The skies never truly cleared, but neither did the raindrops fall. Fans will take that as a win on Day Three of a wet Boston Calling. Traditionally, Sunday is the busiest day of the fest. Last chance to catch the show, last chance to score the merch, last chance to squeeze through the thin chasm (suck in that beer gut!) between two port-a-potties on the other side of the fence from GA+ VIP to complete the super secret behind-the-scenes route, avoiding the port-a-potty gantlet traffic by the food court. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about on that last one, you weren’t there.
Snacktime
(Green Stage) Hard to think of a better way to kick off a day of music than an eight-piece funk band from Philadelphia. It gets the blood flowing. And you knew they were from Philly because the entire band (plus a few heads in the crowd) was wearing a “Snacktime”-branded version of the old Allen Iverson-era 76ers jersey. There’s no easier way to give your merch some pop than to hitchhike on the aesthetic of an established brand. You usually don’t see big bands – big enough to get booked at a festival, anyway – doing this sort of thing, the result of copyright concerns, trademark infringement, intellectual property issues, etc. All the beautiful coinage of lawyers that get paid the big bucks. Small bands usually fly under the radar in this regard, although I hear that the grocery store Market Basket, headquartered in Tewksbury, whose iconic red insignia bands love to swipe, can be quite litigious when it comes to small-time band merch.
Manuela Sánchez Goubert
(Arena Stage) Jazz singer Manuela Sánchez Goubert led a six-piece through a bracing set of mostly original songs at the Arena Stage. The first song launched a twin attack of clarinet and piano that promised a set full of energy. Nobody is going to confuse this stage with the Fort Stage at the Newport Jazz Fest, but Manuela brought the juice, and an ensemble consisting of mostly Colombians gave the proceedings an elevated, international flavor. The Arena Stage experience was hit and miss this year. But the miss was all ambiance (the place had the faint scent of a used jockstrap), while the music hit every time. Bring it back next year and throw down some Glade plug-ins.
Mo Lowda & The Humble
(Green Stage) The winner of the “most beat-to-shit guitar” award goes to the frontman for Mo Lowda & The Humble. It was a white telecaster with chunks of it chipped down to the raw wooden endoskeleton. Sure, I’ve seen guitars in worse shape at local shows. But touring festival bands tend to keep a tighter ship. The last time you earned “authenticity points” for toting around shitty equipment as a national touring act was probably the late ’90s. Everything else about the Philly band was polished enough for the cover of an American Eagle catalog, including the crisp, unblemished red bandanna ringed around the neck of the frontman. The band announced a record coming out in June, and for the rest of the set just got down to the business of rock ’n’ roll.
Sam Austins
(Blue Stage) While we’re handing out awards, Sam Austins wins the “most mentions of Boston in a single set” award. The Detroit native dropped the city’s name at least every other sentence. I’m not kidding. Whether it was in a song or in stage banter, he sounded like he was trying to win a crazy bet. You know what? Silly or not, it gets the people on your side. The three-piece outfit, consisting of a guitarist, keyboardist and Sam Austins on vocals, breaks a lot of genre boundaries. But you can reliably triangulate their vibe within the borderlands of clubby electro, R&B and pop. Minimalist arrangements powered each song’s musical idea with power and grace, turning slogans such as “Wipe your tears” into crowd-churning anthems.
Nate Perry & Ragged Company
(Orange Stage) Nate Perry & Ragged Company brought the country, which has had no trouble finding a home at this year’s countrified Boston Calling. The five-piece can root the toot in a roomful of veteran’s apparel, American flags and Harley-Davidson logos with the best of them. But did you know they’ve gone international too with their hit “Evergreens”? Apparently Brazilians are nuts for that track. The Boston band played a few news songs as well, including “Count On You” off an EP due in July.
Vivid Bloom
(Orange Stage) “Face-melting” is a descriptor invented for shoegaze. The superpowered volume, noise and texture peeling off your skin to reveal the sensitive subdermal layers. Sounds painful, right? But it can be done in good and bad ways, depending on the quality of the PA. Vivid Bloom is a band I always enjoy regardless of the setting, but set them up with the top-quality sound system at Boston Calling and you can hear every blessed accent that God intended come through their FX pedals and into your ears. That’s the good way to melt faces. The bad way is to just crank up the volume and not worry about the mix. One of the things that you pay for with the price of admission at the big fests is a weekend free of that sort of humbuggery.
Remi Wolf
(Green Stage) Sound issues plagued the first quarter of Remi Wolf’s set, which started late, presumably to install a fix that didn’t stick. Funny thing, the problem bedeviled only the microphone of Remi Wolf, the center of attention, while the band wailed away freely behind her. These are moments that can stay chill or turn ugly, depending on the ineffable vibes. The artist on stage plays a big role. I mean, Boston Calling isn’t going to turn into Altamont, but Wolf kept things cool with an easy rapport that pulled the audience in even as the sound issues pushed them away. Chief on her list of diversionary tactics? Divulging the private code names of various band members. The drummer Conor is known as Welding, or Wallington or Wilhelm, or something of that sort. Thankfully, the microphone was fixed, and Wolf launched into “Pitiful” before she got a chance to regale us with an anecdote about her “American Idol” appearance in 2014.
Copilot
(Orange Stage) I’ve joked about Copilot as the area’s chief representative of “Live, Laugh, Love”-core. It’s funny because it’s true. Or at least it’s true. The band brings a devoted core of Copilot fans wherever it plays, which imbues their performances with the familiar joy of a family reunion or church revival. Besides the general vibes, what makes Copilot stand out is their triple-headed monster of vocals. Three vocalists, each with unique timbres and attacks, transport the rootsy, gospel-inflected folk rock to new dimensions. The hustle and bustle of festival appearances can be a whirlwind, but if Copilot gets a chance, they should connect with The 502s, a folk rock band from Florida that scores just as high on the Happiness Index.
