The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (15 page)

Biplanes circled in the purpling sky, towing banners reading “NEW GORILLAZ ALBUM OUT MAY 24” or “SIRIUS (heart)s WEEZER.” That was the only way they could deliver those messages—the festival’s promoter, Goldenvoice, refrains from slutting the audience out to corporate sponsors. More than anything, this is what separates Coachella from major U.S. festivals like Warped, Ozzfest and Lollapalooza: no Yoo-hoo truck, no free Slim Jims, no Army recruiters, no 20-foot inflatable women doubling as water slides. The relatively few booths were far from the stages, and most were pushing stuff at least tangentially related to the main event (music magazines, silk-screened concert posters). The only vendors you could find near the main stage were selling churros and lemonade.

After sunset, three-story TV screens flickered to life on either side of the main stage, each displaying a rotating Weezer logo. It looked like almost everybody at the festival had crowded around the stage, and they were screaming—nay, roaring—for the band. I watched Weezer do “Undone - the Sweater song” from the bathroom line in the press section of the backstage area, three quarters of a mile away.

Wandering the grounds, I had a hard time crediting Coachella with being America’s only European-style festival, as it’s often described; instead, the nobody-asked-for-it eclecticism of the many small attractions called up the ghost of Lollapaloozas past. (It was also pretty much guaranteed to be lost on folks who’d driven across six states to see Coldplay.) A quick sampling of the random crap on offer: 50 garbage cans decorated in outsider-art style, a DIY playzone with a bike-powered merry-go-round, a “chill-out tent” with giant misting fans and a soundtrack of the sort of lite house you hear in the dressing rooms at Express, and a wacky-hippie amusement consisting of a large metal sculpture and an armload of mallets. Lower-tier bookings, especially club acts, played to mostly-empty tents whenever the headliners were on. The outdoor film screenings drew similarly sad crowds—maybe two people were watching the Minutemen movie,
We Jam Econo
, at 11:30 p.m.

Like the Pixies last year and the Stooges the year before, Bauhaus was the big story at Coachella. Gossip about the band circulated like currency among the band’s fans: that Peter Murphy is now a Sufi Muslim and lives in a village five hours from Istanbul, or that the other members of the band, though they all live in Southern California, hadn’t played together since the 1998 reunion tour and only decided to when Coachella offered them a giant pile of cash. (Based on what the other big names got paid, it had to be well into six figures—the ticket money really adds up at $150 a pop for a weekend pass.) Bauhaus had wanted to release 50 bats during their set but abandoned the plan, provoking an unfounded rumor that the city of Indio had intervened by stretching an ordinance that forbids bird releases at night.

I was never goth. I’ve never liked Bauhaus enough to own one of their records; that said, the band’s performance at Coachella was unfuckingbelievable. They hit the stage obscured by fog and white light and struck up the descending bass line and graveyard rattle of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and everyone was craning their necks because you could hear Peter Murphy, but not see him. He finally entered stage left, suspended upside down eight feet off the ground with his arms folded like bat’s wings, being towed slowly sideways toward center stage on almost invisible cables and crooning, “Undead undead undead.” It wasn’t until Murphy had been pulled back offstage, still upside down, and returned on foot that I first noticed his outfit, which was probably astronomically-expensive designer stuff but looked like ‘70s ski pants and a top from Jacques Cousteau’s clubwear line. He gave up the zillion-watt drama nonstop, brandishing a long staff that looked like a martial-arts weapon—he slung it around for emphasis and almost took out bassist David J twice. Whatever Coachella paid these guys to reunite, it was worth it.

Still, Bauhaus wasn’t all I’d come to see, so mid-set I raced back to the side stage and caught the end of Mercury Rev’s epic space-rock blast. They were dressed like pirates, if pirates could order from International Male—lacy women’s blouses are the new look for dudes in bands this season. Spoon was up next, and doled out terse, gorgeously ragged versions of both old and new songs for an impressive crowd. Between tunes you could hear Chris Martin of Coldplay—at that moment headlining the main stage—rhapsodizing about the band’s new record to the 70,000-deep crowd, suggesting that it might be the greatest album of all time. I took this as my cue to call it a night.

