Tag: my morning jacket

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August concerts

Concerts I’ve seen lately:

THE SWELL SEASON’s Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova played five songs Aug. 12 at Lincoln Hall following a screening of the film that made them famous, Once, and a Q&A with Sound Opinions hosts Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis. What a delightful evening. (Of course, now I keep thinking about the tragic death of a fan that happened at a Swell Season concert in California a week later.)

LOST IN THE TREES played Aug. 16 at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion, part of the “Dusk Variations” series. A nice example of an indie folk-rock band making sophisticated use of chamber-music style strings.

MY MORNING JACKET played Aug. 17 at the Charter One Pavilion, which was my first visit to this concert venue on Northerly Island, where Meigs Field was until Mayor Daley ordered in the bulldozers. Charter One is basically a parking lot and bleachers set up in front of a big stage, with vendors selling tallboy cans of Bud for $11. ($11!!!) Not really my sort of venue, but I guess it served its purpose as a setting for My Morning Jacket’s arena rock. The band showed that it still knows how to rock out with a vengeance — at least when it’s playing its old songs. Luckily, the band played a lot from It Still Moves and Z, but I wish they’d played even older songs. The more recent songs are lackluster in comparison, although the band almost brought them to life on stage.

THE SADIES were scheduled to play two nights at Schubas, but the second night was cancelled, and the band ended up playing just one show, Aug. 20. It’s a shame that this terrific band hasn’t become more popular and moved up to bigger venues. On the other hand, it’s nice that Sadies fans can still enjoy seeing them up-close in an intimate venue like Schubas. The guitar licks were as awesome as they usually are, and it was great to hear the Sadies doing some songs from their excellent recent record, Darker Circles. They even did double duty, playing as the backing band for Jon Langford and Sally Timms during one of the opening sets. And they finished off the night with an encore medley of tunes originally played by Them in the ’60s: “Gloria,” “”I Can Only Give You Everything,” “Baby Please Don’t Go” and back to “Gloria.”

Sorry, no photos from these concerts, but my camera will be back in action very soon.

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My Morning Jacket and Ray Davies at Taste of Chicago

JULY 4, 2006
TASTE OF CHICAGO, GRANT PARK

Just another concert by the world’s greatest rock band… Well, at least, one of the greatest. Jim James and company were in fine form, with some nice song choices (stuff from At Dawn that they haven’t played so much in recent years) and Andrew Bird joining MMJ onstage with his violin on a few songs. Now that they’ve played to hordes at Bonaroo and the throngs at Taste of Chicago, I sure hope they’re winning a lot of new fans.

Ray Davies was the headliner, and unfortunately, the security people running the Taste seemed unaware of the fact that a lot of MMJ fans left before Davies started. The result: empty seats. Meanwhile, people were lined up, wanting to get in. Without the seats as full as they should have been, the reception for Davies initially seemed a little muted. I enjoyed this performance, but not as much as Davies’ show this spring at the Vic. Maybe the longer format of the Vic concert just gave him more time to throw in more Kinks songs, including more obscurities. The songs from Davies’ solo record sounded OK, but they weren’t nearly as thrilling as “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.” The crowd stuck around for a while after Davies did his “You Really Got Me” encore, hoping maybe for a second encore and “Lola.” But it was not to be.

The first act of the afternoon was Mike Doughty, the former Soul Coughing lead singer. Now, this is someone I’ve been hearing about for years without ever paying much attention to the music. I wasn’t impressed. Too Dave Matthews-y for my tastes, though I’ve heard worse.

One of the highlights of this whole afternoon was watching the sign-language chicks standing at the side of the stage, offering their sign-language interpretations of the lyrics – at least, the lyrics that they knew or could make out. They also did a lot of air guitar and drumming motions when the bands weren’t singing. They were cute, and frequently grinning as if they realized how silly the whole thing might appear.

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MMJ, New Pornos and Stephen Malkmus

APRIL 22, 2006
PATTEN GYM, EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

I wonder how many of the Northwestern students at this concert know how lucky they were. The double bill of MMJ and the New Pornographers was already so good that it was hard to believe these bands were coming to Evanston to play in a gym. And then it turned out that the “special guest” would be Stephen Malkmus playing a rare solo acoustic set. And then it turned out that the New Pornographers would be playing with Neko Case in the lineup — a rarity these days, since Case has been busy with her own solo concerts.

What a night. Of course, the venue sucked. Not as much as Northwestern’s Norris Student Center, where the Wrens played earlier this year, but it was definitely a gym with a bunch of kids standing around in the dark, and the sound of the bands echoing in the big room. Not the ideal place to see any of these bands, but, hey, a lot of great music has been played in gyms over the years.

