For Those About to Rock was a music and pop culture blog Nick DeCicco for the Daily Republic in Fairfield, California. The blog/column ended regular publishing in October 2016.
For Those About to Rock featured a variety of coverage — concert reviews, music and pop culture commentary (aka "the pop culture rant") as well as artist interviews and more. In 2012, DeCicco completed his album-a-day Our Music Year project, which reprinted in the Daily Republic in 2013.
Sigur Rós performs Oct. 16 at the Treasure Island Music Festival. To see a gallery of photos from the festival, visit the Daily Republic website. (Nick DeCicco/Daily Republic)
Chances are last weekend's final Treasure Island Music Festival went nowhere near the way its organizers planned.
Mother Nature was the weekend’s guest performer, battering the festival with rain and wind, causing five hours of delays and stoppages at the two-day event. Three of the 26 acts were unable to perform.
The conditions caused a number of fans to head for the exits on the tiny island between spans of the Bay Bridge. Some on social media called for refunds, but promoters said they will not issue any. Organizers plan to relocate the festival next year due to a redevelopment plan on the island.
While it’s easy to be angry with the way this year’s weather-worsened event went, I felt something awesome.
I don’t mean “awesome” in the casual way that people so often say it, but rather that I was awed. I doubt my friend, Heather, who stood next to me as we watched Sigur Rós perform Sunday to conclude the festival’s history, understood my grin.
It was a tough slog — literally and figuratively — to that moment.
The rains had ceased, but the thousands who remained were draped in ponchos. Grassy fields turned into a puddle-pocked mud pit, caking our pants, shoes and/or boots. Sigur Rós played the untitled first track from 2002’s ( ), a wintry piano-based piece in which singer/guitarist Jonsí coos the song’s vocals.
I tried to step back and absorb the moment. That’s when the awesome feeling hit me.
I thought of our collective resilience, the thousands of us bearing not just the weekend, but all of our collective challenges beyond the festival gates and whatever else swirled in the universe at that moment.
We were weary spirits, but we were sharing a respite from everything life was throwing at us.
A new co-worker asked a few months ago why I’m so into music. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about it on the entries in this blog, but I was at a loss to articulate an answer the way I wanted.
But that moment Sunday captured it.
The truth is that music was a vehicle to connect with people at a time I felt painfully awkward. It worked. I’ve had the great fortune of meeting countless talented, creative people and forged great relationships. I bonded with one of my best friends, Sean, when he taped The Wallflowers’ Bringing Down the Horse to cassette for me in 1997, for example.
It’s a journey that has defined my life professionally, too. A previous Daily Republic editor said, “You might as well cover concerts since you’re going to them anyway.” Fair enough, I thought.
Part of my love of music, too, is powering through adversity. Music is a cure. It’s a place to escape the stresses of daily life. It’s a place to quiet the depression and anxiety I work with daily. That's hard for me to write, but as we watched Sigur Rós, I thought about how, for the moment, those issues turned to background noise for myself and for all of us in attendance.
A concert or a music festival is an actual, physical place to forget our struggles for a few hours. Despite everything against us in the short and long term, we shared something awesome together. So I grinned.
It’s the way that I try to see life – we hope for sunny days. Sometimes, we get them. Sometimes, our white tennis shoes are brown and squishy from the mud and rain. It's how we deal with it that speaks to our character.
I’ve changed in innumerable ways since the Treasure Island fest began in 2007. Working toward resilience and acceptance, to become comfortable with uncomfortable thoughts and emotions, that’s the hardest lesson of my life.
I don’t claim victory, but every day, I learn a little more. I learn to take the good with the bad and understand that impermanence — whether it’s our emotions or it’s a music festival — is truth.
So, as The Wallflowers’ Jakob Dylan sings in the first song from that cassette Sean taped for me two decades ago, “Come on, try a little — nothing is forever.”
OAKLAND — James Blake fans left Sunday’s Treasure Island Music Festival bummed because high winds forced the cancellation of the English art pop and alternative R&B artist’s set.
On Monday, he made it up to them.
