Wilco Solid Sound Festival

[Party Cheetos]

on Sunday, yoga is from 11-12 in Courtyard B (weather-permitting)

 

i've hardly posted here long, but you're now my favorite person

[tinnitus photography]

 

hope my tongue-in-cheek statement wasn't taken the wrong way.

 

 

there is an official schedule which i imagine will be unveiled shortly.

[Party Cheetos]

 

hope my tongue-in-cheek statement wasn't taken the wrong way.

 

 

there is an official schedule which i imagine will be unveiled shortly.

 

of course not! i needed that kind of humor to brighten up a bleak suburban afternoon.

 

that's great though, I just wanna know when Wilco is taking the stage. I'm more than willing to wait all day to see them (only my second time seeing them, my first time going in as a huge fan though ), but my girlfriend might not be so keen on waiting many hours to see them.

 

so excited though, my goodness. i'm downloading a ton of bootlegs from past gigs now .

[faxman75]

Pretty awesome that this weekend is just about upon us! I'm excited and half of it is for camping in another state lol. I have never been to Mass and it's been years since i've been east of Chicago for anything more than an airport layover.

 

I actually welcome the rain too. I'm coming from Arizona so i'm sure you understand.

[fif1435]

for all of us poor saps who can't make Solid Sound, I hope we can get hourly updates from those who are going!

[Party Cheetos]

for all of us poor saps who can't make Solid Sound, I hope we can get hourly updates from those who are going!

 

if you have twitter, you can surely follow me as i might be able to shoot a few updates in during the day

 

twitter.com/partycheetos

[thejokeexplained]

 

hope my tongue-in-cheek statement wasn't taken the wrong way.

 

 

there is an official schedule which i imagine will be unveiled shortly.

 

so does this mean no yoga?! I'm sure it would do us all a bit of good after the saturday Solid Sound night.

[tinnitus photography]

no, that's actually a scheduled event.

[Magnetized]

so does this mean no yoga?! I'm sure it would do us all a bit of good after the saturday Solid Sound night.

 

There's a video--which I of course won't post--of an extended Spiders/Kidsmoke jam with Wilco and Yo La Tengo at Keystone Park on 7/13/09. At about 6 minutes in (of a 9 minute clip) Jeff is leading the crowd in over the head clapping and says "You're going to feel this in the morning. And it's gonna feel good. It's gonna feel real good." I love that moment. Let's hope we all have sore arms and legs on Sunday morning!

[thejokeexplained]

no, that's actually a scheduled event.

 

didn't notice that in the schedual of events. just figured a vcer (you) would be leading the session. i guess i better bring my mat!

[Magnetized]

Here's a great article that I haven't seen posted on here before, from Berkshire Living. I'm including the full text below. Some wonderful new information about what's in store for us!

 

 

THE BEAT GOES ON: Wilco's Solid Sound Festival

Written by Seth Rogovoy

Wilco invites its favorite bands and all of its fans to a three-day party at MASS MoCA

Jeff Tweedy hates music festivals so much, he says, you’d have to pay him to be at one. And he doesn’t mean to perform. He means to attend.

 

 

 

As the frontman for Wilco, Tweedy is used to being paid to play large festivals; that goes with the territory of leading one of America’s top indie-rock bands. But when it came time to envision a musical gathering that Tweedy himself would want to go to, he threw out the rulebook.

 

 

 

For one, he chose a venue that the vast majority of those who will attend probably have never heard of and certainly haven’t visited previously, a place with a maximum capacity of 8,000 instead of 28,000 or 80,000, more typical numbers for summer music festivals. And to make it even harder to pull off the event, he plunked it down in a rural, isolated region of New England where, in order for it to be a commercial success, the vast majority of attendees will have to drive hours to get there, making for a marketing and logistical nightmare.

 

 

 

And making it an even harder sell, Tweedy didn’t leverage his band’s name to publicize the festival, which in large part is devoted to the music of Wilco and the various offshoot groups and other independent creative projects of its individual members. No WilcoFest. Rather, partly in the hopes of making this a regular event that Wilco won’t necessarily headline each time, he gave the event the strong but rather generic title, “Solid Sound.”

