THE BEAT GOES ON: Wilco's Solid Sound Festival

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.
 

Photos courtesy Solid Sound Festival