Blake took the stage Monday night at The Fox Theater in Oakland for a make-up gig, with festivalgoers using their Treasure Island passes for free admittance. By the end, they rained applause on him as a thank you for the gesture.
“We were waiting to go on stage and, believe me, I was as disappointed as you were not to be able to play for you,” he told the crowd Monday. He said it gave fans a chance to see the show “without treading in water” hours after tweeting a video of the gusts and rain battering his gear on stage the night before.
Fans waited around the block to enter the venue for a show that was announced at approximately noon Monday.
In its own way, it was more satisfying than his set at Treasure Island might've been, unmooring Blake from the time constraints of festival performance and letting him sail through nearly two hours of material.
Joined by a percussionist and a multi-instrumentalist, each sat atop a riser to play his instruments as a bevy of lights fired and video screen displayed swirling orbs of light or, in the case of “I Need a Forest Fire,” a bird flapping its wings against a golden orange sky.
On occasion, the brightness and intensity of the lights was too much, with many fans shielding or closing their eyes. While Blake’s bass-rattling grooves set the tone, the aesthetic enhancements went a long way to complementing his digital glitchery.
His repertoire spanned from the echoing introspection of “The Wilhelm Scream” to the stomping groove of “Stop What You’re Doing.” It all fit under the umbrella thanks to Blake’s presentation. Although his setlist culled from each of his three LPs to date, it also served as a sort of anthology of his work, grabbing "Forward," his collaboration with Beyoncé, and his covers of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" and Feist's "Limit to Your Love."
For fans who have braved the elements not to see him a night earlier, it may not have played out exactly as planned, but it served as a satisfying end to a muddy, messy weekend on Treasure Island for the final installment of the festival.
Setlist
Always
Life Round Here
Choose Me
Timeless
Limit to Your Love
Our Love Comes Back
My Willing Heart
Love Me in Whatever Way
Stop What You’re Doing
Forward
I Need a Forest Fire
I Hope My Life (1-800 Mix) / Voyeur
I Mind
The Colour in Anything
Modern Soul
Retrograde
The Wilhelm Scream
Encore
A Case of You
Measurements
Mikael Jorgensen and Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco perform Sept. 10 at The Fillmore in San Francisco. It was one of five shows the Chicago group performed last week at the venue. (Courtesy photo/Nick DeCicco)
Sept. 9 marked the release of Schmilco and Skeleton Tree, the newest LPs from Wilco as well as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, respectively.
Aside from sharing a release date, the thinnest of strings connects the two groups in another way. Both Wilco and Cave have produced material that referenced death and tragedy before they actually happened.
Expect to see Cave's Skeleton Tree (right) on "Best of 2016" lists. It’s a powerful project from a group that already has a spotless discography, including master works such as 1988’s Tender Prey, 1994’s Let Love In, 1997’s The Boatman’s Call and 2013’s Push the Sky Away.
The songs of Skeleton Tree find Cave beginning to confront last year’s accidental death of his teenage son, Arthur, who took LSD before falling to his death from a cliff in England.
In the opening track, “Jesus Alone,” Cave cuts right to the quick: “You fell from the sky, crash landed in a field near the River Adur.” Surprisingly, Cave wrote this before Arthur’s death. “With my voice, I am calling you,” Cave repeats.
It's one of several tracks on “Skeleton” that seems to possess the gift of prescience, an awareness of things to come, in Cave’s life. That’s where that thin tie to Wilco appears.
The Chicago six-piece rock band recently finished a five-night residence at The Fillmore in San Francisco in support of Schmilco, whose title is a reference to Harry Nilsson’s 1971 LP, Nilsson Schmilsson.
During Wilco’s Fillmore residence, the group played many songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, its most-acclaimed album. This weekend marks 15 years since the album’s first true release, which came in September 2001 via a stream on the band’s website. Due to a record label fiasco that’s worth a Wikipedia deep dive, the record didn’t hit shelves until April 2002.
The timeline illustrates Wilco’s flirtation with premonition. Just days after the 9/11 attacks, there was Wilco singing songs such as “Jesus, Etc.” that seemed to detail the tragedy: “Tall buildings shake, voices escape, singing sad, sad songs. . . . Skyscrapers are scraping together, your voice is smoking.”
