The sky was gray above Chicago's Union Park (a location, incidentally, that no one in the city would recognize if not for the website's annual to-do), and the temperature was dropping rapidly. Nonetheless, my girlfriend and I arrived at the gates with a spring in our step alongside tens of thousands of fans, ready to enjoy the night's offering of indie legends. Although Friday is the shortest day of the weekend-long festival, it tends to be my favorite, and this year was no exception. In the past, Pitchfork has selected three big-name artists to perform some of their most beloved albums, beginning to end (Sonic Youth and Daydream Nation in 2007, Mission of Burma and Vs. in 2008). This year, however, Pitchfork experimented with a new format: Write the Night, where fans who bought three-day passes got to submit a setlist for each of the four Friday night acts. This year's choices were heavily weighted with bands who came into prominence in the ‘90s: Tortoise, Yo La Tengo, The Jesus Lizard, and Built to Spill. It was a rare opportunity to hear some important figures in the indie-verse playing those deeply cherished fan favorites that have a way of getting brushed to the wayside as artists accrue new releases.
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- Tortoise
As a Chicagoan and an unapologetic music snob, it's a little embarrassing to admit that I've never really listened to Tortoise. Back around when Millions Now Living came out, I was more taken with Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and by the time my tastes had evolved to the point where I could appreciate Tortoise's comparatively laid-back approach to instrumental "post-rock," all of a sudden, no one was talking about post-rock any more. I feel that, of all the bands that played Friday night, Tortoise may have suffered the most from being outdoors. Songs that might have sounded lavish and redolent in an enclosed area came across as merely pretty in the open air. Still, the band, currently a five-piece, was in top form, weaving together a warm pot pourri of Krautrock, jazz, and electronica into a continuous stream of music. They didn't move around a lot onstage, and their interaction with the audience was minimal, save for an offhand comment from John McEntire — at the time manning the keyboard — that fell somewhere between self-deprecating and passive aggressive: “We've got a new record that you're not going to hear today because no one requested the new shit.” Following that, the band launched into the title track to TNT. It was a pleasant way to begin this year's festival and strengthened my resolve to start digging into the band's back catalogue.
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- Yo La Tengo
I have always associated Yo La Tengo with tight jeans, horizontally striped polos, and ironic facial hair, with precious, 60s-tinged pop numbers, and hopelessly dull and abstruse experimentations with the elements of song. Their first couple offerings, "Here to Fall" and "Autumn Sweater," did little to disabuse me of my prejudices. The band traded vocal duties and instruments as they cycled through a succession of twee indie gems. It wasn't until they struck on “Stockholm Syndrome” that my attention really perked up. Front man Ira Kaplan hunched over his guitar, teasing out the most warped, inside-out guitar solo this side of Sonic Youth. I'd heard rumors that the band could rock-out live, but it took seeing to believe. Yo La Tengo departed from the Write the Night format to unveil some new tracks, among them “Periodically Double or Triple,” a cool, jazzy breeze of a tune that finds Kaplan ditching his guitar mid-song to pound out a distorted keyboard solo.
He raised hell on the epic, droning “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind.” James McNew's three-note bass line provided the canvas for Kaplan to torture his instrument. And make no mistake, he molested the hell out of it, at one point unslinging it from his shoulder, grabbing it by the tuning keys in one hand, and ravaging the strings with his other. Three-quarters of the way through the song, he let the spent instrument tumble from his grasp, as a fresh guitar, like a Christian thrown before the lions, was fed to him from offstage. It's unfortunate, then, that Yo La Tengo's set was plagued by technical difficulties. A strong cross-breeze interfered with the sound, reducing the guitar and vocals to a bare whisper above the rhythm section, even for those who were within a hundred yards of the stage. (This was a problem, incidentally, that they seemed to work out for Saturday and Sunday.) It's a shame that the audience was denied the full effect of the band's performance.
I managed to track down a setlist for the performance:
1. Here To Fall
2. Autumn Sweater
3. Let's Save Tony Orlando's House
4. Cherry Chapstick
5. Stockholm Syndrome
6. Periodically Double Or Triple
7. Mr. Tough
8. The Fireside
9. Tom Courtenay
10. Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
11. Sugarcube
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- The Jesus Lizard
There's really no way to overstate the anticipation I felt waiting for The Jesus Lizard to assume the stage. Fed for years on sordid tales of manic front man David Yow's wild on-stage antics, I couldn't quite believe I was actually going to witness the spectacle firsthand. And the band did not disappoint. Duane Denison had hardly struck the opening chord to “Puss” before Yow launched himself headfirst into the crowd, not missing a beat while he was passed from hand-to-hand, person-to-person. Not even a full song into their set, The Jesus Lizard had wiped out every band that preceded them (and a goodly chunk of what was to follow).
