Features | Festivals

Sasquatch! Music Festival 2009

By Dom Sinacola | 12 June 2009

Oh, I’m aware of the Columbia River; I know it’s long. But make no mistake, the Gorge is a giant hole. And the land surrounding this giant hole is a giant lip, a sloping brink so vast one feels in control of one’s direction, and therefore one’s gravity, but where one is, incessantly, sliding towards the hole, and so therefore fooled and inevitably doomed. The land surrounding this giant lip is the mighty indifference of central Washington, speckled by wind power turbines and carved with skinny highways. Those of us that came to Sasquatch! (hereafter: Sasquatch) from the areas surrounding were bound to end up there anyway; the Pacific Northwest has no festival like it that can approach it’s size, variety of lineup, stunning venue, or whiteness. There’s plenty nature to see where one lives, to get drunk next to, but why not get really fucking wasted next to nature and 20,000 other people that would each totally condone the logic one just used? And so toward the giant hole we all tumbled, face over fanny, not really ever realizing amidst all the dust we were sputtering up that we were all heading the same way, doing the same thing.

This is like if, of St. Vincent’s Sunday performance, you were to hear “Man, she can shred” three times, each time redolent with very different connotations. First from me (I hate everybody), then from a young festival promoter (enthusiasm and patience of a saint), and finally from a guy who can somehow pop the collar of his tank top. In a sweat-soaked, daddy-long-legs web this trifecta commingles abusively—I will be shamed in my general cynicism because of the PR guy’s friendliness, the PR guy will be disappointed by the distasteful state of my body come Monday’s press tent arrival and will further maybe sigh at the lateness of this article, the third guy will have no knowledge of any of this, the PR guy will implicitly but never marketably admit to disliking that third guy because the third guy never actually bought a ticket to the festival, I’ll straight up despise the third guy because he blasts The Eminem Show (2002) out of his Toyota Celica two campsites over and because he encourages the arrogance of a thousand djembe players by saying “woo!” whenever he passes five, the number in which djembe players congregate to disguise that they are awful.

This is essentially Sasquatch: the dense cloud left to roam central Washington like a suspended tumbleweed weeks later, the afterbirth of a melee no one really remembers because no one actively participated in it. There was music, surely, lots of wonderful performances, and friendships created, babies conceived, perhaps, but these happenings mostly went on around each other—grazings, flesh wounds, skirmishes and forgettable circumstances, grindings into one another, real hard, but no real contact; like describing violence without any knowledge of pain or watching the Murder City Devils without a hammer for your face. So the Sasquatch Music Festival persists, the idea of the best music festival ever proselytized by those principally opposed to camping, watching music in the sun, and prophylactics.

This third guy I was talking about, I called him Albino—because his hair was bleached and a shiney thing for me to stare at, but also because his bulky friend in the group said something about his dad being the bassist in Sly & the Family Stone and Albino threw up instantly. Taking advantage of Memorial Day weekend away from classes, Albino and his eight other companions paid thirty to forty bucks each for the collective privilege of inexorably fucking to shit their own 30’ x 10’ space of Washington brush. Not that it didn’t pay off: at least one dude supposedly had his penis observed outside of his Hawaiian-themed bathing suit and another spoke of the many boobs he’d driven here from Vancouver to talk about. Because they didn’t buy tickets to the festival itself they had extra money for three handles of Captain Morgan and Mike’s Hard Lemonade for the ladies. I shit you not: this is what they brought and they said these things to me. When Sunday morning I asked to borrow a knife so I could cut my jeans into some nifty, exceptionally manly capris and I was handed a butter knife covered in peanut butter, I was asked if I liked the Kings of Leon set. I said I had looked for “Sex on Fire” and it took me some time to find it. He said, “I know.”

It was the Kings of Leon’s last show of their tour, their big Rolling Stone cover tour, headlining the first night of Sasquatch and, appropriately, they asked the audience if, it was all right by everyone, they could have fun on stage. Assuming that, otherwise, they wouldn’t have much fun on stage was an easy task: I have never so resolutely been physically and emotionally defeated by blandness. I did spend over half the set trying to discern the first bars of “Sex On Fire,” and have little recollection of what else they played. Somewhere I gave up. I gave up on everything. Now is when we thank the audience for showing up; now is when we half-heartedly mention the beauty of the land, because even though the audience knows we will not be sleeping in tents, we should still at least acknowledge those who are, maybe make that seem like a privilege, which is fucking stupid; now is when I stick my cigarette in the headstock of my lead guitar; now is when I use my hands to describe the flames around one’s genitals. Now is when I put my foot atop something. Even the drummer, who, dead-eyed and mechanical, looked like someone who would strangle your teenage daughter, only existed, an ersatz organic body for the greater expectation of drummer-ness.