Another sadly well-timed thought from another track: “You have to learn how to die if you want to be alive.”
For both groups, dealing with the darker side of life is nothing new. Wilco tends toward accessibility, but it can cloak some shocking savagery in its apparent innocence. “I dreamed about killing you again last night and it felt all right to me” begins one song from 1999's Summerteeth album.
Cave, meanwhile, has long lapped in the lugubrious, morbid and macabre. For example, his 1996 album Murder Ballads does exactly what it says on the tin, a collection of covers and original tracks about homicide.
The mystery of the premonition in both the Skeleton Tree and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot songs is part of the initial intrigue. The songs of the 15-year-old "YHF" have endured because of the durability of the songwriting beneath them.
I so often use this space to come back to the notion of art as catharsis. I think there's a cynicism – sometimes duly so – about entertainment and music as vehicles to simply make money rather than something as lofty and pretentious as, gasp, artistic expression.
But whether it's The Chainsmokers and Halsey crooning about love in the digital age, Skrillex dropping beats about scary monsters and nice sprites or Cave singing about death in a way that eerily presages the death of his own son, the bottom line isn't just making that paper. It's about connection. If someone hears a piece of music and it resonates with them, that will endure long after the money is spent. There's comfort even in uncomfortably predictive material such as Skeleton Tree or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot". Music can help us cope with death and expressing uncomfortable truths can make us feel more connected to each other, revealing the commonality of the human experience.
“Cool” is not the right word to describe their predictive effect in either Wilco’s or Cave’s songs. In either instance, we’re talking about people’s lives. But hearing Wilco or Cave cope through music helps us all deal with the finite realities of life.
So maybe Wilco was right after all. Maybe we really do need to learn how to die if we want to be alive.
Wilco's "War on War," which contains the "learn how to die" lyric:Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Jesus Alone:"
Wilco's "Jesus, Etc.:"
Last weekend marked Bon Iver’s return from hibernation.
Five years after its last album, the Grammy-winning rock and folk group unveiled a new album’s worth of material during its appearance at its own Eaux Claires Music Festival in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Later that night came the announcement of the group’s third album, 22, A Million (cover at right), due at the end of September, as well as the release of two new tracks.
To call the new songs a departure from previous Bon Iver’s earliest material is underselling it, beginning with the tracks’ titles: “22 (Over S∞∞N)” and “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄.” Those aren’t outliers in the 22, A Million tracklist, whose titles resemble the naming conventions of Aphex Twin, Grimes or vaporwave artists.
The tracks leave the band’s folksy beginnings in the dirt. “22 (Over S∞∞N)” coasts on a bed of glitchy synthesizers and Justin Vernon’s processed vocals that caution life “might be over soon.” The other song filters Vernon’s vocals even more over a clicking chatter of a beat.
This is a far cry from the Bon Iver that made the likes of “Skinny Love” or “Holocene” and, yet, it feels right for the group. To fly away from guitar-based music somehow feels less like a cop out and more like a natural progression.
There’s something to be said for evolving in a way that stays true to a group or an artist’s direction. One of Bon Iver’s contemporaries, The Tallest Man on Earth, has followed a similar trajectory in that he, too, started with one man playing an acoustic guitar and has grown into a full-band ensemble.
The Tallest Man, the stage name for Kristian Matsson (left), progressed across the past decade at a pace that seemed deliberate and knowing, introducing first electric guitar and then other instruments and percussion until last year he toured with a band backing him.
All artists must continue to evolve their craft and experiment with something new, otherwise they risk becoming stale and losing relevance. Some make the turn toward commercial appeal and many fans cry “sell out.” Such cries were heard during the past decade when Kings of Leon smoothed out its sleazy Southern rock for accessible grandeur.
Was that a sellout move? It’s hard to put that label on anyone. 2008's Only by the Night was a conscious move by the band to enter the mainstream and gain some commercial appeal, but it also felt like the direction the band was headed, much like the way Tallest Man and Bon Iver’s career tracks have felt like the next logical stops for them.