 

 

 

For those who have been following the career of Wilco for the past sixteen years, it’s business as usual. Or rather, anti-business as usual.

 

 

 

On the weekend of August 13-15, Wilco headlines Solid Sound, a multimedia festival of music and arts curated by the band, featuring members’ side projects (Pat Sansone’s The Autumn Defense; guitarist Nels Cline’s group, the Nels Cline Singers) as well as other projects by members of what Tweedy calls “the Wilco collective,” including a retrospective of Wilco’s poster art.

 

 

 

In addition, the festival includes performances by artists Wilco deems influential, including guitarist Sir Richard Bishop and gospel singer Mavis Staples—“I don’t want you to be a Wilco fan if you’re not familiar with Mavis,” Tweedy says—as well as lesser-known and up-and-coming groups including Vetiver, Avi Buffalo, Brenda, and the Deep Blue Organ Trio.

 

 

 

The festival showcases a few regional acts as well, including the female a cappella trio Mountain Man from Bennington, Vermont, which sounds like the Roches singing fourteenth-century chant on an Appalachian back porch, and North Adams’s own The Books, which Tweedy calls one of his favorite bands.

 

 

 

The festival will also include comedy, film, art installations, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, the Story Pirates, and just plain silly fun stuff—the sort of thing you might find at a carnival. Imagine, perhaps, a Wilco dunking booth?

 

 

 

“It’s a festival that I’d be more inclined to go to,” Tweedy said by phone from Chicago last month, “and I can’t say that about most festivals that we play. In this case, we’re just trying to make it something fun.”

 

 

 

While Tweedy and his bandmates have brainstormed the possibility of such a festival for years, it was Tony Margherita, officially Wilco’s manager but more like a non-performing member of the group, who first broached the idea of staging the festival at the contemporary art complex.

 

 

 

“I’d been up there a couple times, living part-time in the area, and the space is amazing,” says Margherita on a recent Friday afternoon, just before driving from New York City to his weekend home in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. “I knew they’d done some shows there in the past, and [MASS MoCA director] Joe Thompson and the promoter and I had a meeting and wandered around and sort of fell in love with the space. You’d have a tough time in the U.S. finding a space as big and interesting and open with as many viable options for performing, indoors and out, all those plazas. It’s got a hell of a lot going for it in terms of sheer architecture, and that was a big factor in us trying it there.”

 

 

 

Margherita first met Tweedy when he was night manager of a record store in St. Louis and Tweedy was a clerk. Tweedy kept bugging his boss about coming to see his band play, and Margherita finally relented. Margherita was hooked, and he got the group its first record deal on the basis of a cassette recording. The band was Uncle Tupelo, the predecessor to Wilco, and the rest, as they say, is history. [For more of that history and insight into the band’s creative and commercial process, see the documentary film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.] The two have since been inseparable; as Tweedy puts it, “I’ve never been to MASS MoCA, but I’ve known Tony so long and he’s been there so many times, I feel like I have.”

 

 

 

This isn’t the first time Margherita has swung a coup for regional fans of Wilco—two summers ago, the band played a headlining concert at Tanglewood, which Margherita views as a total success. “It was a great experience,” he says. “The place is beautiful, and we wound up doing nine thousand people on a Tuesday night, which is a really impressive number.”

 

 

 

Tweedy says that the band is always trying to figure out different ways to present itself (starting, presumably, with the group’s music, an eclectic blend of alt-country, folk, Beach Boys-style pop, Motown-influenced soul, chamber-pop, classic rock, noise-rock, and more jazzy and experimental sounds). Solid Sound, he said, is “kind of a continuation of our last few summers trying to play minor league baseball stadiums, trying to present the band in a less traditional atmosphere.”