Despite Kings of Leon’s cymbal-monkey Lurch, the surrounding weekend was filled, maybe even defined, by the delight in watching so many good drummers pop up unexpectedly in the least assuming places.

There was M83’s drummer—barred and listless behind the frilly synth shield of Anthony Gonzalez and his pert biceps—both fulfilling his role as harbinger of electro-wall-of-sound and as the only smartly restrained muscle in a network more house, and therefore unflaggingly repetitious, than chamber pop. The drummer was the only moving thing that made sense in the orange heat at the Wookie stage. The rest? Mystery.

Though John Vanderslice’s set was gracious, genial, and punctuated by a genuine concern for the brightness of the sun, as I imagine all of his music to be, his drummer blissed and bounced through more Cellar Door (2004) cuts than the audience deserved, never letting the toothy grin escape from under his wispy mustache and seeming to gain in energy as the heat wore the rest of the band down. Soon after, St. Vincent and her band demurely entered stage right then fiddled with the sound check until a great sigh released the tension seething between what Annie Clark wanted her guitar to sound like and what she could actually accomplish before the audience passed out. “The Strangers” was a perfect ground zero for testing just how lecherously she could pull off that throttled, bristling hum that signals the best part of the song and, probably, the best part of all her songs. The audience perked up especially for “Now Now,” which was a bit shortsighted on our part because so many other songs gave her so many other licenses to fucking chew her strings, which, really, was something to see. And meanwhile, the guy on the kit to her right patiently, intuitively paced all this—paced the novelty of climax or of the tenor sax, smeared with the calamitous potential of Clark’s arrangements both touchy and surprisingly coherent, giving this tether, lending the whole mass of us patience we didn’t think we’d ever use.

Brian Chase did the same during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs set, holding his sticks traditionally, hibernating behind Nick Zinner’s meowing lead guitar and Karen O’s outfit, which approximated Frankie Muniz dressing up as a flying squirrel dressing up as Gary Glitter. But Chase also sat beneath a huge, inflatable, I think, eyeball that shook and spun on its fragile cord every time the wind came up from the river, or across the gorge from Canada. Every time the wind caught it, the eyeball ended up looking at me up on the hill, staring straight into me. I looked to Chase for comfort, him tiny and squirrelly but precise and therefore in control, which was nice.

Also nice was Grizzly Bear, the band essentially at the bottom of the hole of the weekend of the festival because we left soon after to claw our way out of its cosmic orbit. Their set was by no means a culmination of the weekend, or even much of a revelation. But, perched yet again before the cusp of the gorge, I believed I had a glimpse of what lay at its bottom, of what we’d all preternaturally hurl towards if left to our own devices for a few days more. That’s because they played “Two Weeks” and since I’ve been obsessed with the song, just that and only that, which isn’t all that exciting in itself, but it’s been some time since my opinion and relationship with all music has started and ended in four-something minutes. It’s stymieing shit, especially because I can’t even tell you why I like “Two Weeks.” If you don’t, I’m not going to try to convince you. I don’t care; I’m going to sleep and I’m totally fucking pleased with myself.

I think I originally realized how awesome I am during Animal Collective’s turn on the main stage. I was, OK, Intoxicated—and I of course planned that around Animal Collective. This is what, I always had assumed, happened at large music festivals in the sun where people camped cramped into tiny nodules of mother earth fat: you plan getting fucked up around watching music a half-inch from death. Bonnaroo’s camping thoroughfare was littered with bodies and by the day more piled on top in stranger positions like totem poles knocked from their foundations by the sheer power of good vibes. When the mud and feces from the water area ran downhill to meet the newly sprayed hosings of gruff Mexican guys on horses, I think I remember, relieving the dust that threatened to cake out lungs as we walked anywhere, and all that muck danced between the crooked limbs of unconscious hippies, it was beautiful.