Malkmus was a little awkward at first, having some trouble with guitar tuning and guitar effects (the loud bursts of noise he threw into a couple of songs, including Silver Jews’ “Blue Arrangement”), but awkwardness is part of what Maklmus’ music has always been about. Reduced to one voice and one guitar, his songs are still pretty quirky. It was nice to hear him doing that great Pavement quasi-hit, “Range Life.” The set was abbreviated, ending after just 35 minutes or so, since the concert was on a tight schedule. Or as Malkmus put it, “The Man is everywhere.” SEE PHOTOS OF STEPHEN MALKMUS.

The New Pornographers sounded very good at the recent show opening for Belle and Sebastian, but they sounded great tonight. That’s the difference that the presence of Neko Case makes. Sure, she’s ostensibly just a backup vocalist and occasional lead singer in this band, which is Carl Newman’s vehicle. But her vocals are so strong that they transform many of the tunes into double-lead-vocals.SEE PHOTOS OF THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS.

My Morning Jacket opened with “At Dawn,” which used to be their standard opening song but had fallen out of recent MMJ tours. Really nice to hear that again. (The album At Dawn is still my favorite by these guys.) Jim James is still buried under hair, though better groomed than the “Cousin It” look of a few years ago. Other members of the band looked like they had actually been in a barbershop recently. MMJ didn’t do anything especially new or different tonight, but they excelled at what they also do so well — long, passionate and powerful jams. SEE PHOTOS OF MY MORNING JACKET.

Kudos the Northwestern student organization A&O Productions for booking such a great show.

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My Morning Jacket at the Randolph Street Festival


JUNE 18, 2005
My Morning Jacket
at the Randolph Street Festival

They’re better groomed… not quite as much hair, not quite as much reverb… but man, they still rock with incredible intensity. Tonight’s show was a reminder of why I have called these guys the world’s best live rock ‘n’ roll band. And I’m not the only one to give them that title.

I first saw them in 2002, at South By Southwest. I’d already heard reports about their live shows in Chicago, and I’d picked up their album At Dawn. The disc seemed pretty good to me, but it did not prepare me for the phenomenal concert performance I was about to see. One of the papers in Austin recommended the show that day, saying it would be a nice quiet end to the evening. The writer apparently had given only a cursory listen to some of MMJ’s quieter recordings, and hadn’t heard about their incendiary live shows.

This was one of the first times I’d ever used my video camera to film a musical performance and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing through the lens. After opening with “At Dawn,” the band launched into a hard-rocking song I’d never heard before (it turned out to be “One Big Holiday,” released later on the It Still Moves CD). Seeing these hairy guys thrashing around on the stage as they played their songs and amped up the intensity of what I’d heard on CD was simply amazing.

Lead singer and songwriter Jim James barely showed his face the entire concert, singing through a mass of hair that hang down over his face. As if that “Cousin It” routine weren’t enough, he also had a stuffed-toy buffalo head stuck on the microphone in front of him.Was he a little stage shy… or just weird? And did he have an animal fetish?

Later, at another concert, James played with a toy parrot perched on one shoulder. And then came the cover of It Still Moves, showing bears (stuffed bears? people in bear costumes?) instead of the band members.

But little by little, James has come out from behind the mask. I’ve seen the band in concert six times now, plus a show by Jim James with Bright Eyes and M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket has yet to disappoint. The band has gone through some personnel changes since that concert I saw in 2002 — the only members left from that lineup are James and bassist Two-Tone Tommy. The current lineup is pretty damn solid, though.

At the Randolph Street Festival show, James was wearing a tan sport jacket, his hair still long but neatly pulled back from his face. His voice was just as powerful and as beautiful as ever, as he sustained many long notes. He was more talktative than usual, bragging that My Morning Jacket had performed the best sound check by any band ever. He also noted that they had felt surrounded by cuteness at the festival, after visiting a tent with puppies and seeing someone walking around with a kitten.

MMJ played several new songs, which sounded promising, plus favorites like “Golden,” “One Big Holiday,” “Lowdown,” “Mahgeetah” and “Run Thru,” and a cover of Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying With You.”

The great moments came when the band stretched out the songs — there was more than one false ending, followed by more jamming. MMJ’s detractors have pointed out that the band’s jams are nothing all that complicated, musically speaking. It’s true that they repeat many riffs over and over, but that misses the point of what’s so brilliant about MMJ. They take a seemingly simple pattern of notes, and play it harder and harder, flailing it until it sounds like something new. It’s so cathartic.

SEE PHOTOS OF MY MORNING JACKET.