 

 

Tweedy also thinks that small is beautiful. “I tend to like smaller festivals more, in the same way I like smaller menus more,” he says. “If I go to a restaurant with a thousand things on the menu, I won’t enjoy it because the whole time I’ll think I ordered the wrong thing. That’s an analogy in this case: a smaller festival in terms of bands and how many people would attend, that would make it more comfortable for me as a concertgoer.”

 

 

 

Tweedy hopes that the intimacy of the festival might also breed more give-and-take among the different performers. He has reserved his festival-closing Sunday evening spot, officially called “Jeff Tweedy Solo +,” for an opportunity for spontaneous collaboration with whoever is still around by then. Including the comedians, he says.

 

 

 

The comedians?

 

 

 

“Musicians are always trying to be funny on stage,” Tweedy says. “I think it would be good to have comedians up on stage shaking a tambourine for a change.” [AUGUST 2010]

 

 

 

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and cultural critic and the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet.

 

 

 

 

 

THE GOODS

 

Solid Sound Festival

Aug 13-15

MASS MoCA

87 Marshall St.

North Adams, Mass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[roadhse ma]

Wilco Me ; Thanks for the insightful article and the countdown begins as the anticipation RISES

[Magnetized]

You are most welcome. And for those not tired of reading yet, here's another article, from the local North Adams Transcript, based on an interview with Glenn. Lots of reading, I know, but some really interesting stuff in here.

 

 

Wilco drummer is already hoping for an encore

By John E. Mitchell

 

Friday July 30, 2010 North Adams Transcript

 

NORTH ADAMS -- Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche will make his personal contribution to the Solid Sound Festival (Aug. 13-15 at Mass MoCA) in the form of a performance by his side project, On Fillmore, as well as an installation designed to give audience members a chance to make their own noise.

 

Kotche's drum-head installation will be featured in MoCA's Sol LeWitt gallery, while his band will perform Saturday, Aug. 14. Kotche will take the stage with Wilco the same night.

 

His band mates for Wilco include acclaimed singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy, bassist and original member John Stirratt, guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalists Pat Sansone and Mikael Jorgensen.

 

 

Kotche compares drum heads he will show to the practice of prepared piano, putting different objects through a drum head -- springs, wires, cables and more -- to get odd sounds out of them. He uses this technique for studio improvisation, as well as for recordings that need individual drum sounds to represent different characters.

 

"I get a lot of questions about them from fans, and people are curious about it," Kotche said in an interview this week. "So this is an opportunity for me to build a bunch of these heads and put them in a space and have them amplified. That's a whole element of it. They have contact mikes on them, so these small strange sounds can be amplified, complete with the actual sound hitting the drums."

 

Kotche will create the drum heads especially for the appearance rather than use his own, and he hopes it spurs on ideas in the participants, as well as leading to furious fun.

 

"The best case scenario in my mind would be to strike ideas with people, whether it's drum heads or other instruments or whatever they do," he said. "But I think it'll basically be fun for people to go in and make some noise on these things. I think that's the majority of what's going to happen."

 

The drum-head exhibit is not actually the first idea he had for an installation, but those wilder, bigger ideas remain embedded in Kotche's brain for future reference when the available resources can match his plans.

 

"I think if Solid Sound happens again, it'll be able to grow because some of my ideas were just a little too extravagant for now," he said. "I would like to take it one step further and maybe create more specific sound environments for each prepared head, with lighting and different pre-recorded sounds, and make it more interactive on that scale, too. I think there's room for it to grow in future years."

 

 

And the future is exactly where the band hopes the Solid Sound rests. Although Wilco members see the venture as an experiment, their hope is that the results justify an annual Solid Sound Festival returning every year to North Adams.

 

"There are a lot of unanswered questions, and we're going to have to see how things go," Kotche said. "I'm sure there are going to be a lot of things that we can learn from this time around and see if it actually is something that is successful -- where Mass MoCA would be on board again, where the promoters would be on board again.

