City Stages 2008 Review, Day 3

The grand finale of the 20th City Stages was tremendous. We missed a chunk of the daytime events: the milling around on the scorching asphalt, the scurrying for shade, the ritual gorging from all of the food trailers. As a sidebar, I’d love to know why there were so few local food vendors represented.

Birmingham is a city full of great restaurants and it’s not hard to imagine a huge diversity of local vendors selling everything from little cups of collard greens to ice cream to big glasses of sweet tea. Instead you have the same exact stands selling the same exact stuff all throughout the festival. Even as a vegetarian, I thought that Birmingham’s numerous famous barbecue offerings were under-represented. If the city wants to put on a first-rate show where the best items are present to entice and impress the out-of-towners, the tyranny of the food contracting needs to be broken up.

The crowds were much lighter Sunday afternoon than on the previous two days. It’s hard to say what Sunday night looked like since we were pressed to the front of the Miller Light Stage for the entire evening, but I think that the festival filled up after people got home from church and changed out of their stuffy Sunday suits and into their body paint and loin cloths.

We missed the much-anticipated Toubab Crewe due to some unpleasantness with an inflatable Southwest Airlines airplane and a tiny woman loaded with facial jewelry who insisted that “Bing Hooper” was the closing act on Saturday and he was the best she’d ever seen. Still, we made it out of the “temporary holding facility” in time to see the tail end of The Wailers, who were trying (sort of) to channel the spirit of Bob Marley without playing any of his political songs. While the people who wanted to hear all of their favorite songs from Legend were likely happy, it was a little depressing to imagine the conversations of those who were recalling ‘that one awesome band who played by the pool at that resort at Montego Bay.’ “Hey you guys! It’s ‘Jammin‘!” “And then they played ‘Is This Love!’” Sure, maybe it’s a bit too much to hope for an extended rant by The Wailers on how they would have loved to play Bob’s old song “Zimbabwe,” but now the meaning has been twisted by the atrocities of the Mugabe regime. But still. Sigh. “Hey you guys, it’s so fun to drink rum drinks in the summer! Reggae!”

We moved in as the Wailers crowd dispersed for other places. As with the past two days, terrible metal music came from the local stage as we moved in for Michael Franti’s sound check. Too bad. I was glad to see that Franti is still covering all of the speaker equipment with camo netting, calling to mind The Clash, circa 1980. Truly, Michael Franti brings a message of warning, but also of hope. We have all of his albums, love them all and were quite excited. Unfortunately, the show was a bit of a letdown. His performance at Workplay (3/7/07) was monumental and extraordinary in virtually every way. This one was riddled by sound troubles.

Spearhead is as tight a band as you’ll find, but perhaps because they were following The Wailers, they were a little more heavily-reggae-influenced than usual and not really turned loose. The songs skipped many of the more political tunes from Franti’s catalog, and steered towards summer fun ‘One World’ tunes like “Taxi Radio” and “Hello Bonjour.” Franti told a cool story about his son, who was born when Franti was 20, and played a song that he had written when the son left home on a bus to do graffiti in New York. But problems with sound levels marred the opening to righteous rockers like “Yell Fire” and any anger about contemporary atrocities was confined to muddy-sounding lyrics in his songs. The best song overall might have been “Tell Me Lies,” but nobody even really cheered at the line, “Tell me that somebody stopped the war.” My least faves, unfortunately, were the tracks that are evidently off the new album: “Rude Boys Back in Town” and “All I Want is You.” Still, looking forward, I’d still see Michael Franti anytime, anywhere. He’s that good.

We moved a little closer for the Flaming Lips, who conducted the most elaborate stage-construction/sound check I have ever seen. People in orange safety vests and hard hats swarmed the stage, erecting various complicated pieces of equipment — from musical instruments to digital screens to cannons. We loved that the members of the band were out there with the crew, helping to supervise the erection of this crazy quilt of exploding and noise-making items. There was no separation from the workers — Wayne himself was out there in his white suit directing things to be set up in various places, checking cables and cords, rubbing his hands together like some kind of mad scientist. There was even a safety gong. The tension and anticipation in the air was tremendous.

The performance was unlike anything I had ever seen before. We had been told by other friends over the years about this “new direction” that the Flaming Lips had been going in their live shows. Gone are the punks from Oklahoma with their feedback and distortion. Now they are a massive, epic, incredibly expensive art project: screens and lights and forests of paper being sprayed over the crowd. 20 people in Teletubby suits flanked the stage, dancing the entire time. There was a person in a giant inflatable butterfly suit and another in an inflatable sun. Wayne started the show by rolling out ONTO the audience in a giant hamster ball. The stage was littered with tiny tubes that he would fire out into the crowd, creating arcs of streamers and confetti.

And yet, somehow under all of these absurd trappings, that punk band (who last played Birmingham in Wayne’s estimation in 1987) is still under that elaborate Pink Floyd-style spectacle. There was actual guitar shredding. There were walls of sound and feedback. The audience was still “a bunch of motherfuckers.” And they even banging out an outstanding cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Song Remains the Same.” And yes, we freaked out about it. They really nailed it.

They played their hits like “She Don’t Use Jelly” (with a great old MTV Jon Stewart clip to introduce it) and a staggering encore of “Do You Realize.” The huge crowd seemed satisfied (from what we could tell from the fourth row).

But despite all the whimsy and wonder, we had to ask about the responsibility of putting on a show like that night after night. Yes, yes, there is some great theater to be had by watching the team of technicians assemble a bright safety orange equipment circus, but doesn’t all of that paper come from trees? Is it really a cool thing for the planet to pass out many, many hundreds, if not thousands, of glow sticks just so they can be used one time to create the psychedelic effect of seeing them all hurled through the night air towards the stage? I know Wayne talked a lot about responsibility and the River Keepers and how the war(s) is an insane nightmare. Agreed on all points. But the extravagant consumption involved with a single performance of a Flaming Lips show is a good reminder that it is going to take more than voting for Obama (and escapist rock operas) to save the planet.

Then again, the Flaming Lips were far from the only environmentally reckless suspects this weekend. The lineup list/festival map includes an item about “The Greening of City Stages,” which amounts to announcing that for the first time in 20 years of the festival, they have decided to recycle the astonishing volume of beer cans and plastic bottles that will be used over the three days. Wow! A recycling program in 2008! Somebody call Lisa Simpson!

And lest you think we are simply overlooking the virtues of this bit of overdue reformism, also consider that every single recycling barrel came with its own staff member. That’s right, a 1-to-1 recycling-bin-to-volunteer ratio. And even if we concede that the general public in Alabama are such morons are so new to the concept of recycling that the staff members are needed to ensure proper sorting, what about the fact that you aren’t allowed to re-fill a water bottle? Recycle yes, but re-use no? I mean, props to the AEC for trying to get a good thing going and all, but … damn.

Finally, thanks to the folks who booked such great acts. We were happy each and every night we went home. It was a great value of music for the entertainment dollar. The festival SHOULD be in good hands from here on out if they keep bringing in great acts (and taking more than plenty of tax dollars to subsidize the whole thing). We’ll be back next year!