Glorious Nowhere
A report from the 9th Annual Upland Breakdown.
Take Snowy Range Road west out of Laramie toward Centennial, Wyoming and roll through a particularly mellow High Plains valley. A late-summer, gold-green prairie hugs Scenic Highway 130--nothing but purdy nothingness for 360 degrees. Thirty minutes later, the plains collide with Medicine Bow Mountain Range like a floor against a wall. In there, Centennial guards the entrance to distant snowy peaks. Centennial-population 100, born on USA's 100th b-day--is a ramshackle collection of rustic buildings scattered on either side of a bending highway. In one eyeful, you can see the whole dusty burg from Joe Carducci's house.
Carducci settled here over a decade ago. "I picked Centennial because it is halfway between Chicago and L.A.," says the former SST co-owner and author of the MonkeyWrench rock book, Rock And The Pop Narcotic, a vicious screed that hurled s*** at the rock critic establishment for missing out the point of SST bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, Sonic Youth, and the Descendents. The tumbleweed outpost also gives Carducci ample silence to write screenplays, he says, and a setting to indulge his interest in old Westerns.
Carducci and his Laramie buddy David Lightbourne--a disciple of pre-Elvis rock and roll and a charismatic folklorist curmudgeon--have been curating the Upland Breakdown, a day-long music festival held in late-August at the homey Beartree Tavern in Centennial, since 2000. The Breakdown was originally intended to promote Upland Records, an alt-country offshoot of the more punky Owned and Operated Records, run by the Descendents' Bill Stevenson out of his Blasting Room studios, located 95 miles of road south in Fort Collins, Colorado. Eight summers hence, with Upland Records long defunct, the Breakdown survives as Carducci and Lightbourne's annual labor of love. Its roster of players is primarily culled from friends-along-the-way. SST producer turned Celtic-junkyard-folkie Spot has played multiple B-downs, as has Lightbourne's longtime friend Michael Hurley. A highlight from last year's fest was a rare performance by Carducci's former Wicker Park pals Souled American.
While each Breakdown's bill would entice at least a room-full of giddy diehards in your Austins, your San Frans, your Chicagos, part of its appeal and surrealism is that most of the Beartree crowd (aged from toddler to senior and perched on lawn chairs and benches) treat the performers with a relative aloofness. There is respectful clapping, there is dancing when a suitable beat arrives, but there is hardly a trace of the sweaty-palmed worship that follows someone like Michael Hurley in cultural centers. If you're ever in the hippest quarters of our biggest cities ever pondered the reception of an underground fave sans their cult of personality's scaffolding, come to Centennial in late August. See a twelve year old boy giving Michael Hurley the stink-eye during a trademark mid-song wolf-howl; see a grandfather waiting nonchalantly for a PBR can while former Bad Livers' multi-instrumentalist Ralph White goes Cajun-wild on his pushbutton accordion; discuss the pros and cons of making art in Los Angeles with Joe Carducci while two Western wear-bedecked tourists tiptoe to inspect the nature of the hubbub.
As Lightbourne put it so bluntly last summer, this is all in step with the Breakdown's design. "When you see Centennial, Wyoming and you see how ridiculously small it is; it's a failed ski town. It's Aspen 300 years ago...I don't want the rich people. That's my objection to doing it anywhere else. We were offered to do it at [regular rock clubs], but moms can't sit with their kids at picnic tables and watch it there. Those places are alcoholic grease traps.You won't see anything at the Breakdown except people who want the most unf***ed with music."
When I walk into Beartree's backyard around 3 p.m., the first act, the Alltunators, a darn-good old-timey husband and wife duo plus stand-up bassist from Denver, report over microphone that the grill's sizzling beef-smoke is overwhelming their olfactory. The outdoor stage is set up thusly: a wooden, L-shaped overhang frames of the performers and a small PA for the western-facing audience, the north side of the L houses has a grill that blows meat-clouds into the musicians' eyes. A concrete slab floors in the immediate viewing area, which has a rather awkward set up, with a circular, unlit brick fire pit to sit on in the center, surrounded by benches around the square. A green lawn slopes mildly downhill from the concrete towards the south, and folks sitting at picnic tables and basking on lawn blankets pay varying degrees of attention. The bowl-shaped valley, the fat clouds towering over the foothills, the cars and trucks lining the highway: these things are in near constant view.
Second on the agenda is grey-mustached blues man Al Rivers of Eugene, Oregon. Carducci advertised him via email like so: "We've been trying to pull rivers to the mountains for a couple years now; he's another of Lightbourne's seventies Oregon blues cronies so you know he's disreputable enough to be good." Rivers' voice is gracefully froggy, and he accompanies himself with a deft acoustic folk blues style via Elizabeth Cotton and Mississippi John Hurt.
His originals are fun, down-and-out numbers mostly pivoting off the perils and pleasures of becoming a crabby old coot. Rivers gets the crowd involved by having them call, "He's a grumpy old man!" during "Grumpy Old Man" and by telling one of his grandfather's banjo jokes.