 

"If everything goes well and according to plan, then I think the plan would definitely be to keep doing this every year and let it grow in different directions," he added. "I can't imagine a more beautiful space and a better situation -- and just the way everything's come together. I would think it would stay at Mass MoCA and just be our little weekend every year."

 

It's not unusual for a band to helm a music festival, but it's almost unheard of for a band to partner with an art museum. Wilco is a band that has always had an art-friendly tone to it, offering up unusual side projects -- such as The Wilco Book, with its accompanying CD of sound experimentation. Kotche sees these manifestations of the band as just a part of a complete attitude towards all facets of its work.

 

"I think they are just different sides of the same coin," he said. "We never really talk about that aspect -- doing art projects in addition to the music. It's just a part of what we do being creative. We try to make records that challenge us and stimulate us and hopefully break new ground for us, and I think it's the same feeling with artwork or things like the book -- trying different ideas out. They're all different outlets for the same spirit and energy as we have when we get together and play."

 

 

Kotche believes one of the big appeals of the festival for fans will be the opportunity to experience other sides -- and in some cases more experimental sides -- of band members. Wilco shows and recordings don't necessarily yield such opportunities for the players, who more often are seen working as a team.

 

"It's a welcome thing when we get to incorporate this other side of us as well," Kotche said. "I don't want to say our roles in Wilco are defined, but we all realize that a large portion of what happens and what the fans are interested in revolve around the lyrics and songwriting. We support that as best we can, but there are also all these other ideas and aspects of us as musicians and people, and it's nice to show once in a while."

 

Joining Wilco was an opportunity for Kotche to apply his percussive strengths and interests to a different landscape altogether. He points out the wealth of experimentation he brought to the band's table, including the use of "found" sounds and homemade instruments, as well as his extensive background in both classical percussion and improvisation. Those components changed the sound of Wilco forever upon his arrival on its album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."

 

"It was for me a very stimulating experience, and it required as much of that as I had to offer," said Kotche. "That's still the case. It's just varying degrees sometimes. We are a rock band at the end of the day and have to support the lyrics, because that is what the band is about."

 

Sometimes the players are able to work through songs with few restrictions. Other times the challenge is to burst with creativity on a subtle level, within the confines of a rock band. It's a challenge Kotche loves.

 

"If someone listens to a record like ‘Sky Blue Sky,' they might be like, ‘Oh, Glenn didn't get to play out like he did on ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,' or ‘Wilco' (The Album). Maybe he was more held back,'" Kotche said. "I'm actually exploring creative concepts for me; it's just within different parameters, like subtle drumming things and concepts and feel, and little placements of notes and ideas, and forming drum parts that are extremely challenging for me and force me to be creative. It just might not be overtly experimental to the listener.

 

"Each Wilco record and project, I'm always forced to challenge myself and be creative, and sometimes that's what people would think of as traditional experimentation, and sometimes it's much more subtle and under the radar -- things that maybe only I would catch."

 

When Kotche joined Wilco in 2001, he already had his own career as an experimental drummer. He has had a long association with Bang on a Can, through which he first became aware of Mass MoCA.

 

He arrived in Wilco during a period of change -- the band had been forced to change record companies and fight for the release of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," all after altering its signature sound and losing some long-standing members. Ten years later, Kotche is still so busy that he doesn't always have contemplative time to take stock of how things have changed, but he can measure those differences in the contrasts between then and now.

 

"Making ‘A Ghost Is Born' especially, we did a lot of experimentation. It was really a great time, I think," Kotche said. "Although, Jeff probably wasn't in his best place, but he got his life on a better track.

 

"Now Pat joined the band, and this is where we've been at the last five years. This is where it really feels comfortable in a good way, not in a complacent way -- comfortable in that this mix of personalities works really well together. We trust each other musically, we all get along personally, and I think we all bring something unique to the table, but we also have a lot of common ground."

 

Kotche is positive about the band's current position but also excited for some new horizons as a group. Moving forward is the one of the major constants in Wilco's career, despite a changing line-up, and even being comfortable gives rise to experimentation and innovation.

