Any valuable experience with art – at least any art I’ve ever loved – makes you feel simultaneously more connected to the world and vibrates some string deep inside you.
Deep into a humid Memphis night, the second of Gonerfest 18, Reigning Sound – the key quartet of friends who formed in 2001 in Memphis for the first three classic records, and equally classic singles and compilation Home For Orphans, singer-songwriter Greg Cartwright, Bassist-singer Jeremy Scott, drummer-singer Greg Roberson, and organist-guitarist-singer Alex Greene, augmented by drummer-percussionist Graham Winchester, John Whittemore on acoustic and electric guitars and pedal steel, cellist Elen Wroten and violinist Krista Wroten, and Marcella Simien on washboard – opened a headlining set with the apropos lead-off track from their reunion album, A Little More Time With the Reigning Sound, “Do It Again.”
Carwright’s finely sharpened and sweetened growl poured over a crowd hungry to be with each other again and hearing Simien and Scott’s voices rise and converge with Carwright’s on the chorus’s “I really miss ya,” was almost enough to knock me down to my knees.
It’s easy to get so deep into survival mode that you wall off the pain of missing people, your people, until something knocks a brick loose and all those feelings come flooding out. For the next hour, the Reigning Sound did that for me and everyone I knew there, dancing and shouting along, and forgetting how to act but in all the best ways. Watching Greene and Whittemore shoot grins between them, the Wrotens dancing on the side of stage, Roberson and Winchester melting into one monstrous, jubilant rhythm, everything lined up and nothing let me down.
Last year was a lesson in – all credit to Anne – finding ways to mark things we couldn’t be together for, or at least not together to the extent we normally would/should have been. It was a valuable lesson in learning how do that even as I feel guilty framing any part of the pandemic in the light of my own personal self-improvement or benefit.
One of my favorite public examples of that marking was Gonerfest’s translation to streaming. Organizers Eric Friedl and Zac Ives and their crack team recreated so much of what’s kept me coming back to Memphis for ten years: I still found bands I’d never heard before; I still felt a little of that community when I checked into the zoom or in the local discord rooms I set up. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t feel great to be back in Memphis dancing with other people.
Other returning Gonerfest champions Quintron and Miss Pussycat closed Thursday night with an expansive, spiritual set at a right angle from what even we big fans had seen before. Since 1990, Quintron and Miss Pussycat carry a torch that illuminates a way to live on one’s own terms, to keep magic in the foreground of someone’s worldview.
Despite a long list of collaborations and communal activities – Quintron’s live reprise with the Oblivians on their raw gospel record Sing Nine Songs with Mr. Quintron at Gonerfest a few years ago was one of the most exciting rock and roll sets I’ve ever seen; appearances enlivened records and shows with fellow New Orleans travelers Galactic and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys; their Spellcaster Lounge down in Nola – but the work under their own name has been very much a self-contained unit for years.
Their last record, Goblin Alert, produced by Greg Cartwright (underlining the sense of friendship and collaboration and community that ripples through everything Gonerfest), had a fuller band feeling with Sam Yoger on a full drumkit, Danny Clifton on electric guitar, and Benni’ on vocoder and other synths. They convened the same cast, augmented by an additional woman on percussion and vocals, for a gorgeous, filthy tent revival. They expanded forms we knew and loved into cascading waves of sound, part trashy euro disco and part classic spiritual fire music as lines collaged and built, ratcheting up the intensity while wriggling away from literal meaning. It was a set that left me drenched and babbling.
The new venue sacrificed some of the “bouncing all over Memphis” quality I love so much, though the afterparties did what they could to pick up that slack – the couple we walked past but decided we were too exhausted to brave the crowds were clearly hopping – and for trying the create a safe space we could all be both distanced and self-contained Railgarten was perfect. Also, the two bartenders I mostly dealt with were fantastic, overjoyed to see the festival here, made a point of remembering my name, like they were as happy as the goers were to be around people. While I’d still like different day shows, it was nice to have headliners everyone could see from almost anywhere in the venue.
And what we missed in racing from venue to venue, the zoomed-in focus on Memphis and surrounding area bands paid off with some acts I’ve been hungry to see since the streamed version and some I might never have seen otherwise.