Lightbourne's Stop And Listen Boys set is particularly rambunctious and tight. Lightbourne, wearing a striped tie and a country hat, looks yanked straight from the pages of a Steinbeck novel. Half fun-loving song and dance man, half antagonistic folk curator, Lightbourne leads his band, anchored by stand-up bass, slide guitar and a washboard, through upbeat standards like "K.C. Moan," Charley Patton's "Hang it on the Wall," William Moore's "I'm a Ragtime Millionaire" and the Memphis Jug Band's "You May Leave, But This will Bring You Back." Several adults clap their hands in approval; two kids go berserk in the late-day hamburger haze.
Lightbourne gives erudite and funny history lessons in between songs. At one point, he salutes late folklorist Charles Wolfe and his book, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?, on the Carter Family, saying that Wolfe "wrote about everyone who ever played an instrument in Tennessee." Lightbourne goes on to introduce "Cocaine Blues," noting that though it is catching on as a cover now, he played it first with
Steve Weber and the Holy Modal Rounders in the ‘80s.
"If anyone wants to dispute me on that," he offers, "We can fight after the set."
Then, Lightbourne gives Michael Hurley the stage. Hurley's first song is a goofy a cappella rendition of an old bluegrass song called "My Old Papa."
He hazily explained the song's origins at a live performance the previous day on Fort Collins' KRFC FM: "I'm playing a song I remembered the other night. I ran it through my mind about forty times before I finally remembered. I pieced together all these verses and forgotten lines."
Hoping about in circles on one foot at a time, Hurley sings in a voice that becomes endearingly and increasingly out of breath: "I'm traveling down the highway, on a dark and windy night saw an old man cross the road, in front of my headlight. I pulled out to the roadside, and I stopped to let him in when I turned and saw his face, I thought he was an old friend. Just an old friend, I hadn't seen in years. His face was old and wrinkled, his eyes full of tears. My mind couldn't place him, my thoughts were running fast. thought that I'd known him from somewhere in the past. And suddenly I stopped the car, my eyes welled up with tears it was my dear old papa I hadn't seen in years. His hands began to tremble as he broke down and cried and, he said "I found my only son before my time to die." Just my old papa, I hadn't seen in years. His face was old and wrinkled, his eyes were full of tears. His hair was long and shaggy, his body worn and thin our ramblin' days are over, we've reached our journey's end."
Picking up his cherry-red electric guitar, Hurley moves through songs from all over his career. He plays "Blue Driver," "New River Blues," "Driving Wheel," "Oh My Stars," a new song called, "Puttin' Sugar," "I Paint A Design" and "Knockando." He also plays a sleepy version of "Over The Rainbow." Ralph White joins him on accordion for a few songs, and the otherwise stripped-down set has all those things Hurley is gushed over about: a no-bulls*** presentation of songs that oscillate between sad and silly and are just as comfy as a pair of old socks with toe holes.
When introducing his Austin-based traveling companions Precious Blood, a sometimes collaboration between songstress Amy Annelle and all-purpose roots man Ralph White, Hurley says something wacky about not recognizing his own precious blood until fleas started gulping it down. Annelle and White use Precious Blood as a vehicle to explore old folk and country music making songs by relative modernity like T-Rex. They seem like they were written by some toothless Appalachian dude. Like their van-buddy Hurley, Annelle and White have for years practiced a kind of musical and literal nomadism that makes their unearthing of spooky old folk tunes come out effortlessly heavy. Regardless of good-natured grins and pleasant stage banter, the songs bleed out of their breath like fire.
As the Centennial evening gets goose bump-chilly, Precious Blood moves through a combo-platter of "Can't Feel At Home In This World" and "Hell Broke Loose In Georgia." Annelle leads them through a great version of "Just A Bum," Hurley's classic salute to vagrancy. And though Hurley says that he's retired that tune for himself, he sure sports a big grin watching Annelle sing it.
A Cajun dance song called "Little Dark Eyes" comes next, and White switches from fiddle to shiny green accordion. Annelle suggests, "If you've been eyeing a cutie from across the meadow, now would be the time to ask them to dance." A kind of old-world waltz ensues and about three couples take Annelle's advice.
A fantastically doomed cover of The Kinks' "Alcohol" follows. I am momentarily convinced that an evil sprit is hiding in my sixth beer of
day. Annelle and White close out the show with The Meat Puppets' "Lost" . and an accordion-spiced rendition of bluegrass favorite, "Shady Grove," which inspires a guy with a Grateful Dead leg-tattoo to plead for a Jerry-tastic encore.
But, alas, the dark has fallen. The fire-pit is stuffed with cardboard oxes doused in lighter fluid. The musicians pack up and hole up at their merch table in the bar. Both Carducci and Lightbourne independently remark that this has been the best Breakdown yet. The Beartree's backyard and roof-deck were hardly at capacity, but the performances were all mighty-fine and everyone was happy come sundown. Carducci says that he is already prepped to go fishing for next year. He's gonna ask Will Oldham and the Kirkwood brothers to put Centennial on their schedules.
Elliott Johnston writes for various alt-weeklies. This is his first blog post for Arthur, the free all-ages counterculture magazine.
