Wilco Solid Sound Festival: Weekend rich with pleasures

When Wilco took the stage amid a downpour at its Solid Sound Festival on Friday night, rain was steadily splashing about a foot in the air off the surface of the stage, and 5,000 to 6,000 concertgoers had pretty much pushed beyond any hope of staying dry, a sea of umbrellas and ponchos notwithstanding.
But except for a delay in start-time -- softened by some banter between the weekend's comedy curator John Hodgeman and actor Justin Long -- the band stuck to its plan, opening its much-anticipated set with a new song, "I Might."
The sprightly tune, spooled around an unwinding guitar figure, may become a regular opening number for the Chicago-based rock heavyweights. But its debut was a nod to the occasion, with the track (to appear later in the year on a new studio album) released that very day exclusively at the festival, via a pop-up Euclid Records shop.
By the time the band opened its drier Saturday night set with the bemused swagger of "I Love My Label," the Nick Lowe cover that serves as the single's B-side, it felt like a giddy toast, a celebration of the second incarnation of the festival that solidified this increasingly independent band's home-away-from-home in Western Massachusetts. (The joke, as it were, is that Wilco just founded its own independent label -- based, with the band's management, out of Easthampton -- to release future albums.)
Feedback from last year's inaugural version was
of an exceedingly well-run festival, with the patron experience clearly considered at the heart of the event planning. About 1,000 attendees were added to last year's tally of 4,000-5,000, and the whole thing swung into action quicker (with campgrounds becoming settled and the parking lots closest to the venue reaching capacity for the night by about 5 p.m. on Friday), but the predominant theme once again was a very pleasant, convenient, well-considered experience for attendees.
There was a great sense of group catharsis at the main concert field -- as Wilco powered through its Friday-night set with a darkly crackling sequence of "Poor Places," "Reservations" and "Spiders (Kidsmoke)," or capped its Saturday show with an eight-song encore including Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion onstage for Wilco's adaptation of Woody Guthrie's "California Stars." And the festival-ending sing-along, with most of Wilco joining Levon Helm's band for "I Shall Be Released" and "The Weight," was a big rock moment. But the weekend was rich with subtler pleasures as well.
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Harkening back to his in-gallery demonstration of prepared drum heads last year, Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche freely romped through the museum's Sol LeWitt exhibition on Saturday afternoon, leading an all-improv jam on a series of oversized instruments built by the late Bennington College professor Gunnar Schonbeck. Among his cohorts were Darin Gray, from Kotche's On Fillmore side project, and Wilco guitarist (and avant-guitar hero) Nels Cline.
Guthrie and Irion had a good festival, as their big moment with Wilco punctuated a day featuring a regularly scheduled, early afternoon set as well as an in-gallery pop-up show from atop a raised platform. The gallery set was vociferously received by an audience happily craning its necks to see the unusually staged performance, and who sent the four-piece band off with a large ovation.
New Zealand songwriter and guitar-gearhead Neil Finn followed-up his "proper" Saturday set with a performance amid Nari Ward's sculpture on Sunday. Elsewhere, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and sun took a turn encouraging a falcon to take flight during a Sunday afternoon demonstration, and kid-friendly performers Story Pirates wandered around, creating little moments and laughter and spectacle.
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Not to say the action wasn't hot on the primary festival stages as well. From a Wilco-centric perspective, the story of the weekend was the debut of a half-dozen new songs. Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy pleased a soggy audience with big, horn-laden arrangements of songs including the Tweedy-penned "You Are Not Alone." Another highlight came when legendary Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore donned an acoustic to lead a five-piece band including Samara Lubelski on violin, Mary Lattimore on harp, John Maloney on drums and Keith Wood on another acoustic guitar. Drifting in and out of a more traditional, linear composition style, the group showed in measured doses that feedback and effects boxes are not needed to evoke engrossingly chaotic textures.
Those two features were in abundance, however, when Moore joined Cline on Sunday for the duo's first set in 13 years under the name Pillow Wand. Both musicians stayed seated as they coaxed cascading waves of noise from their electric guitars and accoutrements, Cline at one point playing with his teeth and Moore hammering his instrument with open palms when not employing a drum stick. The most hooked-up sequences, though, featured Cline fuzzing his way through a hard-struck rhythm part as his partner splayed fragments of splintered sound into the air.
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Even more of a feast than last year's version, the 2011 Solid Sound featured more performances, special art installations, and independent food vendors than any one person could sample in full. Perhaps the key was to just let it flow, with the understanding that, like the weather, the course of a day at a festival this eclectic is bound to be unpredictable.