The New Pornographers

I had never seen all of the New Pornographers live. I last saw the band touring for Twin Cinema (2005), when Carl Newman and Kathryn Calder shared the vocal duties, which was pleasant enough. But to see anyone—even the inveterately charming Calder—who is not Neko Case sing lead on “Mass Romantic” cannot but underwhelm a little bit. I’d always wanted to see the full band together on stage, all those tremendous personalities clashing in terrific harmony. I never would have guessed that my quest would have ended years later in, of all places, Utah.

And it almost didn’t, for the announcement of the show at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Park was met with a public outcry so forceful it very nearly prevented the show from happening. In April, concerned citizen Bethany Brinton wrote an op-ed for the Salt Lake Tribune voicing her concerns about the free outdoor show:

“In this time of moral and financial crisis, Salt Lake Mayor Ralph Becker is going to build a stage in Pioneer Park and invite the rock group the New Pornographers perform. Please tell me this is a final April Fool’s joke. Considering Becker’s agenda of ‘fairness,’ to whom is even the name ‘New Pornographers’ being fair to? Is it fair to the victims of the 6,500 registered sex offenders in Utah? … To be fair to the majority of citizens, how about some decent, respectful entertainment for them? I asked my neighbors what they thought of bringing the New Pornographers and they were equally disturbed.”

When I first read this editorial, I let out a heartless, East Coast cackle. But perhaps Ms. Brinton was right after all. I soon learned there was every reason to be disturbed.

As we arrived at the park, the scene seemed harmless enough. There were plenty of families—some with small children, even—who had bravely confronted the depravity promised by the band’s name in favor of a nice evening outside. There were sno-cones. There were about ten different hacky sack circles. There was a large dad in a Hoobastank t-shirt.

But then dusk set in. The band took the stage, and with the first thunderous note of “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” the space beneath the Pioneer Park stage morphed into a fiery pit of degeneracy. Teenagers, dawny-haired teenagers, all of whom had braces and freckles and looked more or less like gangly, pubescent Matthew McConneghys, started to dance, to scream, to hit each other, to actually, honest-to-God mosh. They started a circle pit during “It’s Only Divine Right.” Young boys began crowd surfing, and then young boys began picking up people who didn’t want to be crowd surfed and offering them up, sacrificially, to the outstretched hands of the madding crowd. “Will they crowd surf us?” my friend who I was traveling with turned to me and asked worriedly. “I might have to punch someone,” I said; and that is how I came to assume my fight stance at a New Pornographers concert. At the height of it all, a man with dreadlocks climbed an impossibly tall tree and when Neko Case pointed him out from the stage, he did not even seem to notice or acknowledge tens of thousands of eyes looking at him. Below, as the band began a finale of “Testament to Youth in Verse,” I shoved off a final group of moshers and saw in their eyes a primal gleam indistinguishable from prison-lust. “We don’t get a lot of shows coming through here,” said the friend I was visiting. “People get sort of starved for live music.”

In the midst of all of this, somehow, the band managed a fantastic performance. They plowed through the highlights of Together and a decent chunk of their formidable catalogue, the four charismatic frontpeople lined up on the stage like a wall of fullbacks. It’s hard to triumph over the mucky blare of an outdoor festival soundsystem, let alone a howling inferno of repressed teenage sin, but Neko Case’s voice retained incredible power and nuance even given the circumstances. In particular, during the part in “Challengers” when she sings the line “Whatever the mess you are, you’re mine, OK?” I’m sure a little shudder of goosebumps rippled throughout the crowd. But, much to my delight, nothing on stage was transmitted louder or clearer than Dan Bejar’s crazy. Bejar was present only nominally, choosing a few sporadic moments in which he’d wander out to the far corner of the stage and strum a guitar with his back to the crowd before disappearing. A few times throughout the night, he wandered back to the stage, like a brown bear recently roused from a winter’s sleep, as though he’d just happened upon a festival stage and an unutilized microphone and decided, for lack of anything else to do at the moment, to begin singing “Jackie, Dressed in Cobras.” Which is to say that both Case and Bejar met my wildest expectations in how they functioned on stage with the New Pornographers, and that seeing the band in perfect attendance was well worth the wait.

And so, it was thus that I finally got to check off my bucket list “seeing Neko Case perform ‘Mass Romantic.’” I just never dreamed I would be crowd surfing a teenage Mormon when it finally happened.