Maybe an even better example is Taylor Swift, who’s moved from country pop to just plain pop during the past decade. That the same person made “Our Song” and “Blank Space” seem unlikely, but that’s how she’s changed to stay relevant and progress her sound.
In Bon Iver’s case, as Robin Hilton for NPR’s “All Songs Considered” pointed out this week, the seeds for Bon Iver’s digital transformation were planted long ago. In a clip of “The Wolves (Act I and II)” from Bon Iver’s 2007 debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, Hilton noticed a quaver on Vernon’s voice as he sings “lost” in a backing vocal. It shows Vernon has played with vocal processing since Bon Iver was with him cooped up in a Wisconsin cabin to write its first songs.
After “Wolves” came “Woods,” tucked away on 2009’s Blood Bank EP (cover at right), which Kanye West sampled and used as the basis for his 2010 track “Lost in the World.” The continued collaboration between West and Vernon – two men who love production and vocal manipulation – on multiple records makes a song such as “22 (Over S∞∞N)” feel like an obvious destination for Bon Iver.
It would be more difficult to absorb if “22 (Over S∞∞N)” and “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄” felt like aberrations, but they seem right in the pocket for Bon Iver. They are remarkably different from where the group started, but they fit with where its creative director, Vernon, has been headed during the past decade.
If the new songs had more in common with Swift’s recent pop material, now that would be a real shock.
Rapper J. Cole performs Aug. 5 at the Outside Lands Music Festival in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Cole performed hits such as "Crooked Smile" and "Power Trip" to tens of thousands last weekend at the annual music and food festival. (Courtesy photo/Ché Holts)
When it came to scheduling conflicts at last weekend’s installment of the Outside Lands Music Festival in Golden Gate Park, promoters — knowingly or unknowingly — demonstrated a divide within the millennial generation.
Counterprogramming at festivals is when multiple events take place at the same time. For example, British art rock band Radiohead playing the main stage to end the festival’s second day while electronic dance musician Zedd played on the opposite side of the festival.
When that happened, a parting within the millennial set took place. It’s no stretch to say that the majority of festival attendees fit snugly into the generation ranging, according to some, from 1982 to 2000, making us range in age from 16 to 34.
I’m among that group, although it’s worth noting that if I had been born just three days earlier, in 1981, I would be considered Gen X, so I feel I relate well to both groups. When FX’s “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson” (right) aired earlier this year, I was the right age to appreciate the modern program but also old enough to remember the events the first time around, including the hoopla about Marcia Clark’s hair.
I’m also old enough to unironically use the word “hoopla.”
So, like any older member of the millennial set who had their minds blown by the British band during the past two decades, the ’Head vs. Zedd conflict wasn’t much of one. I didn’t expect it to be for many other festivalgoers, but I underestimated Zedd’s appeal among the youngest of my generation. A sizable crowd flocked to the Russian-German dance musician’s act because some of them saw Radiohead, as someone recently told my friend, Cara, as a “mom band.”
Admittedly, the bar for enjoyment is easier to clear for uninitiated listeners for Zedd than it is for Radiohead. With a festival that lasts 30 total hours, every minute counts, so picking the EDM artist who virtually guarantees a fun, danceable time even if you don’t know any of his material is a safer bet than a quirky alt-rock band that has made its name by sitting at the plot point on the graph where experimentation meets accessibility.
While it wasn’t much of a choice for me, I don’t fault others. An 18-year window for a generation is pretty large considering I went to elementary school and played Oregon Trail on an Apple II while the youngest millennials had more powerful computers in their pockets as iPhones at the same age.
Radiohead vs. Zedd wasn’t the only place where this intragenerational divide cropped up. The night before, the elder millennials flocked to Friday headliner LCD Soundsystem, a dance-punk mainstay of the 2000s on a reunion tour, while the younger seemed to overwhelmingly chose North Carolina-based rapper J. Cole (left), who’s found success in this decade. I figured I’ll have another chance to see Cole, but “to tell the truth, this could be the last time” for LCD, as one of its songs goes.
Yet one more example came Sunday evening, when electronic group Major Lazer blared away on the main stage and rocker Ryan Adams played the nearby Sutro Stage. Like Cole and Zedd, Major Lazer’s success is more recent, with Adams career now spanning more than two decades.
