2016 was a fire lineup (you need to scroll down through the last few years to see it, though I had kinda wanted to go to last year's as well, as shitty as the Fri-Sun downcards were...the jam scene just hasn't fielded enough good new acts in the last 20 years):
https://www.locknfestival.com/lineup/past-performers
The other thing, of course, is that this is going to only draw the worst of the jam scene fanbase, just like any festival post-March 2020 is going to draw the worst of its fanbase. It's going to be a bunch of Republican and Libertarian jam band fans and it's going to be the worst if it's allowed to happen.
It's not like everyone who enjoys a Phish show is cool with violating social distancing and booking tickets to Virginia as I type.
Yeah, I don't trust people enough to think this could work. Which is a shame, because Lock'n is generally a cool festival that has fielded some neat lineups. It's a jam fest first and foremost for sure, but with a little more diversity (or just better selection?) usually than the other big East Coast jam festivals like Mountain Jam and Peach. It's the last camping festival I've been to, in 2014, and it was run well.
But they definitely need to just sit this one out.
Not to imply I ever really had stopped listening to my core SG-era Cornell favorites. The book just pushed me to finally go back and listen to some more pre-Louder Than Love material.
I loved seeing Bourdain show up in Have a Nice Trip (as well as Carrie Fisher and Fred Willard, who had JUST died...but especially Tony). I agree, his death hurt. Tom Petty's did, too, for me. I saw him a good few times starting in like '01/'02, his music formed the core of a lot of special memories for me, and he seemed like a buddy, just like Bourdain did.
Most of Audioslave disappointed me to be honest and I've considered revisiting it, but kind of decided it was just as well I didn't. I have really enjoyed Eurphoria Morning a lot lately, and revisited the whole SG catalog while I was reading Everybody Loves Our Town a couple months ago.
BUT "Cochise" still rips. I think that was why other Audioslave disappointed me - because their first song was exactly what I wanted from "Chris Cornell fronts RAtM" and then the rest wasn't. They were still better than just about any of their 2Ks modern rock radio rivals, though.
Actually Danger Mouse is on a hot streak again. People slept on part of that hot streak last year in the form of the excellent Karen O album, but everyone seemed to give him his just props for the last Parquet Courts album.
Disappointing, I think RHCP would have had a lot more room for originality, wide ranging opinions, and humor. The fun thing about REM & U2 is they had huge, unwieldy catalogs over long spans of time. RHCP fits that mold better and a lot less has been said about their catalog in terms of critical retrospects (and yes I know, this is a comedy cast first...the first "Achtung Baby" episode definitely drove that home for me) than Talking Heads.
Oh well, hardly a big deal!
I don't think of him as particularly weird, but definitely real, cool, relatable, and not at all beholden to expectations or trends.
Definitely one of my favorites, Brick Body was Top 3-5 for me in 2017 and the EP was great, too.
I got into them way late, too. I knew who they were for like 15 years before I actually listened to them, for some reason. But I was glad I got into them in time to catch their most recent tour, which way exceeded my expectations for them circa 2014 or whenever it was.
Those are capital-G great songs, but I don't think they have quite enough high end support to quite outdo the previous two albums.
But for me at least, the 'Mats are one of those bands with great songs out their ears but no one definitive, front-to-back masterpiece album.
But I actually went through a solid week in June where for some reason "Alex Chilton" lodged in my head and I just couldn't stop listening to it and playing it over and over in my mind when I wasn't listening to it.
Jim James has been an inconsistent lyricist over the years (I mean the guy wrote "Highly Suspicious" for starters), but he also has penned some incredible ones in there.
"Golden" is beautiful, both in performance and just in poem form, from the description of road/band life to the gorgeous romantic verse that it ends on - https://genius.com/My-morning-jacket-golden-lyrics
and really the bulk of lyrics from the first five songs on It Still Moves. And then stuff like "Smokin from Shooting", "Circuital" - maybe they're not David Berman lyrics, but who cares?
They're just a weird band for him to have used for that knock.
It's a great venue for sure. The area around it is a total dud, at least if you're in from out of town like my friends and I were. We also had an almost comically bad Air BnB, so that probably caused other issues on the way to and from the show to stick in our craws more than they might have otherwise.
But yeah, the venue really is an excellent place to see a show. And The Waterfall II is incredible. If it's not in at least my Top 5 of 2020 at the end of the year, it will mean that we had just about the greatest August-Decemeber run ever.
"Pelota" is a jam! For me "So We Won't Forget" edged it out because it's the one that most makes me imagine I'm out on some balmy summer night with friends, possibly on psychedelics or mdma, acting like there's not a care in the world, possibly dancing.
Agreed on everything except I forget what you're talking about on Mortal Man because I never listen to it.
And while of course I do want to root for him and for him to be a righteous dude because I love his music and he has a huge spotlight, none of that really consciously factored into me interpreting a song like "The Blacker the Berry" the same as what you said. A lot of his albums are narrative and there's often a sense of internal struggle and efforts to reconcile feelings with aspirations. Now of course we do like to pick out stuff we like and slap "mouthpiece of a generation" on him for it, so there's if nothing else a bit of a double standard. But I dunno...art is messy and being a generational icon is too - ask/look at any other artist who's been labeled that, too.
It is majorly slept on, but I think "The Greatest Own..." is my least favorite thing on there, haha.
Those first two tracks, with the more overt Eastern elements, are monsters.
It'll be interesting to see if the swell of Black Israelites/Farrakhan stuff getting controversy lately brings any kind of new, more nuanced commentary from the great creative types who gave repped Farrakhan over the years. Like has anyone - a Q-Tip, a Chuck D, a Jay Electronica even - ever said anything like "we love Minister Farrakhan for his efforts to empower the African American male, but regret his comments on women/LGBTQ/Jews"? Or would that be seen as defeating or disrespecting what they feel he has done for the black community?
Yeah they have always gotten oddly shafted by tastemakers. I know they have classic rock and jam elements going, but I really never understood why they get shrugged off they way they do and only given the consolation that "they're great live" (true as that obviously is). I'm bias because they've been my favorite band for 16 years, but obviously I think they should be right up front in that converasation.
I wouldn't say they've moved away from headlining spots though - they hold their own three-day festivals in places like Mexico and the Dominican, and they get to headline when they play jam-leaning fests (Lock'n 2016, any time they play Forecastle), etc. They just haven't played much other than their One Big Holiday fests and a handful of special dates since the Waterfall tour wrapped in 2016.
The great thing about The Waterfall was that when it dropped I had given up on having high expectations for their albums because I thought EU & Circuital were inconsistent and that was the new norm. So The Waterfall hit extra hard when I realized it was a bona fodr great album.
I really didn't expect a PE for this. Thanks, Ryan!
It didn't seem as thoroughly subdued last night during the listening party, but I was a) well into the effects of a pretty potent edible b) video-chatting with friends.
I'm interested in seeing my second impression now under more conventional listening circumstances!
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