Bumbershootings

We sent comedian Travis Watt into the bowels of the Pacific Northwest’s favorite music boiler, Bumbershoot.

Here’s what may or may not have happened:

Hi, I am Travis. I am to be your eyes and, probably more importantly, your ears in the thorny bush of Bumbershoot 2011. My qualifications:

1. What I like to call Clear Eyes (I have never been to a major festival before, and have crated all of my capacity for awe to the Pacific North West for this musical conflagration).

2. A Full Heart: I will check out every band and act I can. Bumbershoot injects new acts into the culture. No prejudice here.

3. Can’t lose: My internet access. Not that I am incapable of losing it. Just that if I do I am useless. How will I use Shazam to figure out who the goons on stage are?

Stand by for more updates. And possibly more Friday Night Lights references.

P.S. I Love You

Their soundcheck could have scored a particularly ominous Coach Taylor locker room speech. But the rest of P.S. I Love You’s set is frothy and urgent. Like a marathon Dance Party in its twenty-eighth giddy hour. To some extent that’s true as the band rolled into town after a road trip from Ontario that left on Thursday morning.

A guy in the crowd has an orange balloon on a 30-foot string. You kind of just want to give him points for such a plangent but obvious solution to meet up with your friends.

The crowd talks, or tries to, as the music goes on. The same is basically happens to the vocals, which you can only hear puffs of. In that sense, this is montage music. Listen and feel know that a music supervisor somewhere approves of your actions.

P.S. I Love You curls some looking-out-at-the-ocean guitar swirls into rocking beat.And why wouldn’t it? The beat bounces everyone’s chin up and down. The surprising number of forty-somethings in golf shirts and cargo shorts. The tall crew cut girls in flannel. The poor guards without earplugs paid to defend garage-high stacks of books.  Everyone else and their RayBan stares.

The lead singer’s playing a double guitar with a wood grain nicer than my Roger Sterling’s liquor cabinet. For a pyramidal man like Paul Saulnier, it works. A colossus should wield an instrument made from two log cabins smashed together in a tornado.

Warpaint

Warpaint was the musical zenith of the festival. In some ways Bumbershoot is just Seattle trying to come to terms with the fact that there’s a sun in the sky and that life might not always be horrible. What captures life’s herky-jerky conveyor belt of crap than beautiful, sad girls moaning minor-key stormrock? It’s catchy, moody music that lacks hooks but has plenty of velcro.

YACHT

So many people had so much fun at YACHT. I was not really one of them. Their thin fizz steamed off the stage and didn’t penetrate the fog of sweat and weed every groundling burrowed through during this final stage of the festival. Even when the band got some of the crowd onstage for a Little Miss Sunshine catharsis-boogie everyone danced like they were chaperons to a middle school dance.

COMEDY BANG BANG: Friday

A lot of people rumbled about the lack of variety in Bumbershoot programming this year (Chillwave), but the comedy scheduling came with perilously high opportunity cost (saying “yes” to Rory Scovel meant saying “no” to Kyle Kinane). Matriculating through all of the comedy venues to see your favorite performers was possible– but then you would have to do something like miss Broken Social Scene.

That’s why I committed early on to seeing the triptych of Comedy Bang Bangs (Comedy Bangs Bang?). Each show was triple booked: host Scott Aukerman interviewed festival headliners in addition with 2 character drop-ins by Andy Daly AND Paul F. Tompkins. It seems like a unique opportunity to see the cross-pollination of character work bloom into what might be new and popular and dominating the entire comedy spectrum in a few years.

Friday night mingled Anthony Jeselnik’s character (*please *let him be playing a character) with Daly’s pretzel-making August Lint and Mr. Brainwash (90% glue-blooded at this point). Each performer’s battery packs were topped off and each joke seemed to contain within it an array of jokelets, callbacks, and character details (the suicidal Lint was told to blame Hall & Oates when he jumped off the Seattle Space Needle and he responded that the quick fall might only give him enough time to blame Oates). It might have been one of the finest examples of live performance I’ve ever seen.

Finishing Thoughts

This was my first big music festival and it was a blast. But it’s also a bit like wardriving, a term used in the early 2000s before ubiquitous wifi. Your body and your friends and your stuff has to caravan to the stage through the lines and the event staff and that crazy old guy with a Spider-Man mask painted on his face. You might not find the proper frequency to really correspond with your favorite band.

That’s why I think Bumbershoot succeeds more a comedy festival than a music festival. Technology is moving music away from performance (don’t throw that dance party in my face as evidence, people have always danced) and toward construction. Music criticism’s never been better and that goes hand-in-hand with cultivating earbud music. But their both primarily solitary pursuits.Technology seems to be pushing comedy toward creating community with live shows burning wilder conceptual fuel (as comedic tropes become more widely known and audiences look beyond standard setup-punchline humor) or higher energy slapdash shows assembled on the fly.

But the current hybridized model allows the modern internet user maximized pleasure. From bare rooms where improv groups make jokes about the aesthetic values of Glo-Fi to tremendous fields where those values are droned through, Bumbershoot has something for every quasi-liberal alterna-kid.

And I don’t think that’ll be changing anytime soon.