“Somebody's got their laptop turned up so loud right now, man, it’s crazy,” Adams said to laughter as his crowd felt the bass rumble from Major Lazer’s set in the neighboring meadow.
I didn’t always make what seemed to be the “older millennial” choice, either. I certainly shook my booty and had fun during 22-year-old Jauz’s genre-bending EDM performance Saturday while Big Grams, a collaboration between Phantogram and 1990s/2000s hip-hop great Big Boi from OutKast, played the main stage.
To put the difference down as young millennials like to dance vs. old millennials are sophisticated would be a self-serving viewpoint lacking nuance. I think all of the acts mentioned offer something worthwhile. I was disappointed that LCD played at the same time as J. Cole.
Yet as far as attendance goes, the elder millennials are reaching an age when their music is becoming the classic or legacy acts. Radiohead has been making music longer than even some college-aged millennials have been alive.
This year’s Outside Lands showed the widening gulf between myself, a man in his mid-30s, and someone who is about to start their junior year of high school. We might be the same generation on paper, but our life experiences are entirely different.
It’s smart of Outside Lands’ promoters to appeal to both ends of that generational spectrum, but I wonder what it portends for future installments. Given the youthful vibe of the festival, I picture the older end of the millennial range aging out of festival culture as it approaches its 40s.
Then it won’t be long before the cycle continues again. It’s easy to imagine an Outside Lands 10 years from now in 2026 when someone like J. Cole is a headliner carting more than 15 years of hits playing the main stage as someone born after 2000 — Gen Z, the Founders, or whatever 21st century children are called — is the counterprogramming.
SAN FRANCISCO — A massive number of festivalgoers crammed the Polo Field on Sunday for the third and final day of the 2016 Outside Lands Music Festival to see Third Eye Blind and Chance the Rapper.
Tens of thousands of fans swarmed the lawn back to the festival’s iconic windmill an estimated one-quarter of a mile away from the main stage for the veteran San Francisco rock group as well as the Chicago hip-hop artist for two of the best-attended sets of a weekend that saw more than 70 artists play.
While temperatures that climbed into the sunny 70s after the first two chilly, overcast days of the festival, the sun finally emerged to play about 45 minutes before 3EB’s set time. The local band delivered an inspired, energetic set behind the work of lead singer Stephen Jenkins. While 3EB nodded to its 1990s mainstream glory days with hits such as “Jumper,” “Never Let You Go” and “Semi-Charmed Life,” it was an unexpected David Bowie tribute medley with help from the Magik*Magik Orchestra and 15-year-old guitarist Spencer Barnett that made the masses applaud.
Chance, meanwhile, cut his set short by 10 minutes on both ends. He ran through a string of feature verses he performs on other rappers songs — Action Bronson’s “Baby Blue,” Towkio’s “Heaven Only Knows” and Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” — before playing a smattering of tracks from this year’s Coloring Book mixtape.
Also drawing a massive crowd and closing the weekend on the Twin Peaks Stage was Lana Del Rey. In an hourlong set, the Los Angeles-based singer delivered hits such as “Video Games,” “Blue Jeans” and “Summertime Sadness.” Despite a staircase leading down into the crowd, Del Rey felt like she kept at a safe remove from the “Lanatics,” her devoted fanbase. While much of her artistry feels like a retro pose, she did strap on a guitar and play a bare bones rendition of “Yayo” from her Lizzy Grant album that felt raw and allowed her voice to lift into falsetto.
Ryan Adams and the Shining closed the weekend on the Sutro Stage with one of the day’s best sets. The North Carolina-born rock and alt-country musician’s band brought muscle to his material to match the might of 2014’s self-titled LP, but also beefed up older songs such as “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)” and “Shakedown on 9th Street.” While Jason Isbell appeared to play guitar on “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” the takeaway moment was Adams’ improv song, “Goodbye Two Balloons,” which was a nod to a previous improv performance during his last appearance in Golden Gate Park, when he made up an impromptu song about a person holding “Three F— Balloons” at the back of the park during the 2014 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.
