More Festifying

I was mistaken; Florida apparently still allows smoking in bars, but whether or not it does, the punks are doing plenty of it. Apparently the first show I attended on Friday had a very low jerk quotient, because I didn't see (or smell) a single person smoking, but such was not the case today. In fact I ended up missing one of my favorite bands because the prospect of hanging out for a several hours in a truly vile atmosphere (lack thereof, actually, if we're taking "atmosphere" to imply "breathable air") was just too much to bear.

So why didn't I simply step outside and wait there until it was time for the band to go on? Well, it's not that simple. Some of the Fest venues were so crowded that you had to wait in line for an hour or more before enough people left and you could be allowed in. And in the case of the popular bands, nobody was leaving and you just weren't getting in. About a hundred of us listened to Dear Landlord from outside on the street, despite having waited nearly an hour to get in. I missed my friend Justin's band the Ringers because the line to get into Common Grounds was held up by painfully slow ID checks. And although we got into the Market Street Tavern in plenty of time to see the Copyrights, the prospect of three hours of not breathing prompted me to give up and leave, which I kind of regret, as I expect it was a completely awesome show. But my lungs are still thanking me.

I actually like both Gainesville and Florida, but there are a few backward aspects, the smoking policy being one of them, that are more than a bit maddening. So too is the way the town is laid out, in old-fashioned drive-everywhere-wasting-massive-amounts-of-gas fashion. Naturally traffic is a massive clusterfuck for several hours every morning and evening; despite Gainesville being a sleepy little college town of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, I've seen gridlock to rival that of New York City.

Another exciting adventure: looking for a supermarket that sold actual food fit for human consumption. Okay, this wasn't the hardest thing in the world; it simply required joining the masses of carbound lemmings and driving several miles out from the city center (there's no supermarket within walking distance) into Walmart land. In fact, I visited an actual Walmart, under the mistaken impression that in addition to cheap TVs, tires, geegaws and doodads, that great American institution also sold food. In fact, I'd swear the one my cousin dragged me to in Northern Michigan had a large grocery department.

Not the one in Gainesville, however. Well, they did have something vaguely resembling a grocery department, but edible food? Of the non-packaged and processed, non-empty calories and non-carcinogenic variety? Absolutely zero. I was looking specifically for fresh produce, i.e., fruits and vegetables. Not too much to ask for in a grocery store, you'd think? In Walmart, it apparently is. They don't even have a produce section. It's a wonder the entire town hasn't come down with scurvy.

Eventually, after another hour or so of destroying the atmosphere and driving a few more species to extinction, I did find another supermarket with a fresh food section, and really, it's time I stopped complaining about Gainesville now, because for the most part I'm still happy to be here at the Fest, and even happier to have spent most of the day at the best venue by far, a bike co-op called the Kickstand, well away, but still walking distance from downtown, where there were no ID checks, smokers were exiled to the outdoors where they belonged, and nearly every band was good to great.

Some highlights: Delay, The Max Levine Ensemble, Tin Armor, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Brook Pridemore and Two Funerals, but seriously, there was almost nothing there that wasn't worth watching. And although the place was clearly crawling with vegans and bike punks, none of the didacticism and bombast sometimes associated with those groups was in evidence. Just a nice comfortable scene on a nice sunny day. Ryan Delay said, "There's really no reason to leave here," and I wish I hadn't.

There was meant to be a 2 am house show featuring Spoonboy, Andrew Jackson Jihad, and Wingnut Dishwasher Union (I met the alleged brains behind the latter operation, and he seemed pleasant enough, though I see from his Myspace that he believes "Any good punk is at least part hippie," and we might have had to have a little discussion about that idea), but when I arrived at the appointed reference there were three police cars with lights a-flashing, hundreds of punk rockers milling around in the residential backstreets, and little if any evidence of music going on. Perhaps I should have stuck around and possibly got arrested, something I haven't done in quite a while now, but seeing one other Fester being led off in handcuffs reminded me that I had never particularly enjoyed it back in the days when getting arrested was a fairly regular activity of mine. Might have made for a more interesting blog post, though.