 

"We've realized that this is the definitive line-up of the band," Kotche said. "We're able to play consistently; we're able to put on a really good live show and have a lot of energy with it, and we're able to play well under pressure. But at the same time, I think we're at that point where we're yearning to try some different things, too.

 

"We've shown ourselves that we can do what we've done the last five years really well, and I think we want to push things in a different direction now. I think that's the general consensus among everyone, so we'll see where that goes. Sometimes you start that way and end up at the same place; sometimes you end up somewhere completely different."

[thejokeexplained]

schedules up!

 

http://solidsoundfestival.com/downloads/SolidSound_schedule.pdf

[u2roolz]

schedules up!

 

http://solidsoundfestival.com/downloads/SolidSound_schedule.pdf

 

And don't forget to bring a special map.....

[willywoody]

schedules up!

 

http://solidsoundfestival.com/downloads/SolidSound_schedule.pdf

 

Like that Nels and Glenn are going to demo their installations.

[willywoody]

And don't forget to bring a special map.....

 

I just spent 10 min looking for such a thing but never found it. I did find their standard gallery map, though:

http://www.massmoca.org/pdf/gallery_map.pdf

 

Thanks for posting the solidsound map, I just printed it out.

[Starry Eyed Squirrel]

Hey, if anyone is still looking for a place to stay and they are getting discouraged by the insane prices for all the nearby hotels/motels...

 

I just found a place in Wilmington, VT, about 25 miles away, called the Vintage Motel, and it's $75/night. I think that is a super great deal, and it includes free breakfast. The guy that owns it, Riaz, is extremely nice. Glad I found this place!

 

Just passin' it along to my fellow Wilco freaks.

 

See you next weekend!

[Party Cheetos]

I adore the way this schedule was set up (in that Joe's stage isn't opened till 6). It eliminates the whole "camp out all day at one stage" problem that I was fearing .

 

Too exciteddd!

[kidsmoke]

Can I just say....WOO HOO, Disneyland for Wilco fans!!!!

 

 

 

Who is this band Yoga I'm hearing about?

[thejokeexplained]

I adore the way this schedule was set up (in that Joe's stage isn't opened till 6). It eliminates the whole "camp out all day at one stage" problem that I was fearing .

 

Too exciteddd!

 

I agree, as i'm sure most of us who are going have done exactly that to get our spot by the stage. I just wish they would have set up the stage "in the round" so there would be more front stage area for us to enjoy.

[roadhse ma]

Agree on the stage no big deal if I am 50 feet from stage hoping the sound is mixed well for the surroundings...

 

The answer to this ? maybe found or debated elsewhere but her goes..

 

After looking at the schedule should I hold no hope that Tweedy will make any guest appearances on Friday night..?

 

Here is the Long Range Outlook.for North Adams hoping it Holds Up Looking Good!

 

http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/USMA0282

[Magnetized]

After looking at the schedule should I hold no hope that Tweedy will make any guest appearances on Friday night..?

 

 

I'm expecting him to make a guest appearance in my dreams Friday night! Does that count?

 

(Remember THAT thread? LOL)

[Party Cheetos]

Can I just say....WOO HOO, Disneyland for Wilco fans!!!!

 

 

 

Who is this band Yoga I'm hearing about?

 

it's gotta be Nels, he has to be running it.

 

WE'VE SEEN HOW FLEXIBLE THAT GUYS NECK IS, C'MON.

[roadhse ma]

Hey, if anyone is still looking for a place to stay and they are getting discouraged by the insane prices for all the nearby hotels/motels...

 

I just found a place in Wilmington, VT, about 25 miles away, called the Vintage Motel, and it's $75/night. I think that is a super great deal, and it includes free breakfast. The guy that owns it, Riaz, is extremely nice. Glad I found this place!

 

Just passin' it along to my fellow Wilco freaks.

 

See you next weekend!

Hey Starry Thanks for the Info My Wife and I were looking for a spot like this.

Just booked thanks