Other notes from day three:
• Kamasi Washington — Kicking off the day on the main stage, the jazz saxophonist who played long, layered selections from last year’s triple album The Epic. He also invited his father, Rickey, to join him on stage for “The Rhythm Changes.”
• Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem — The Muppets house band made an appearance, “performing” along to pre-recorded covers of The Mowgli’s “San Francisco,” Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ “Home,” The Band’s “Ophelia” and closing with a choir-backed reading of “With a Little Help From My Friends” in Joe Cocker’s style.
SAN FRANCISCO — British art rock quintet Radiohead mixed new material with old favorites in a two-hour set Saturday in Golden Gate Park for the Outside Lands Music Festival.
Six tracks from A Moon Shaped Pool, released in May, were on display Saturday, including three in a row to start the night. The last of them, “Ful Stop,” was where the show kicked in, starting a three-song suite of rockers along with “2+2=5” and “Bodysnatchers.”
The band gave snapshots of its abilities or eras — a pair of two-song glimpses of OK Computer, a turbo-charged coupling of tracks from 2011’s The King of Limbs, a torrid closing trio of “Everything in its Right Place,” “Idioteque” and “There There.” The band closed the show with the second of its two-song Computer snapshots, doubling down with a thunderous “Paranoid Android” as well as “Karma Police.”
The day’s biggest surprise was Julien Baker, who started the day on the Sutro Stage. The 20-year-old singer and guitarist was arresting with her gentle, minimal playing style and versatile voice. Since many of her songs are downers, she joked, “The great thing about starting off your day with all these bummer jams is it can only go up from here.” She built multiple tracks into intense moments, including “Vessels” and “Rejoice.”
New York-based art pop and folk singer Sufjan Stevens brought the downright bizarre, from his evolving costumes to encouraging the crowd to chant the “We’re all gonna die” refrain from “Fourth of July” with glee. He brought his kaleidoscope of colors to bear, beefing up his off-beat brand of sometimes wispy songs with deeper instrumentation or new arrangements to make them fit for festival-sized crowds.
Long Beach rapper Vince Staples and Los Angeles-based electronic dance musician Jauz brought big crowds and lots of fun to the Twin Peaks Stage in the Hellman’s Hollow section of the park. Both packed the field, getting hands waving and bodies dancing.
While Staples relied on hits, including “Norf Norf” and “Señorita,” Jauz showed off his rock chops, working the likes of Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” and Kiss’ “Rock and Roll All Nite” into party sensations.
Other notes from day two:
• The Knocks — The New York synthpop duo kicked off Saturday’s Twin Peaks trend of getting people dancing, including “Brightside” and a guest appearance from St. Lucia on their “Modern Hearts” collaboration.
• Kevin Morby — The Los Angeles-based folk rocker showed off his chops, including several cuts from this year’s standout LP Singing Saw.
• Fantastic Negrito — Oakland’s own and NPR contest Tiny Desk Concert contest winner made up for last year’s day-of show cancellation with a brisk 45-minute set early in the day, mixing in crowd favorites such as “Lost in the Crowd” and “Rant Rushmore” as well as a rendition of Lead Belly’s “In the Pines.”
• Declan McKenna — The 17-year-old British indie rocker showed promise during a stop on the Panhandle Stage, including a stripped down solo reading of his song "Basic" as well as "Paracetamol," which offers a human look on the difficulties transgender teens face.
SAN FRANCISCO — Reunited New York group LCD Soundsystem headlined day one of the Outside Lands Music Festival, but a good portion of the crowd was seeing rapper J. Cole instead.
James Murphy and company delivered favorites from LCD's three LPs, boosted by a lighting and video setup that enhanced their dance punk.
While Murphy isn’t the most engaging frontman, he did bring his crate of swirling, hypnotic beats and throbbing grooves. He rants (“Losing My Edge”) and yells (“Yeah”), but it worked to sell the urgency of the band’s songs. The band closed with a version of "All My Friends" that felt somehow celebratory.
