Author: andrew-cedermark

Crozet Music Festival has been postponed

The Misty Mountain Music Festival was set to take place where the CMF has traditionally taken place, at the Misty Mountain Campground, with a mission curiously similar to CMF; meanwhile, the 5th annual CMF, had been moved this year to locations near Downtown Crozet. As one Facebook user asked on the Crozet Music Festival’s page, "Is this the same weekend at the same location as Misty Mountain Music Festival? Are they actually seperate or being put together. Or do we buy tickets to both and bounce back and fourth?"

With the postponement of the Crozet Music Festival, the most confusing weekend in local music is now much less confusing. (Very) long story short: CMF organizer Biff Rossberg wasn’t able to secure the necessary permits in time after nailing down a location for the festival. But he says that he’s learned from the experience, and has tentatively rescheduled the festival for later in the fall.

“I appreciated [Albemarle County Zoning Administrator] Amelia McCully’s strong urging that we could work together instead of in opposition, and we thought it would be best for all concerned if we waited for a later date in the fall,” said Rossberg.

Legendary reggae group the Itals, originally scheduled for the Crozet Music Festival festival, will instead perform this weekend at Brasserie Montiel/Cucina del Sol. (Details are here.)

Meanwhile, the Misty Mountain Music Festival continues through this weekend, with performances by a host of local bands. Details are here.

As for the confusing weekend lineup of festivals: After the inaugural CMF in Claudius Crozet Park in 2007, the festival moved to the Misty Mountain Campground from 2008, where it stayed through 2010. Rossberg says that he was in touch earlier this year to try to schedule Crozet Music Festival for the campground again, but the two parties never struck a deal.

"It was never agreed upon that the Crozet Music Festival was going to happen at Misty Mountain this year,” said the local musician John Howard, who was listed as a contact for the Misty Mountain Music Festival. "For a while we’ve been wanting to take a weekend and bring in a few local bands."

"We’ve only put this together in the last month and a half," Howard said of the Misty Mountain fest.

 

Categories
Living

Here we are now, entertain us

Exactly a year ago last Saturday, the most important songwriter of the 20th century, Bob Dylan himself, played the John Paul Jones Arena. Only a few weeks earlier Lady Gaga, who is hugely important in American culture, had played. All this was leading up to a pair of November gigs with the Dave Matthews Band, Charlottesville’s most important export.

An October 26th show with The Goo Goo Dolls was announced for the John Paul Jones Arena, a bright spot in an otherwise quiet season for big concerts.

Compare that to this year: the Grateful Dead offshoot act Furthur, featuring Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, is booked for November 8, and the staggeringly popular ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s “Controlled Chaos” show follows two days later. Good stuff. But look through the season’s schedule and we’ve got the Ringling Brothers’ circus in October, Broadway in Charlottesville, a couple of job fairs, the annual Martha’s Market Fundraiser…hmph.

Worthy events, to be sure, but we’ve got an arena. Where’s the arena rock? (Just as this article was going to press, the arena announced a Goo-Goo Dolls show for October 26.)
I called JPJ’s manager Jason Pedone to check in. Did something happen with the arena’s agreement with SMG, the events management company that works with promoters to route its acts through the dozens of arenas like JPJ that it manages across the country? Nope: The agreement is inked with SMG through June 2016.

Where are the rock shows then? “Those things are a little bit out of our control, to some extent,” Pedone told me over the phone. “But we’re going to have another great year. We just can’t always control when they’re announced. Last year the year got started a little bit earlier. But we’re going to have another great year.”

“I know that’s not really exactly what you’re looking for,” he said. “No disrespect to any artists, but I understand your question. It’s just the way things are falling this year.”
He said shows there are still being booked as they’ve always been. “If you can route a show from Huntington, West Virginia, to Charlottesville, to Baltimore, that works out really well.

“We certainly do pitch that to agents and promoters that are routing tours. In some cases the corporate office routes the shows themselves.”

The Paramount Theater also seems to be in a dry spell, as far as big-time rock ‘n’ roll acts go. A strong first half of the year brought us Randy Newman, Earl Scruggs, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and then Gillian Welch this August. Good stuff.

The theater’s schedule is packed through the winter with events featuring the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Co., the Met in HD, a night with celebrity chefs Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert. Again, good stuff. But where’s the rock?

Starr Hill Presents will bring The Jayhawks to the Paramount on October 23, but aside from that it’s a similar pattern—no big-name rock acts through the end of the year. I checked in with Debra McMahon, vice chair of the Paramount’s Board of Directors, who said that the board was finalizing an agreement that would continue the Paramount’s partnership with SMG, which means that moving forward it should be business as usual—big-name acts rock acts.