I didn’t make it back out to the festival till 4 p.m. on Sunday, but of the 16 bands I missed, I’d seen half of them recently and hadn’t heard of the other half. I checked out the Fiery Furnaces for two songs and then managed to get within 30 feet of the Gobi tent for M.I.A.—the only act I saw do an encore all weekend. In fact, there might’ve been a minor civil disturbance if Ms. Arulpragasam hadn’t come back on for another few minutes of her Neneh Cherry-goes-favela-funk bassplosion—clearly she shouldn’t have been stuck in the littlest tent, which was kind of like a 500-capacity yurt. I ate some more churros, caught Tegan and Sara’s hit song, then sat in the shade and ignored The Futureheads from a half mile away.

A friend commandeered a VIP golf-cart transport by convincing the driver that he was in Bright Eyes, and we sped across the grounds in hopes of making it to the Arcade Fire’s side-stage set. The entire back side of the stage was 30 or 40 people deep with members of other bands, and out front the audience was as huge and ebullient as it’d been for Weezer. Trent Reznor whizzed past us on another golf cart, a girl tucked under each arm.

Sunday’s sunset slot belonged to the reunited Gang of Four. I almost didn’t watch, afraid that my teen-years favorite might suck. The guys in Gang of Four are nearly as old as my parents, but took the stage spry and lively and jumped immediately into “Damaged Goods”—a song that is, more than a quarter century later, the template for dance punk as we know it. Frontman Jon King threw himself around the stage in a slate-gray suit, wild-eyed and vitriolic, spitting “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust” as Andy Gill’s guitar slashed—and then, when the frenzied final choruses stopped and switched to the outro, bassist Dave Allen flubbed it, not only playing through the pause but continuing to play the wrong part. The rest of the band glared at him. And he kept fucking up—by halfway through the fourth song I was disgusted with him. His subpar playing was forcing Gang of Four to fake their way to the ends of the tunes, band-practice style, in front of 50,000 people. I left too early to catch the set closer, but it was in a local paper, the
Desert Sun
, the next day: King destroyed a microwave with a baseball bat.

I went to see Aesop Rock on the side stage, and with Mr. Lif as hype man he was better than usual—an audience of a few thousand yelled “Life is a bitch” along with him. The wind picked up, bringing in the aroma of the Port-O-Let villages. By the time Nine Inch Nails took the main stage it felt like a sandstorm was in the making, and I was headed back toward the parking lot. I turned and saw, a mile away, Trent Reznor’s snarling head, as big as a house on the Jumbotrons and framed by illuminated palm trees. Over the distant din, I heard ponies.

PART FIVE: FAITH

THE PASSION OF DAVID BAZAN 

Chicago Reader
, July 2009

“People used to compare him to Jesus,” says a backstage manager as David Bazan walks offstage, guitar in hand. “But not so much anymore.”

It’s Thursday, July 2, and Bazan has just finished his set at Cornerstone, the annual Christian music festival held on a farm near Bushnell, Illinois. He hasn’t betrayed his crowd the way Dylan did when he went electric—this is something very different. The kids filling the 1,500-capacity tent know their Jesus from their Judas. There was a time when Bazan’s fans believed he was speaking, or rather singing, the Word. Not so much anymore.

As front man for Pedro the Lion, the band he led from 1995 till 2005, Bazan was Christian indie rock’s first big crossover star, predating Sufjan by nearly a decade and paving the way for the music’s success outside the praise circuit. But as he straddled the secular and spiritual worlds, Bazan began to struggle with his faith. Unable to banish from his mind the possibility that the God he’d loved and prayed to his whole life didn’t exist, he started drinking heavily. In ‘05, the last time he played Cornerstone, he was booted off the grounds for being shit-faced, a milk jug full of vodka in his hand. (The festival is officially dry.)

I worked as Bazan’s publicist from 2000 till 2004. When I ran into him in April—we were on a panel together at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Music in Grand Rapids—I hadn’t seen him or talked to him in five and a half years. The first thing he said to me was, “I’m not sure if you know this, but my relationship with Christ has changed pretty dramatically in the last few years.”