Anyway, it's now nearly 4 am, and that's including the extra hour gained by the end of Daylight Savings Time. A busy day awaits tomorrow, including the Used Kids, the Monikers, the Unlovables, the Ergs, and a bunch of country punk bands, all of which will probably be subject to unpredictable revision. On the other hand, maybe I'll just stay in and watch 12 more hours of MSNBC, CNN and Fox coverage of the next-to-last day of the election campaign. Well, probably not, but I seem to have developed an unhealthy fascination with their round-the-clock natterings. I mean, it's not like I still need any help deciding who I'm going to vote for, and it's even less likely that any of the candidates will be calling on me for my expertise, so what exactly do I hope to learn by watching this stuff, other than that I really, really don't want to spend the next four or eight years listening to John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Oh, one last Festly tale: apparently my criticisms of Dillinger 4's unfunny comedy act have reached the ears of Paddy, who followed up his normal "I love cocaine" rant with some version of "Fuck Larry Livermore" which may or may not have enlivened proceedings; I don't know because of course I wasn't there, having several more interesting things to attend to. But having just been told about it by someone who was, I was standing in line outside another venue when Paddy himself came up and got into a long and mostly incoherent conversation with the guy standing in front of me.

I actually didn't know who it was, having mistaken him for a particularly unfortunate street tramp, and I have no idea if he recognized me. But some kid rolling a joint up the street did, after a fashion: "Yo, dude, you're Shawn Stern, aren't you? Don't lie, I know you are, you own BYO Records! I love that label, can I shake your hand?" And that, my friends (I told you I'd been seeing too much of Liar McCain!) was when I called a wrap on Day Two of The Fest.

Spoonboy

If there were any justice in this world Spoonboy and I would star in our own sitcom. It would be predictable but heartwarming, the underlying premise being that we constantly disagreed about stuff but were still buddies, and every episode would start off something along the lines of:

Spoonboy: Well, see you later, Larry, I've got to go save the world.
Larry: What makes you think the world even needs saving? Or that whatever you do won't make it even worse?
Spoonboy: (Does trademark eye-roll, then picks up his guitar and goes into a song about how I'm an unwitting tool of the patriarchy.)
Larry: Aw, ya big lug, you may be wrong about everything, but dammit, ya got a heart of gold.

Or something like that. Obviously I'm not ready to make the big switch into sitcom-writing just yet, but with a little fine-tuning and a laugh track, I think it could work. Anyway, Spoonboy came through town the other night as part of his save-the-world solo tour that culminates with his attempts to shut down the American electoral system, or at least the Democratic and Republican conventions, and as flippant as I might sound about it (I'm still in sitcom mode, see), he put on an awesome, stunning show that you'd be well advised to see regardless of where you're situated on the political or cultural spectrum.

It might (probably) will entail peddling down to your local anarchist collective or info-shop, but provided you don't try to hand out John McCain (or, for that matter, Obama) pamphlets or question the natives about their bathing practices, you should come through the experience not only unscathed, but also with a greater appreciation for the diversity of opinion and expression that bubbles just under the surface of a seemingly placid (if not downright catatonic) society.

Try as I might, I haven't been able to get Spoonboy to explain how he got his somewhat curious nickname, saying only that it dates back to his days as a teenage ska fan, but I suspect the photo at left, posted by a fan on the PPMB, tells at least part of the story. While it might also portray the Spoonboy in a somewhat more frivolous light than you might expect given his current commitment to activism, it's worth noting that one of the things I like best about him is his sense of humor, which hasn't been dimmed by his intensely earnest views on everything from global capitalism to neighborhood community centers. And something which sets him distinctly apart from the majority of activists I've known.

"I go back and forth with him," says longtime friend Thomas, who's driving the tour car and in general acting as Sancho Panza to Spoonboy's Quixote. "I really love lots of his ideas and the passion he brings to them, but then I'm like, 'Wait a minute, how exactly would that work?'"

Which is pretty much exactly where I stand, with the minor difference of having had quite a few years to become disillusioned with the rather large gulf that generally emerges between anarchist theory and practice. Like Thomas, I really want Spoonboy's vision (well, at least the part where everyone lives in a more cooperative and healthier, happier environment) to come true, but am not quite sure how we get from here to there using the methods he seems to be endorsing.

But there's enough of a spark - and maybe more than just a spark - of genius about this young man that I wouldn't want to ignore the possibility - or even the hope - that he just might be right about some of these things. That, coupled with great reservoirs of idealism and compassion - qualities often in short supply these days - mark him out as someone worth watching not only for his prodigious musical talent, but as a real man among men, and someone who makes you feel a little bit better about just being alive.

Pop Goes The Music

In yesterday's long, rambling post about playing 1890s songs on the piano, I neglected to mention one other reason why late 19th century songs have a special place in my heart: they represent, for better or worse, the dawn of popular music as we understand it today.

Oh, sure, there was always "popular" music of a sort. It's very likely that catchy tunes were being spread from town to town by wandering troubadours at least as far back as the Middle Ages, and probably well before that. It's also a near certainty that some of the most memorable motifs (riffs, if you will) in classical music were lifted ("borrowed," if you prefer) from popular peasant songs.