At Sasquatch we tried to start a tally of fallen soldiers, extra points granted for those that witness the collapse, but nothing doing. After a day we told ourselves that the next day would be ripe, when everyone’s hung over and exhausted and still trying to get fucked up. The next day we decided that maybe all the substances we’d expect these people to like they just didn’t. By the third day we were completely bummed that no one was casually slumped in a ditch or eating curb by the general store. I won’t even get into how clean the Honey Buckets were kept, though the actual venue lacked sufficient number of Honey Buckets, and sufficient amount of shade. Also: sufficient garbage and recycling programs. Sure, Albino gonna fuck your shit up, but provided with some recycling bags and maybe a fucking pamphlet he’d read atop a Honey Bucket or his car, the end-state of the camp grounds wouldn’t have been so revolting. No poopwater everywhere, but there was a healthy stench that followed me into my dreams.

Animal Collective were fantastic. At first they weren’t, but during “My Girls” they were, all parts exposed equally—and literally, the vocals mixed as high as everything, flayed bare. It became a competition, then a Rusted Root concert, then a long, obnoxious joke sent reeling into the gorge. As soon as it ended I felt like I’d eaten well. I looked for some friends I’d met from Abbotsford who liked to describe what a crazy place it was, I mean straight up scary, but smile while they do it and ask charming questions about America because, shit, they’ve been to Thailand for months but almost never America, and then I find them without even trying. We go to look for shade. As I’m standing sideways in the brush—aware, so lucidly as if never before, that my right leg is about a half inch shorter than my left, something my doctor impressed upon me when I was fifteen but must have not tried hard enough—behind me a friend is kicking down a bush. His movements remind me of Tim Robbins escaping from prison, short, sure, and attuned to a pulse in the din that very few of us could sense. This registers as wrong, or incorrect given the intuitiveness on display within that vast ocean of ignorance and post-pubescent wherewith-fuck-al, but a combination of heatstroke and a slowly seething contempt for the lack of shade there allow quiet awe, plain and simple, to settle inside my body. Yeah, alright, do that. You’re doing it well.

And there the awe settled for the rest of the weekend. It came in most handy when I went on stage with Of Montreal as part of their clusterfuck of a show. Mine was a small part—during “For the Elegant Caste” I stood next to the bassist and looked really scared and then missed my cue to freeze because I couldn’t hear the tiger dressed in a tuxedo roar after he was greco-roman wrestled by the same guy in a leotard who, in only a jockstrap, explained backstage to a bunch of us what we were supposed to be doing on stage, but since a show was happening, was completely inaudible. There was also a part where a few people at the front of the stage were positioned by the guy in the leotard after freezing, but since I was standing next to John Vanderslice and the bassist, I was mostly invisible to the crowd. John Vanderslice agreed that he had no idea what was going on. The crowd was enormous, though, and while I still hold pretty steady to what I think of their recently released music, I’m amazed that they can do that, all of that, every shitbrained indulgence, at all, and still keep the focus of the show on themselves, whether you like that or not.

I had fun though, that’s what I meant. I just never felt like I was inhabiting anything, only waffling by it and leering at it cock-eyed from the other side of the road. I suppose the Gorge Amphitheater will have that effect on one’s perception, taunting us poor human saps with an unfathomable distance between our stupid, crispy bodies and all that majestic guff pissed wondrously across the sky. Here I was at Sasquatch confronting, bluntly, my own imperfect, dying body. I ate a Clif bar. This happened often over the course of the festival, where I’d ogle something captivating and respond by getting tired with my curiosity. I spent a lot of time sitting under a shade tent. The shade tent was a brilliant idea and I encourage you to bring one to your next outdoor camping music festival.

I wish I could speak of Sasquatch abrasively—in terms of its friction, say, as in gravel against slippery lung meat or armpit hair against armpit, or in the way opposing forces, the implicitly different pieces of the total that is Sasquatch, were continuously rubbing up against one another. But, turns out, the whole of the weekend was mostly a friendly, fluffy experience. I don’t think anyone died. The lead singer of Passion Pit passed out during their performance. I got to talk about some boobs with a guy who knew the subject well. And then, after our talk, I distinctly remember getting up from the back of his bumper and walking into my tent and getting into my sleeping bag and going to sleep. I dreamed of dreaming about memories to cherish. And then the next day, well rested enough, I got into the car and climbed the fuck out of that hole.