One of the day’s biggest highlights was Foals, which is aging like wine. The last time the group played the festival, now in its ninth year, the British post-punkers helmed the main stage. Relegated to a smaller platform this time, the band showed some of the best fire of the day, delivering a set of confident rockers with driving blasts of guitar. The sun also made its only extended appearance during the band’s set on a day when temperatures routinely hovered in the 50s.
Later, on the same stage, Denver’s Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats strode in with a point to make. It’s difficult to believe the band is nearly one year removed from its breakthrough appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” when a fiery performance showed Rateliff’s chops and the band’s cohesion. His dance moves showed as well as his politics, mentioning Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential run and urging the crowd to keep his message alive.
Beach House closed the Sutro Stage on Friday. The group was sublime, with its melancholy and moody music matching the overcast, sunset tone. What impresses in the band’s live performance is that their songs retain their fragility from the studio recordings, but manage to project to a crowd of thousands at a festival, too. That helps when the strongest weapon in your arsenal is Victoria Legrand’s voice. The group also used a prop that looked like a see-through curtain that stretched from the stage floor to the lighting rig atop it and, when alight, looked like a constellation of stars. Much like LCD, fans could be seen throughout the set peeling off to go see Cole.
Other notes from day one:
• The Claypool Lennon Delirium — This oddball project brings together the talents of Primus bassist and singer Les Claypool with Sean Lennon, son of the former Beatles singer and Yoko Ono. The combo thrives in reverb-soaked psych rock, including a batch of originals as well as a trippy cover of King Crimson’s “In the Court of the Crimson King.”
• Jidenna — The “Classic Man” singer was smooth, dancing his way through a set of his singles that show an encouraging future.
• Moon Taxi — On the tiny Panhandle Stage, the Tennessee band was one of the day’s early highlights, delivering fan favorites such as “Year Zero” and “All Day All Night.”
Thom Yorke from Radiohead sings at the inaugural Outside Lands Music Festival in 2008. Radiohead returns this weekend for the festival's ninth installment amid a critical revival after May's universally acclaimed "A Moon Shaped Pool." (Courtesy photo/Julio Enriquez)
Radiohead is back in the Bay. Everything is in its right place.
The British art rock quintet returns Saturday to play the Outside Lands Music Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, supporting its ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool.
The band’s last Bay Area gig came April 2012 in San Jose, but prior to that, it claimed the first-ever headlining spot at the inaugural Outside Lands in August 2008.
That remains as a standout moment in the festival’s history, with fans — both ticketed and not — breaking down fences to pack the Polo Field shoulder to shoulder to watch the innovative British group. Sound problems plagued the set, with the audio cutting out several times.
While much has changed for Outside Land since that time, Radiohead returns triumphant as Moon Shaped Pool represents a critical resurgence after 2011’s uneven The King of Limbs.
It’s an unlikely story that festivalgoers are seeing Radiohead amid a critical revival given how the band’s status seemed just months ago. When the band was announced as a headliner in April, the public only knew whispers that a new album was on the horizon. Limbs was the most recent material and, given its lukewarm reception, there was reason to think we had reached Peak Radiohead in the Aughties.
Heck, even I was skeptical. Maintaining the level of quality, creativity and ambition they have for as long as they have is baffling.
But not so fast, said Radiohead. While Pool represents a safe effort by Radiohead’s impossible standards — not as bold and daring as Kid A, not a generational statement like OK Computer — it’s still on par with some of the British quintet’s best efforts in terms of quality.
That’s rare. Few groups get to be so beloved critically and culturally for two decades.
Even comparing to other “golden” stretches, there’s marked beginnings and endings — Stevie Wonder, The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bruce Springsteen and Prince in the early 1980s, Pavement in the 1990s, Mastodon in the 2000s, Kendrick Lamar so far in the 2010s.
But Radiohead has no chill when it comes to nearly two straight decades of must-spin LPs: The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows and Pool.
Even though Limbs (left) was a failure by Radiohead standards, it was a noble failure. The band was trying to push boundaries and explore new territory, subverting the beauty of In Rainbows with the electronic elements and textures from Kid A.
There’s plenty of smoke blown up the collective backside of Radiohead, brand-making platitudes about how they’re “the band of a generation” or the “saviors of guitar music” or whatever mantle they’ve been assigned this month.