But because there was no systematized means of preserving such songs - at least if anyone was keeping a 14th century version of the pop charts, it's never been found - and also because historically there was a fairly strict separation between "high" and "low" culture, little notice was taken of what the common people were humming along to.

Until, that is, the industrial revolution turned peasants into an urban working class and gave them sufficient purchasing power to - at least en masse - rival the royalty and aristocracy who had been the traditional patrons of the arts. That, coupled with the process of mass production and standardization meant that instead of it taking months or years for some version or other of a folk tune to migrate from town to town, identical versions of a new song could be in thousands, even tens of thousands of households across the country in a matter of days.

As a boy I asked my dad, who was old enough to remember when phonographs were rare and radio nonexistent, how songs could become "popular" without most people being able to hear them played. He looked at me with surprise, as if wondering not for the first time how any offspring of his could be so clueless. "Why, through sheet music, of course."

He went on to explain how in the late 19th and early 20th nearly every reasonably well-off home had a piano and someone - most often one of the daughters of the family - who knew how to play it. Each week when a new batch of sheet music would come into the local shop, people would rush down and grab copies of the ones that looked interesting or that they'd heard about from others. Then they'd go home and start practicing, and with any luck by Saturday night they'd be leading friends and neighbors in a singalong of the latest "hits."

As much as I was wedded to my rock and roll radio during the 1950s and 60s, the idea of that whole piano singalong thing always appealed to me, and when I first started hanging out in the UK during the 1970s, I was lucky enough to occasionally run into some old-timers who still did things that way. One of my most favorite times was in a tiny town near the top of Scotland on or near Midsummer Night. At midnight it was still light enough for under-14s to be playing football on the village green. Nearly everyone else was squeezed into the one local pub, with no notice being taken of closing times or legal drinking ages. An old lady, who I understand to be either 90 or 96 - between the rowdy din and the Scottish accents, I reckoned myself fortunate to understand anything at all - took a seat at the piano and ran though nearly every song of note from the First and Second World Wars and much of what had come between.

I only knew about half the songs - if that - but I joined in singing with everyone else, wondering at the same time what would happen when the old dear at the piano had taken her final encore. Was there anyone in the town with her encylopedic knowledge of the old songs, or would she be replaced by a jukebox and/or a television?

I suppose it's always been a quiet ambition of mine to be able to play the piano well enough that people could sing along with me, and that in the process I'd be able to pass on some of the great old songs to a new generation or three. But I never practiced enough, was never quite outgoing or demonstrative enough, and maybe just wasn't talented enough to realize that particular dream.

But maybe there's still time. My mother and I are talking about going out to Ontario this summer for her cousin's 100th birthday celebration, and if I keep at the practicing, I'm hoping at the very least I might be able to play a few of the hits from 1908 or thereabouts to mark the centenary. Given that the average age of my audience will skew toward the high 80s, it's possible that they'll let me slide with a less than perfect performance. On the other hand, these are people who really know these songs, so my usual slapdash technique won't suffice.

Not even sure we're going yet, though, as my mother's kicking up a fuss about the new Homeland Security regulations for travel to Canada. Seems she let her passport lapses a number of years ago, thinking that her international traveling days were done, and she is very cross with George Bush for - well, a number of things, but particularly for requiring a passport for a journey which, back in her Detroit days, she made hundreds if not thousands of times with no more than a jaunty wave to the border crossing guards at the Ambassador Bridge (she and her parents were themselves "nickel immigrants," so named because of the bridge toll at the time).

A new passport will cost her about 100 bucks, and while she can easily afford it, she's insisting she's not going to give the Bush the satisfaction of taking her money, even if it means missing out on the party. "But Mom," I tell her, "you're the only one who's going to suffer. I really doubt President Bush is going to be sitting there in the White House cursing his luck at not getting that extra $100 out of you."

"I know," she says, "but it's the principle." And every time we have one of these discussions I learn a little more about how I got the way I am.

In other road trip news, I'm seriously considering going out to follow the Weakerthans around the middle of the country for a few days in early April. I used to do this fairly often, but in recent years have only been seeing them when they came to whatever town I was living in at the time. Maybe I'm just getting restless as winter enters the home stretch, but I think several consecutive nights of Weakerthans plus some long meandering two-lane drives in between might be just the ticket.

And lastly, I got a pleasant surprise in the mail today: the new CD from The Max Levine Ensemble, OK Smartypants AND I Love You, This Is A Robbery, the solo album from MLE guitarist/lead singer David "Spoonboy" Combs. Both are excellent, in very different ways, and inspired me to drag my old electric guitar out of hiding. Tomorrow, after the neighbors go to work, I might even try to plug it in.