. Epp, etc.), and really seemed to enjoy themselves. After months of psyching myself up, the band came through on the promise that my imagination made to myself on their behalf.
At the end of the show, after Shumway’s crowd-surfing, the band dragged some boxes out on stage and threw out t-shirts. Due to my prime spot (maybe it wasn’t that great after all, huh?), the shirts all went over my head. I was tempted to move back a bit, but then I was sure somebody would drop some right where I had been standing. I did manage to get a hand on one of them, but so did about a dozen other folks. Four of those hands didn’t give up for several minutes, and after a while the two contenders decided to settle the matter with a best-of-three rock-paper-scissors contest.
They somehow trusted somebody, who had been trying to break up the combatants earlier, to be their referee, judge, and temporary shirt holder. I guess it would have been hard for him to get away with the shirt in that crowd, but still…. Anyway, Right Guy won the first round and Left Guy won the second, bringing us a make-or-break rock-paper-scissors match. The moment was thrilling…both the judge and I asked for time so that we could capture the situation on film. Below, you see Left Guy’s paper covering Right Guy’s rock.
When I asked the woman who was holding one of the shirts if I could take a picture, she looked offended as I started to ask the question, as if I was asking for the shirt. When I finished talking she looked relieved, laughed, and then asked her boyfriend (this is an unconfirmed romantic relationship, I’m just assuming) if it was okay. Unsurprinsgly, it was, and I was gracious in my appreciation.
Twenty minutes later Wolf Parade came on. I don’t know why the hell any band was scheduled to play after Green River. If I had to guess, and while I didn’t have to, I did, I would say it was because Sub Pop wanted to emphasize that they had a good current roster and were focusing on the present and future. Whatever. I was not in a mood to listen to anybody else at that point, nor was Beckers, so we left.
So that’s the end of what I’ve got, but there was a bunch of other stuff around the blogosphere to commemorate the event.
First, apparently there was a Sub Pop flag perched atop the Space Needle, and they painted the Needle itself to look like a 45 from above. Sweet. The top pic is by Dan Delong of the Seattle PI.
Here are reviews and pics from Three Imaginary Girls, a KEXP review, KEXP pics, two Saturday and two Sunday reviews on Line Out, and Saturday and Sunday pics from Line Out