When he wasn't running amok in the crowd, Yow could be found hanging from the mic stand, doing pushups, crawling across the stage on all fours, and crouching like a madman. During “Nub,” he pulled his shirt up and let it hang over his head like a hood. Halfway through his set, he was completely soaked in sweat. The band sounded immaculate. Drummer Mac McNeily hammered the skins mercilessly while David Wm. Simms churned out his roiling, murky bass-sewage. Denison's guitar snarled like a cornered animal, and Yow lovingly reproduced every gurgle and grunt as if Liar or Goat had been released a year ago rather than nearly two decades.
Nevertheless, I was troubled by the apparent apathy of those around me. Past the first five or six rows of fans, nearly everyone was standing motionless, some with arms folded, for the entirety of the set. More than that, you could catch them casting furtive, irritated glances at the odd duck in the crowd who had the audacity to bob his head or — God forbid! — sway from side-to-side. I chalked the crowd's somnolence up to too-cool-to-dance hipsterdom at the time, but adjusted my views as the weekend wore on. Looking back, I honestly think that most of that audience just didn't know how to react, perhaps lacking the frame of reference for a band like The Jesus Lizard. God knows that there's no abundance of artists nowadays providing the kind of confrontational yet immediately accessible noise punk that The Jesus Lizard spun so effortlessly.
The Jesus Lizard's set straddled the band's Touch and Go oeuvre, but drew most heavily from Pure and the first three LPs. They closed their set down with “7 vs 8” from their punishing debut, Head, extending the song's musical outro into a squealing jam. Yow was the first to depart the stage while Dennison fell backwards, flailing his guitar, legs kicking robotically like a wind-up toy that had been toppled over. McNeily left last, dripping with sweat and trembling. But the band returned for a two-song encore (the only Friday-night band to do so), both of which were unfamiliar to me, but the first of which, I think, was a cover of The Dicks' “Wheelchair Epidemic.” When all was said and done, The Jesus Lizard's set was easily the crowning moment of the night, if not the entire weekend.
Setlist:
1. Puss
2. Sea Sick
3. Mouthbreather
4. Destroy Before Reading
5. Killer McHann
6. Nub
7. Glamorous
8. Bloody Mary
9. Blue Shot
10. One Evening
11. Then Comes Dudley
12. Boilermaker
13. Gladiator
14. Monkey Trick
15. Blockbuster
16. 7 vs 8
17. Wheelchair Epidemic (encore)
18. Fly on the Wall (encore)
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- Built to Spill
It's hard not to feel sorry for Doug Martsch, having to follow a power-house like The Jesus Lizard. If he felt threatened by the intensity of his predecessor's sonic attack, however, he didn't show it. In fact, Built to Spill seemed defiantly somnolent, opening with the laid-back jam, “Liar.” Under different circumstances, I might have been putty in their hands, but after the blunt-trauma of David Yow's performance, it was hard to muster much enthusiasm for three stationary guys jamming away behind their mic stands. Still, they worked in some lovely surprises for the devoted fan: an improvised jam to close out “Strange,” a remolding of “In Your Mind” into a crunchy, slow-burning brooder. Classics like “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain” and “Going Against Your Mind” were irresistible in their own right. It was enough for most of the crowd, at least, many of whom stood and swayed in rapt attention as Martsch unspooled his intricate guitar exercises. The band wrapped their set up shortly after 10 PM with “Carry the Zero,” not a minute too soon before my long-suffering girlfriend who was by then cold, tired, and thoroughly sick of watching bands that weren't The Jesus Lizard. I couldn't say I blamed her. My feet hurt, my throat was raw, my neck was sore... and the festival had hardly begun yet. Saturday and Sunday were the long days.
Special thanks to Built to Spill superfan Mike, who helped me put together the band's setlist:
1. Liar
2. Stab
3. Strange
4. You Were Right
5. Kicked in the Sun
6. Conventional Wisdom
7. Else
8. The Big Dipper
9. In Your Mind
10. Virginia Reel Around the Fountain
11. Goin' Against Your Mind
12. Carry the Zero