Tom Morello
(Blue Stage) Tom Morello unleashed from the duties of playing lead guitar for Rage Against The Machine is every bit the antiestablishment musical hero as a solo act. Maybe more so. He brought his strong pro-union, anti-Trump message to the Blue Stage, drawing the crowd into an uncensored version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” He even got everyone to jump on cue like Kriss Kross. No small feat for an audience whose average age probably ranged up into the 40s. Not to be outdone, Morello invited Chuck D onstage for a performance of Public Enemy’s hit “Prophet of Rage.” It was a tight squeeze schedule-wise, with Public Enemy scheduled to perform 30 minutes later. But the rapper has made a name for himself as a rock ’n’ roll fellow traveler, harking back to the genre-crushing “Bring the Noise” collab with Anthrax, so why miss a golden opportunity at Boston Calling?
Public Enemy
(Blue Stage) Not all nostalgia acts feel relevant four decades into their career. Public Enemy does. The legendary rap group out of Roosevelt, New York, closed with their immortal classic “Fight the Power.” It goes without saying that the slogan was a running theme for the entire set. The group has always been unafraid to speak truth to power, which, in the ’80s and ’90s, filled the “white flight” suburban class with fear. These days, though, the equivalent demographic brings their kids to dance along to the rhythms and rhymes, and more often than not the message that Public Enemy delivers, which is heavy on truth, justice and other ideas that need more love these days. It’s always a joy to see Chuck D and Flavor Flav together again, backed by the S1Ws – but has Terminator X been swapped out for DJ Johnny Juice?
You could hardly draw up a sharper dichotomy in music and politics than the competing bands at the Green and Blue Stage to close the last day of Boston Calling. At the Blue Stage, the fiery ideologues Tom Morello and Public Enemy, standing up for those without a political voice; at the Green Stage, Vampire Weekend and Dave Matthews Band, standing up to get priority seating at the boarding gate. Do we channel music to negotiate the current political travails, or do we use it to plant our head firmly in the sand? Boston Calling presented us with a binary choice, yet most of us chose “both/and” instead of “either/or.” We want to have our cake and eat it too. Make that make sense.
A stronger
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After DMB’s set ended, Dave Matthews held up signs that said “stop killing children” and “end the genocide.” He also made a comment about the state of the world between songs.
So it seems inaccurate to say that they wanted the audience to channel their music to bury their heads firmly in the sand.
Thanks for reading (and writing), Dan. Tom Morello is pro-union musician who you can find on a picket line as often as on stage. At the height of their career Public Enemy was the poster child for being persecuted for exercising your right to free speech as an artist. DMB, on the other hand, dumped a tour bus worth of human feces into the Chicago river and has courted a fanbase primarily composed of white, upper middle class, pot smoking SUV owners. (VW doesn’t even need to be mentioned.) What are we talking about here? Be serious.
It is of course indisputably true that Tom Morello and Public Enemy are far more political than Vampire Weekend and Dave Matthews Band. But somebody reading your review who hadn’t attended DMB’s set would be left with the impression that Dave Matthews had nothing to say about any of the issues of the day. Which just isn’t true.
Is this an attempt to silence the issue of Palestine? aka “plant our head firmly in the sand” This is should require a correction.
“You could hardly draw up a sharper dichotomy in music and politics”
There is a dichotomy in the music but the politics not as much as you might think. Tom Morello is also consistently opposed to genocide and supportive of freedom in Palestine. Maybe there are solidarities you wouldn’t expect? Maybe you disapprove of those politics so that’s why you wrote it like this? I hope not.
Dan, I’m sure the various members of DMB have said all sorts of stuff about all sorts of things. But you think the average DMB fan is going back to the watercooler on Monday to militate for social change? Please stop. That fanbase is about as politically active as a sack of wet potatoes, and it reflects back on the band, which has spent three decades cultivating that kind of political apathy, so that when the frontman says something like “Free Gaza” the crowd cheers, but takes it as purely performative, and goes back to whatever they were doing. You might not like that being the case, but it is the case.
Another line of response here is to remind ourselves that opposing genocide isn’t a political stance, strictly speaking — it’s a moral stance, with political (and other) implications. So DMB opposing genocide is good! But it’s apoliticism of a different flavor that ultimately wants to remain ignorant and inactive with respect to root causes.
Slaw, we’re on the same page. If my writing didn’t communicate the amplification that you are trying to add, then it was written too ambiguously, and I’ll try to be more clear next time. Thanks for reading.
I’m sure you’re knowledgable about all sorts of music and music culture, but you have it wrong about Dave Matthews Band and you’re being weirdly defensive with the criticisms about it. The contrast between RATM/PE and DMB isn’t the dichotomy you frame here.
You define them by the bus incident, when the band wasn’t even on the bus or had anything to do with the busdriver’s error.
You focus on the demographics of their audience, when you see a lot of the same elder millenial/gen-x white people at DMB, Rage and PE shows. What about the artists in the band? Certainly Blacker than most rock acts.
You characterize them as apolitical, when they’re not. Research their activism, donations, protests, fundraisers, songs, statements, etc. You get into nomenclature distinctions about their stance on Gaza as “moral” instead of political. What about when Dave protests US congress or donates time, money and fame to causes? The line between Morello and Matthews isn’t as stark as you paint.