Optic Sink – Natalie Hoffmann from NOTS’ synth and vocal collaboration with Ben Bauermeister (A55 Conducta) on beats was every bit the cold, jagged but funky and hooky blast of fresh air as last year’s debut album. Nick Allison and the Players Lounge, favorites of mine from the stream, brought tumbling melodies wrapped in barrelhouse piano and chiming, spacious guitars for some perfect pre-sunset swaying and letting the rest of last night’s sin sweat out of your skin music.
And the biggest thing I go to Gonerfest for: bands I hadn’t even heard of before who blew me away, again, with more of a local bent this year for obvious reasons. Ibex Clone intrigued me with their chiming, abstracted twang and Cure-ish atmospherics swirled through grinding Gang of Four grooves. Snooper won the day for super young kids with a wire tight band, interesting grooves and shout-along hooks and righteous energy.
MS Paint, from Hattiesburg, put a classic wild-man singer spitting rhymes in a classic slam poetry cadence over gnarled, molten hardcore played by organ, bass, and drums behind him – my favorite discovery and left Anne and I quote-shouting “Destroy all flags and the symbols of man!” all the way home.
None of which is to discount bands I already loved or had an inkling would be good, none of those disappointed me.
Kings of the Fucking Sea united two of my favorite musicians, Sara Nelson from Little Killers – I still play their two records regularly, fifteen years later – and Poni Silver from the Ettes, as my favorite new rhythm section, behind singer and guitarist Chet Wiese. That trio also backed the great writer Sheree Renee Thomas – also recently named editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – on a moving spoken word tribute to Memphis.
NOTS played their complex, thorny songs like they were fist-pumping anthems and turned the gravel lot and open-air venue into a claustrophobic warehouse party in all the best ways. Still one of the best bands working and increasingly comfortable in their power trio mode, I no longer even miss the quartet arrangements.
Jack O – and I’ve been a huge fan through all his solo guises, especially the Tennessee Tearjerkers lineup featuring John Paul Keith – proved again that with The Sheiks he’s got a band equally comfortable with every era of his career and every genre he wants to dance through. A snarling version of one of my favorite songs from the earlier period of his solo career, “’Til The Money Runs Out” flowed into a bouncing take on the Billy Swan/Clyde McPhatter classic “Lover Please” which sat comfortably with a few gnarled Oblivians classics and a pulsing run through Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” introduced with “Next year: Gonerfest goes to college!” and featuring Abe Smith from True Sons of Thunder on lead vocals and Jack’s occasional bandmate Greg Cartwright on backing vocals.
Aquarian Blood not only completed their metamorphosis into a roughed-up, abstracted folk band that’s just as exciting as those first couple rock sides they put out but played an explosive version of that very first single with a seven-piece version that made standing in the burning sun, whiskey spilled on my suit jacket, feel like a baptism instead of a punishment.
The baptism hit in full force with the Wilkins Sisters. Reverend John Wilkins closed the Murphy’s day show at my first Gonerfest, a decade ago, and is still my favorite set I’ve ever seen. I still chuckle thinking about this man, who’d seen some things, introducing his song “Trouble” with, “Who here has seen some trouble?” then, laughing a little, “I want to remind you all that the night is young.”
Goner put out Wilkins’ second record, Trouble, last year and it was one of my records of the year. Unfortunately, the Reverend passed away from COVID complications late in 2020 so it was fitting his family – if I heard correctly, two daughters, one granddaughter, and one goddaughter – took the stage to pay tribute. Songs of his – including kicking off with a fiery version of “Trouble” – favorite songs of his like “Wade in the Water” and brought the house down on a version of Bill Withers’ “Grandma’s Hands” that reduced me to a blubbering mass and a “I Been Through the Storm and Rain” that almost levitated me out of my skin.
Everything else here was damn near perfect – if occasionally loud – sipping drinks to DJs playing things from Columbus heroes Great Plains’ “Exercise” to the Hot 8 Brass Band’s “Ghost Town” (RIP Bennie Pete) to Spanky Wilson’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” crowds dancing to Tina Harvey’s bubblegum cover of “Waiting for The Man,” this was a trip that my soul needed more than I could have put into words.
Screen of Distance 