He went on to explain that since 2004 he’s been flitting between atheist, skeptic and agnostic, and that lately he’s hovering around agnostic—he can’t flat-out deny the presence of God in the world, but Bazan doesn’t exactly believe in him, either.

Pedro the Lion won a lot of secular fans in part because Bazan’s lyrics—incisive examinations of faith, set to fuzzed-out guitar hooks—have a through-a-glass-darkly quality, acknowledging the imperfection of human understanding rather than insisting on an absolute truth. As the post-9/11 culture wars began to heat up, Pedro the Lion albums took a turn toward the parabolic: an outraged Bazan churned out artful songs about what befalls the righteous and the folly of those who believe God is on their side.

Bazan’s relationship with the divine started out pretty uncomplicated, though. Raised outside Seattle in the Pentecostal church where his father was the music director, he hewed closely to Christian orthodoxy, attended Bible college, and married at 23. Now 33, he didn’t do a lot of thinking about politics until the 1999 WTO protests. “Growing up, Christianity didn’t feel oppressive for the most part, because it was filtered through my parents. They were and are so sincere, and I saw in them a really pure expression of unconditional love and service,” he says. “Once I stepped away, I could see the oppression of it.”

Bazan’s
Curse Your Branches
, due September 1 on Barsuk, is a visceral accounting of what happened after that. It’s a harrowing breakup record—except he’s dumping God, Jesus and the evangelical life. It’s his first full-length solo album and also his most autobiographical effort: its drunken narratives, spasms of spiritual dissonance, and family tensions are all scenes from the recent past.

Bazan says he tried to Band-Aid his loss of faith and the painful end of Pedro the Lion with about 18 months of “intense” drinking. “If I didn’t have responsibilities, if I wasn’t watching [my daughter] Ellanor, I had a deep drive to get blacked out,” he says. But as he made peace with where he found himself, the compulsion to get obliterated began to wane. On
Curse Your Branches
, Bazan sometimes directs the blame and indignation at himself, other times at Jesus and the faith. He’s mourning what he’s lost, and he knows there’s no going back.

“All fallen leaves should curse their branches / For not letting them decide where they should fall / And not letting them refuse to fall at all,” he sings on the title track, with more than a touch of fuck-you in his voice. On “When We Fell,” backed by a galloping beat and Wilson-boys harmonies, he calls faith a curse put on him by God: “If my mother cries when I tell her what I discovered / Then I hope she remembers she told me to follow my heart / And if you bully her like you’ve done me with fear of damnation / Then I hope she can see you for what you are.”

The album closer, “In Stitches,” may be the best song Bazan’s ever written. It’s the most emotionally bare piece on the album, and works as a synopsis of the story:

This brown liquor wets my tongue

My fingers find the stitches

Firmly back and forth they run

I need no other memory

Of the bits of me I left

When all this lethal drinking

Is hopefully to forget

About you

He follows it with an even more devastating verse, confessing that his efforts to erase God have failed:

I might as well admit it
Like I’ve even got a choice
The crew have killed the captain
But they still can hear his voice
A shadow on the water
A whisper in the wind
On long walks my with daughter
Who is lately full of questions
About you
About you

The second “about you” comes in late, in a strong falsetto, and those two words carry his entire burden—the anger, desire, confusion and grief.

Since the jug-of-vodka incident, Bazan has kept a pretty low profile, doing a couple of modest solo tours and releasing an EP of raw-sounding songs on Barsuk. Pedro the Lion was a reliable paycheck—most of its albums sold in the neighborhood of 50,000 copies, and the group toured regularly, drawing 400 to 600 people a night. His most recent tour couldn’t have been more different: Bazan doesn’t have a road band put together yet for his solo stuff, but he couldn’t afford to wait for
Curse Your Branches
to come out. So he found another way to keep in touch with his most devoted fans, booking 60 solo shows in houses and other noncommercial spaces. He played intimate acoustic sets to maybe 40 people each night, at $20 a ticket, and took questions between songs—some of them, unsurprisingly, about the tough spiritual questions his new material raises.