As Pedone said of JPJ, “Keep checking in. Another outstanding year coming up.” Let’s hope it starts soon.

Funny “haha”

What did one cannibal say to the next while eating a clown?

Maybe you can find out this November at the United Nations of Comedy Tour. Tickets are on sale now for the November 19 chucklefest, which features David Foster, Gina Brillon, Bridget McManus, Sheng Wang and Funny Man Skiba. (They’ve appeared on Comedy Central, BET “Comic View,” HBO, Showtime, and other national programs.)

The comedy series was founded by local events promoter Ty Cooper, who intends for the series to promote diversity around town. Can’t argue with that. So we’re giving away a pair of free tickets to anyone with a good joke. Visit the Feedback blog at c-ville.com for complete details.

Oh, and the answer to the above joke is, Does this taste funny to you?

Wait, nevermind

Speaking of big-name rock acts, you’ve probably heard in, like, every major media outlet about how September 24 weekend marked the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the album that turned major labels on to independent music and brought angsty, abstract lyrics in rock music to the mainstream.

Well, over at the Feedback blog, I’ve been hosting a little birthday party for lovers of another important album, albeit a much less important one, that celebrated its 15th anniversary on the 24th: Pinkerton, Weezer’s mega-flop-turned-cult-classic. For those of us who were 6 years old when Nirvana broke, Pinkerton is, in its own way, our Nevermind. Viva Pinkerton!

Goo Goo Dolls announced for the John Paul Jones Arena

So the Goo Goo Dolls think they can waltz—or "Slide," as the press release noted—into Charlottesville, never having been here before, and play the biggest venue in town?

Turns out they can.

The John Paul Jones Arena announced this morning that the Dolls will play the arena on October 26. Tickets run from $27-44.50, which does not include the cost of however many of those delicious icy drinks you have when you go to the arena, and go on sale Friday, September 30, on the JPJ website or through Ticketmaster.

"The GOO GOO DOLLS have become one of the most globally respected and influential forces in popular music history, selling more than 10 million albums since 1986," says the release. In 2007 and 2008 the group released two volumes of greatest hits comps, following those up with 2010’s Something for the Rest of Us.

A time capsule from the days of major label excess: The Goo Goo Dolls play their 1998 mega-hit "Slide" on a glacier in Alaska.

UVA Art Museum launches Writers Eye competition

Guest post by Sarah Matalone

A week into the 25th annual Writer’s Eye competition, the museum can already boast the highest attendance in history, with 2,600 local youth already booked to tour the UVA Art Museum’s collections. That means there will be a lot of work for the judges of its "Writer’s Eye" competition, invites these youngsters from nine sprawling counties in the region, to react to pieces of art in the museum with their own poetry and prose works.

The creative challenge divides competitors into four levels: grades 3-5, 6-8, 9-12, and University/Adult, a category within which organizers are hoping to see greater growth this year. To help writers get started, volunteer docents from both the university and community at large lead tours based on an inquiry method, a process which Education Assistant, Kris Iden says encourages kids to engage in a dialogue with and think more critically about art.  

After writers have completed their creative responses, special guest judges, John Casey (the prose assessor) and Kevin McFadden (the poetry assessor) will choose the winners from the entries from the high school and University/Adult categories, with local teachers and writers deciding on the younger batch of entries. The first, second, and third place winners get published in the Writer’s Eye Anthology.  

As Iden described the program, Writer’s Eye fulfills an important niche locally, providing students with the opportunity to be in front of a real art object, not simply a reproduction or something displayed on a computer screen, an “evermore rare experience.” 

More info on the competition is here. Entries are due by November 11.

Good shows at the Hamner at 4CP, plus fun to be had at the Jefferson and Southern

For those who are itching for some good theater, A Life in the Theatre, a softer Mamet two-man play from 1977, just opened at the Hamner. And last week saw the opening of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Endgame at Four County Players. The production runs through October 1 in the theater’s Cellar black box space—we’re looking forward to seeing it.

The Jefferson announced that Saturday’s show with The Head and the Heart and Thao with the Get Down Stay Down (that’s a lot of words for two bands) is sold out. That means no more tickets, folks. I saw Thao play at Miller’s, of all places, three years ago, and before it is said that she is great it should also be said that she is a Virginian. And now: She is also quite good. The Head and the Heart failed to captured neither my head nor my heart when they opened for Dr. Dog at the Jefferson earlier this year. Dave Matthews likes ’em though, so, hey, more power to ’em! Check out one of Thao’s many good tunes below.

Thao’s "Beat"

Ah, triumphant returns. Welcome back home Wes Swing, about whom I have spilled so much ink that it is more convenient to link to old articles than it would be to write about him more. He has been on the road for a while in support of his record, Through a Fogged Glass, but plays the Garage on Saturday night with a band called the City Dwelling Nature Seekers. Sounds like a good one!

Tonight the Southern hosts Yarn and Dangermuffin, the form being a New York-based Americana group said to owe "as much to Gram Parsons and Earl Scruggs as to Jerry Garcia and Exile On Main Street-era Rolling Stones." Can’t argue with that!

 And it goes like this.

Nevermind “Nevermind”: “Pinkerton” also has an important birthday Saturday

The talk of Nevermind‘s 20th anniversary September 24 seems to have been marked everywhere, from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork, from NPR to the blogs of fashion photographers, who have christened Kurt Cobain’s daughter with Courtney Love, Frances Bean, a new fashion icon. We’ve already heard about how, after it was released in 1991, Nevermind sold millions of copies, brought angst and abstract lyrics to the mainstream, and made the music industry—as it was called then—turn its attention to independent music. Yadda, etc. and so on, and then by 1996, the Butthole Surfers’ Electriclarryland was selling 500,000 copies on Capitol Records.

But talk of this important anniversary shouldn’t overshadow the also very important birthday of a record exactly five years later, one that didn’t sell a lot of copies straightaway: Weezer’s second album Pinkerton, which was released five years to the day after Nevermind—15 years ago this Saturday. While Pinkerton didn’t change the way people listen to music—or more importantly, the way A&R reps pick talent—in retrospect, it did mark a crossroads in rock music.

Two years before Pinkerton, Weezer had released the Blue Album to commercial success and critical acclaim, marrying the Kiss-indebted riffage of the ’70s, to the New Wave of the ’80s (thanks to production by The Cars’ Rick Ocasek), to the post-grunge sound of the ’90s, as pioneered by Nevermind and the growing cadre of crossover acts.

But after its success, Weezer’s frontman Rivers Cuomo went some kind of crazy. The band’s follow-up was originally intended to be a rock opera centered on characters named Wuan and Dondo. It was to be called Escape from the Black Hole. (The parts of it that were released are, for fans only, really sick.) Those plans were scrapped as Cuomo enrolled at Harvard, where studied music composition and literature. The songs that would make it onto Pinkerton were a combination of ones written before the Blue Album, and new ones.

Unlike Nevermind, Pinkerton was considered a flop. It peaked at #19 on the charts. Gone from Weezer’s second effort were the layers of pop revivalism that had characterized the band’s debut. What remained was a uncomfortable mash of silliness and extreme darkness, like on "Why Bother?": "It’s just sexual attraction / Not something real so I’d rather keep whackin’," which is followed by a sincere chorus, "Why bother? it’s gonna hurt me / It’s gonna kill when you desert me." So too with "El Scorcho," which begins with dumb ululations, runs through a couple of minutes of jibberish, and then offers this jarringly sincere crescendo: "Maybe you’re scared to say I’m falling for you." 

Starting with "Tired of Sex," Pinkerton is a vicious record—even if not as vicious as Nevermind: formally complex, deeply confessional, thoughtful and damned angry. If it has any missteps, it is the desperately sensitive "Butterfly," where Rivers alone, on an acoustic guitar, sings a song…called "Butterfly."

Sure, taken from a distance, a lot of stuff on Pinkerton feels silly. Cuomo, for his part, thought Pinkerton sucked, and would later say of his masterpiece in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, "It’s like getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself." But for at least one preteen who was still jazzed about the Blue Album, man, did this album fucking rock.

It’s worth considering Pinkerton alongside Nevermind because, amid all this Kurt-worship, people aren’t talking about is how grunge soon lost its way. There were good years for grunge, but the top-40-ification of the genre also paved the way for some unforgiveable noise. See Staind, Puddle of Mudd, and, worst of all, Creed. You might even call the rap-rock fad a mongrel breed of grunge and hip-hop from the late 1980s.

But for its generation of listeners, Pinkerton took the anger that made grunge so compelling, sent it to Harvard, made it study Puccini (whose Madame Butterfly forms Pinkerton‘s thematic backbone) alongside girl group lyrics, and turned it into something less drug-addled, more personal, and not so damn cool. In short, it made a lot of people, no matter how ugly they considered their feelings, think that they too could be in a famous rock band.

That paved the way for a revolution in its own right, called emo. The grunge acts of recent history (see above) haven’t been nearly as compelling as acts like, for example, Panic at the Disco or My Chemical Romance—which are not great bands by any stretch, but at least brought an emotional complexity to MTV and top-40 radio.

Weezer’s second album is a sidenote in the context of Nevermind‘s revolution. But for those of us who were too young to understand Nevermind when it came out—it came out just days before my sixth birthday—Pinkerton hit us where it hurt five years later. Judging by how its reissue was received late last year, it still does.

Happy 15th Birthday, Pinkerton!

Win tickets to the United Stations of Comedy Tour at the Paramount

What did the one cannibal say to the next while eating a clown?

We have no idea, but maybe you can find out when the national stand-up comedy series that’s regularly held at Play On! Theatre gets much bigger with the United Nations of Comedy Tour, a roundtable featuring celebrated talent this November.

Tickets are on sale now for the November 19 slaphappy chucklefest, which features David Foster, Gina Brillon, Bridget McManus, Sheng Wang and Funny Man Skiba, some of today’s funniest comedians, all of whom have drawn national attention. (They’ve appeared on Comedy Central, BET "Comic View," HBO, Showtime, and other national programs.)

The comedy series was founded by local event promoter Ty Cooper, who intends for the series to represent a multi-cultural effort to promote diversity around town. Can’t argue with that.

We’ve got a pair of free tickets for whoever posts the funniest joke in the comments section below.

Oh, and the answer to the question above is, "Does this taste funny to you?"

(Full details are here.)

Categories
Living

Mind out of time

If you were to meet either Frank Fairfield or Erik the Red on the street, you’d think that each was an absolutely one-of-a-kind, true American original. They’re both difficult to get in touch with, wear high-waisted stovepipe pants, speak with the wide-eyed, hopeful innocence of pre-Watergate Americans, and, indeed, both sing as if the second half of the 20th-century never happened. That made it a treat last week when the two minstrel revivalists—the former a Los Angeles old-time musician, and the latter a songwriter who lives near Scottsville—came together for a very charming, and very bizarre, night of Appalachian old-time acoustic music lyrically centered on ’coons, whiskey, and stories ’bout what papa did at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar.

Frank Fairfield, who played a couple of shows in town last week, is a relic from a past most are too young to have lived through. The fiddler, guitarist and banjo player is one of the only living—let alone young—artists on the Tompkins Square folk record label.

Erik the Red, a Charlottesville native “homesteading” near Scottsville whose real name is Erik Knierim, opened the show. Knierim told me has two rules: He never asks to play a gig, and he accepts all gigs he’s offered. That means only a couple times a year can you see him jump between guitar and ukulele, enigmatically prefacing earthy, original tunes with a huge grin: “This next one was written on a cold night.” His set last week featured a Beach Boys cover and a song from his “favorite film,” 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, “A Whale of a Tale”—which goes, “I swear by my tattooooo,” as Kirk Douglas also sings it in the film—plus a spate of Red originals about cold nights with his sweetheart. These he played, still grinning, and jiggling his leg in time with the song, on a small acoustic guitar missing its high-E string. 

There is an undeniable cuteness to Knierem’s show, as compared to the dead serious, mustachioed, Brylcreemed Fairfield, who had arrived in town early, and played a secret show Monday at The Garage. He wore a wrinkled gray blazer over a white shirt buttoned all the way up, and seemed to have used the same polish on his black bucks as he did in his hair, which was parted devoutly to the side. It is the kind of total and complete affect that makes you want to track down his high school yearbook in the hopes that you’ll find him wearing a Korn t-shirt. As L.A. Weekly has noted, “If it’s all an act, then this guy deserves an Oscar.”

Like Knierim, Fairfield is a revivalist (though he doesn’t like that term) who plays banjo, guitar and a very, very mean fiddle, singing with the brusque, clipped delivery of 78rpm ghosts like Uncle Dave Macon and Burnett and Rutherford. Like his affect, Fairfield’s tunes haven’t been updated to the computer age. Children die at home while papa’s at the bar; on “Call Me A Dog When I’m Gone,” he sings, “Call me a dog when I’m gone / but when I get back with that $10 bill / it’s, ‘Honey where’d you been so long.’” You’d think he’d at least adjust for inflation.

Fairfield was discovered (though he probably wouldn’t like that term either) busking at a farmer’s market in Los Angeles by a member of the band Foreign Born, who became Fairfield’s manager; soon Fairfield was opening for acts like Fleet Foxes and Cass McCombs, and releasing albums on the influential, lost treasures-oriented folk label Tompkins Square, where Fairfield soon was given his own imprint. 

The story of discovery is worthy of Fairfield’s music. On his fiddle in particular, Fairfield achieved a polyphony it usually takes three fiddlers to achieve, augmenting long, rabid bow-drags with pizzicato plucks on his fingering hand. He at times seemed genuinely bewildered by his audience. He drank tea, not beer, and asked what kind it was. Between songs he tuned his three instruments—a banjo, fiddle and a parlor guitar—painstakingly by ear, which most audiences don’t tend to tolerate. Early in his set he ripped out a fiddle rag he said was from the South of Texas, originally written as a dance tune. “I was trying to get you all dancing on that one,” said Fairfield through a thick moustache, looking miffed. “But people don’t dance anymore. They just sit and watch.”

Replacing the fiddle with the banjo, Fairfield softly laughed as he arranged the microphone, “I’m gonna get it just so now, just so.” 

After the show I called Knierim to see what he thought of Fairfield. He said he’d previously seen Fairfield play in Oregon and was blown away. Naturally, he was honored to share a stage with the enigmatic, old-time musician. So honored, in fact, that he and his girlfriend invited Fairfield to Miller’s to shoot pool—a game that became popular in the early 20th-century. They played until 2am. 

“I’ll tell you what,” Knierem said over the phone. “He whupped our asses.”

“This is a great game,” Fairfield apparently told Knierem. “It’s like playing an instrument. The gentlest touch is always the best.”

Avett Brothers and afterparty with Vetiver, activists reflect on war and warming up for Mount Eerie

Earlier this year I revealed my surprise that the Avett Brothers had booked not one, but two (!) consecutive dates at the nTelos Wireless Pavilion, to which "Avett fan" responded in the comments section: "No need to be too shocked. The Avetts have been selling out venues much bigger than the Pavilion in states south of Virginia for years now." Tonight is the second evening in which Avett Fan and I get to hash out our differences, him or her from the inside the Pavilion and me from the Belmont Bridge, on my way to check out the Vetiver and the Fruit Bats after party.

There have been fliers all around town for a series of events being billed in town for this weekend as "The Military Industrial Complex at 50." Turns out it’s a three-day conference that begins today at the Haven and runs through Saturday and Sunday at PVCC’s Dickinson building, centered on the goal of "moving money from the military to human needs." A list of speakers are more info are here. (Read a brief interview with organizer David Swanson here.)

When I was in high school I studied under a very special drama teacher who refused to start rehearsals until the first frost. While it’s not quite there yet, the "cooling off," as Devon Sproule calls it on her new album, has arrived, and with it theater season begins with a couple of worthy shows. While we’ll have to wait for next weekend to see the opening of A Life in the Theatre, a softer Mamet work, at the Hamner. But fortunately last night saw the opening of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Endgame at Four County Players. The production runs through October 1 in the theater’s Cellar black box space—we’re looking forward to seeing it.

If you looked at this week’s C-VILLE, you probably saw that it was sort of like a little Mount Eerie welcome party in the arts section. It’s because no one in today’s indie rock landscape can hold a candle to that band’s Phil Elverum, who for my money is the most exciting, thoughtful and unpredictable musician (he’s also a shrewd businessman who offers his tunes on a variety of media and offers books and photos and more for superfans like me) working in that world today. Rather than moving to some big city after becoming successful about a decade ago, he incorporated his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, increasingly into his music in a variety of exciting ways that I’ll leave to you to discover. That said, sometimes his shows kick ass and sometimes they’re super-boring. But would you really want to go in knowing what to expect? Outside the purposes of this blog post, the show is in fact on Monday. Just saying to conserve your energy.

"Lost Wisdom, Pt. 2"

 

Virginia Festival of the Book announces featured writers

Guest Post by Sarah Matalone

Many of the Virginia Festival of the Book‘s events—we’re looking at you, Crime Wave—tend to sell out very early. So no, it’s not too soon to start talking about the 18th annual fest’s featured guests, even though it’s not until late March.

Here’s some of the early highlights:

  • Ed Ayers, former UVA professor, current president of the University of Richmond and beloved “History Guy” from the BackStory radio program, will speak at the Festival Luncheon. ($40)
  • Jeffrey Deaver, bestselling author of the new James Bond reboot novel called Carte Blanche, will talk at the Crime Wave Luncheon. ($60)
  • Jerry West, a.k.a., “Mr. Clutch,” former player, coach, and general manager of the L.A. Lakers, will host a rousing Leadership Breakfast. ($40-$500)
  • Authors Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle, and singer-songwriters Marshall Chapman and Matraca Berg, will blend story and song with their “Southern Refrains” at The Paramount. ($32-48)

Stay tuned for more information on the free events as the festival approaches.