What old songs shall the rock stars play at All Tomorrow’s Parties
By Matthew Kantor
All Tomorrow’s Parties
Sept. 19 through 21, Kutshers Country Club, Monticello, NY; for more information visit
www.atpfestival.com.
In a scene where the hottest bands are generally the newest and least known—if you’ve got an unpronounceable name and play 3 a.m. shows in Bushwick, you’ve got it made!—suddenly, everything old is new again.
At this weekend’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, a three-day, 20-plus-band orgy of sound, bands like Meat Puppets and Built to Spill will take the stage to play decades-old records, and shoegazer icon My Bloody Valentine will play its first U.S. show in 16 years.
For fans, these shows provide an opportunity to hear landmark records and see live what they’ve been listening to for years. For the musicians, however, this wave of nostalgia doesn’t hold the same appeal.
“It’s not just us recapturing something from our youth,” says Meat Puppets bassist Cris Kirkwood. “We’re still able to find new vitality in the songs and we’re getting more hellish about it as we age.”
Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, who will be playing his 1995 solo album Psychic Hearts at the fest, has a drier take on performing vintage material. Having performed Sonic Youth’s groundbreaking album, Daydream Nation, in its entirety last year, Moore is well acquainted with the pitfalls of revisiting past achievements.
“I had no interest in doing it. It’s the same thing as Daydream Nation,” says Moore. “I wanted to move forward. I didn’t want to spend a year touring and rehashing Daydream Nation even though it turned out to be something really rewarding for me. I was asked to do Psychic Hearts by Barry Hogan who curates ATP, and I said I would do it kinda because I wanted to see My Bloody Valentine.”
Wry MBV incentive aside, Moore maintains that he’s still having fun playing Psychic Hearts’ material because of its straightforward, barn-burning nature. The ideas that formed the album also remain clear and accessible, and the music that inspired his bid at rock transcendence stays relevant.
“Psychic Hearts was a conceptual record for me,” he says. “I wanted to make a record utilizing these song riffs that I didn’t wanna elaborate on. I was really into the idea of repetition. A lot of it was wanting to take little lyrical ideas I had in notebooks and set them to simplistic patterns. It was influenced a lot by the first Nirvana record. It intrigued me how they had simplistic note patterns. I related it to what I liked about bands like The Fall who even had a song called “Repetition.” To express it was very explicit, too—it has a rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic. Those are the ideas that were at play. It certainly wasn’t a grand gesture.”
“I don’t really think of [record albums] as nostalgia,” he adds. “I think of them as these signifiers that everybody has personally that people then share, especially people around the same age. There were a few records that were extremely potent for me at a time that was really crucial. I was nineteen in ‘77 so there’s the first Patti Smith record, the first Ramones album, The Sex Pistols’ album, Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids. That whole first generation of punk records was extremely important for me and still is. I can put those on and they still inspire me to write music.”
No stranger to blazing punk trails, Meat Puppets first New York show, in 1982, included Sonic Youth on the bill. As part of the SST label’s family, the bands shared a home with The Minutemen as well; in fact, the tragic loss of Minutemen frontman D. Boon affected some Meat Puppets II music well before All Tomorrow’s Parties.
“Certain songs took on a certain flavor years ago,” says Kirkwood. “The Minutemen covered the song “Lost” [“Lost on the freeway again/ Lookin’ for means to an end”] and then D. Boon got killed right on the highway here in Arizona. He was a special person and ever since then “Lost” has always had this certain flavor to it, this certain essence to it. It’s touching in that way that speaks to all of us that have been playing music for such a long time.”
After a recent recovery from some harrowing experiences that included drug abuse, the death of his wife, a bullet in his back and a prison stint, Kirkwood is not immune to the emotions evoked by still being alive and playing with his guitar-slinging brother Chris, decades removed from their origins in the Phoenix desert.
“I put myself through years of hell,” he says, “and to actually be back and healthy and playing with my brother again is touching. Some of those things will come up, like damn, it’s my brother and we don’t have a lot of family and it’s touching in that way. That occasionally can surface but still it’s always about the same shit it’s been about.”
Moore has a more pragmatic take on the idea. “We’re able to sort of not have day jobs, that’s the most important thing,” he says. “I don’t know how long that will last now that the industry is kind of in this situation where people aren’t buying the documents. It’s sort of frightening. I’ll have to start mowing lawns pretty soon. That’s what I used to do when I was fifteen, now I’m fifty, so I’ll have come full circle”.