I don’t know what those things mean, but they sound like the sort of declarative statements that look great on a sticker on the album cover, but don’t hold up to scrutiny.
What I am willing to say is that bands that so repeatedly defy expectations are rare.
Radiohead’s at the plot point on the graph where accessibility meets experimentation. They’re both a reflection of ourselves in the digital age as well as a statement about them.
There’s something beautifully funny about a group with themes of isolation and alienation bringing together thousands of people in Golden Gate Park to share an experience together.
I can’t wait for it.
What’s trending culturally right now feels like artifacts pulled from a time capsule sealed in the 1990s:
• Pokémon is the hottest game in the nation.
• Pop punk rockers Blink-182 have the No. 1-selling album on the Billboard charts.
• Two of the biggest names in politics right now are Clinton and Gingrich.
To quote a Blink-182 hit from that era: What’s my age again?
Fully submerged in our retro-’90s deep dive, it feels like proper time to binge watch “The Larry Sanders Show,” especially months after the death of its star, Garry Shandling (right).
“The Larry Sanders Show” ran for six seasons on HBO, a behind-the-scenes, half-hour comedy about production of a fictitious talk show of the same name. Many critics consider it the high-water mark of Shandling’s career.
As someone who never saw the show during its run, there’s something satisfying about watching Shandling in his signature work. It was ahead of its time so much that he told Jerry Seinfeld in an episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” prior to his death that it was a difficult show to sell because its mockumentary, behind-the-scenes style didn’t have a precedent at the time.
Now such comedies are commonplace. It feels like a less silly spiritual ancestor of “30 Rock” in the way it shows the behind-the-scenes drama of a variety show, but like a sibling of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” because of the frequency with which Sanders’ actions blow up in his face.
While trailblazing in some respects, the show has not aged well in others. Unlike “30 Rock,” which showed rare snippets of the variety show it produced, “Sanders” gives more than passing glances at its show within in a show. Larry engages with guests as well as delivers opening monologue bits referencing 1990s news of the day. “No flipping,” Larry tells his would-be viewers as he heads into commercials, a funny idea considering the actual program is on HBO.
The show is so old that it talks about being in competition with the first run of the “The Arsenio Hall Show,” a show that returned to the airwaves for a single-season run on CBS in 2013-14. A young Dana Carvey appears as an upstart comedian filling in for Larry as a guest host. Janeane Garofalo, in one of her earliest screen roles and more recently for her political commentary, has a recurring spot as a member of the show's staff.
Perhaps the greatest and saddest way the program shows its age is its guest appearances by a sobering parade of deceased comics and celebrities, including Robin Williams, Phil Hartman, John Ritter, Bruno Kirby, Ed McMahon, Chris Farley, Warren Zevon and others. Even film critic Gene Siskel pops up.
Also, of course, there’s Shandling himself, the not-so-calm at the center of the storm roiling with anger under the surface as the title character. It’s a strong performance that blurs the line between fiction and fact. Even if he faded from the mainstream after the show’s conclusion, he left a powerful mark on television.
While admirable for the elements that made it ahead of its time, the show’s full-bloom nostalgia makes it a complicated title to suggest to other newcomers in 2016. While I smirk at the sight of Hartman, whose shocking death I still mourn, I suspect those unfamiliar with his great work on “Saturday Night Live,” “NewsRadio,” “The Simpsons” and more might not get the same thrill from seeing him once more.
Maybe that’s why I find “Sanders” bittersweet, but enjoyable. I’m old enough to remember Hartman as well as Ritter, Farley and even Siskel. Though some of the jokes are dated, it’s the characters and the issues they face that make it entertaining. Shandling, along with Rip Torn, as producer Arthur, and Jeffrey Tambor, as his nauseating sidekick Hank, make for a colorful, entertaining trio at the heart of the show.
So even if time has passed by “The Larry Sanders Show” in some respects, it’s still a time capsule worth opening.
No flipping.
Robin Williams on the show (NSFW language):
Bruno Kirby and Steven Wright make guest appearances:
Jeffrey Tambor recreates Hank's often-used opening credits dialogue for an episode of "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon"