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Thee American Revolution/ Pipes You See Pipes You Don't/ Andy From Denver/ Casper & the Cookies/ Circulatory System/ Elf Power/ The Music Tapes, PopFest Closing Night, 40 Watt, 8/15/08

by Doug Holschuh
08.18.2008

It's 8PM on Saturday, the last night of PopFest, and the show at the 40 Watt is set to begin with the appearance of the Smittens followed by Big Fresh. I'm scheduled to cover the 10PM and later shows tonight, so I'm conserving my energy outside of Flicker. I'm excited about tonight, because the lineup reads like an Elephant 6 family reunion. Someone says PopFest is like band camp for indie rock kids. Tonight it's like a high school reunion, a high school where you liked everyone.

Thee American Revolution

I don't need to start covering bands until Andy from Denver at 10PM, but at 9PM, I head inside to see Thee American Revolution, because I hear (at the last second) that this is a side project of lead Apple in Stereo Rob Schneider. This evidently isn't a secret, but they're a band that doesn't advertise themselves too much, and I'm surprised and pleased to catch Schneider, especially after missing the Fat Planet show at Little Kings on Friday afternoon. Not sure who everyone in the band is but Schneider brings up Bill Doss (Olivia Tremor Control, Sunshine Fix) dressed in a blue paisley psychedelic shirt (one of those that looks like it's from 18th century) with mutton chops; he looks like he should be in the Byrds or (in keeping with PopFest) the 13th Floor Elevators. Nice to see a rock start dress like a rock star!

Thee American Revolution sounds like Schneider and company getting their early 70s heavy metal fix. The second song ("Magazines") has Bill Doss doing a great "Smoke on the Water" bass line. The final song ("She's Coming Down") almost has a Sabbath feel to it. Great stuff! It's a shame that they ran out of time before they can do one more song, but the bill for tonight is packed tight, they've already fallen behind, and they obviously want to give the ending bands enough time to play. (This will become a theme for the evening, but in the end it works out.) This is probably a gross generalization, but PopFest all week has been a lot of newer, young bands making great music, but starting with Scheiders' Thee American Revolution and looking at the schedule, this last night is shaping up to be the night where the seasoned pros come out and play.

Pipes You See Pipes You Don't

The next band up, in the 9:30, slot is Pipes You See Pipes You Don't, and all I can is Holy @#!* I never thought I'd hear folk-rock, almost country-rock, at PopFest. Only Pete Erchick, former keyboardist with Olivia Tremor Control and another E6 alum, could pull this off at a PopFest, and it's a nice and enjoyable change of pace even if the set is far too short. Bill Doss is on stage again playing rhythm guitar; maybe he's going to play with every band tonight. Eleven people on stage; that's almost a half Dark Meat!

Andy From Denver

Breaking from the E6 theme, HHBTM artist Andy From Denver (Andy Gonzalez, formerly of Of Montreal and Marshmallow Coast; and, I believe, his wife, Sara Kirkpatrick) does an interesting take on the husband/wife, brother/sister, boy/girl two piece, with Andy playing electric guitar and signing pop songs over early 80s synth beats.  I keep trying to place the synths (Robert Palmer?), but nevertheless, the 80s feel is definitely there with Andy even dressed a bit like Tom Cruise in Risky Business (although with red, heart-shaped sun glasses in place of the Ray Bans). He even dons a Nintendo Power Glove at one point! Sort of a jazz-influenced (Steely Dan or solo Donald Fagen?) feel to the guitar work. Lots of cleverness on display with Andy's internal thoughts (pre-recorded) playing for us between songs ("That went pretty well ... Boxers up my ass ... Gotta be like the energizer bunny"). It works pretty well, and I want to see more, but sadly after playing 12 minutes (yes, I timed it), Andy is told he's done; the show must go on.

Casper and the Cookies

Next up is one of my favorite local live bands, HHBTM artists Casper and the Cookies. The show is finally almost exactly on time. They are the last band slotted for a 30-minute slot, so this problem will hopefully go away once the headliners take the stage. The band comes out all glammed up (they must have gotten Bill Doss's memo). Lucas Jensen (Venice is Sinking) joins Jason, Kay, and Jim onstage tonight as fill-in drummer, and he's spot on; you'd never know he's a temp. Before they play, they show a video of Keith John Adams, who through some stroke of luck is both an HHBTM artist as well as a BBC correspondent. Adams is in Beijing for the Olympics, and he's doing a mock man-on-the-street piece in Beijing asking a "local" teen who her favorite American bands are. Turns out they're all HHBTM artists (Smittens, Bunny Grunt, Andy from Denver, Lolligags)! I especially enjoy the fact that the Visitations are the American band that best embodies the values of the Chinese Communist Party. Adams then goes on to introduce Casper and the Cookies. You could almost believe that he wishes he was here. Hilarious. Is this vid up on YouTube yet? The band then proceeds to tear through their set. They actually handed out a program for their show. They mention before their last song that they had to skip some it. Did they follow it up to that point? Hard for me to say from where I was listening. It doesn't matter. The set is great, and the band's quirky power pop is a blast that the crowd loves. (I keep hearing the wonderfully strained vocals and off-kilter timing of Big Star.) They have to skip some of their program, but at least Casper and the Cookies end up being the first band to play without being cut off.

Circulatory System

The night is really taking off as the show moves to the big three of the night, who will be given a full hour for their sets. The 40 Watt is pleasantly full. I'm not getting crushed, but the place is probably 80-85% full, which is great turn out considering all the music we've already seen this week, and how tired everyone must be (or maybe that's just me). Circulatory System arose from the breakup of Olivia Tremor Control, and the band contains everyone from OTC minus Eric Harris (Ham1) and Bill Doss (Sunshine Fix), although Doss does come to play bass for one song. Multi-instrumentalist John Fernandes is part of the mix, and he wins the award for most stage time tonight, playing with everyone I saw except Andy from Denver and Casper and the Cookies. Lead singer Will Cullen Hart leads the band through some dark, heavy psychedelia, and the cacophony of sounds and long jams of the band is the peak of the E6-style psychedelic rock of the night. Olivia Tremor Control was always very Beatles-ish in its psychedelia, but Circulatory System has taken the more experimental side of that and seems to have infused a bit of the San Francisco side of psychedelia into their sound, although more of a darker Airplane style rather than the cheery Dead side of things. I've always thought that the experimental psych of Circulatory System suffers from not having Doss's pop sensibilities (and vice-versa), but tonight the music is exactly what I'm looking for, spacey yet with a strong rhythm section to hold it together. Hart has trouble tuning his guitar toward the end of the set and leaves abruptly, which mars a set that otherwise is one of my favorites of PopFest.

Elf Power

Elf Power is next on stage at midnight. Elf Power has always been the more straight-ahead pop/rock side of the E6 collective, and they are a crowd favorite. I'm never sure why I don't like them more, as my tastes usually run toward the poppier side of things, but I've never gotten into them as much as everyone else. I should love them, but I don't. But that's OK. They don't need my love. They get plenty of adulation from everyone else. Their set is tight and rocking, and the crowd loves every minute of it. For me, there are some interesting moments, especially when Laura Carter's keyboards and John Fernandes's clarinet join the fray. Some of the songs even lean toward a GBV-like prog rock, which is always a welcome sound.

The Music Tapes

The PA System is playing Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island while The Music Tapes set up, which is a nice nod to one of Julian Koster's former bands. The stage for The Music Tapes is packed with musicians, instruments, and other items: a giant metronome, a hand-clapping machine, an old TV up front, a step ladder holding what looks like an old radio or a record player (turns out it's a keyboard that Koster later plays), lit-up plastic dog and snowman lawn ornaments. The place is packed by now, and everyone is eagerly awaiting the band as they set up the elaborate stage.

I'm unfamiliar with The Music Tapes, and I really don't know what to expect, and when it starts (with Koster alone, strumming his banjo and singing in a high, shakey voice, before the full band joins him and starts to  rock) the music and the stage have me struggling for some way to describe what's going on. The E6 connection is definitely there, and there is a neo-psychedelic feel to the whole thing. The odd instrumentation of Neutral Milk Hotel is there, with the banjos, tubas, and the singing saw that Koster plays, bending the saw and playing the teeth with a violin bow. Amplified, the saw has a haunting, almost theremin quality to it -- "singing" is a good descriptor. For the second song, the cover comes off the old TV in front of the stage, and Koster's pre-recorded voice dubbed over an animated doodle of a half-smiling face sings the song while the band plays. The TV probably sings half the set, and it works well with the whole stage setup. The TV vocals sound a bit like the Polyphonic Spree, and I wonder how many overdubs Koster puts on the vocals that he pre-records. I continue to struggle to describe this music, and then it hits me that it's primitive psychedelic/indie rock, psych done as if it were coming from the backwoods of Georgia. It's as if legendary Georgia folk-artist Howard Finster started an E6 band: Finster Psych! Indie rock as folk art.

The odd instrumentation continues with Koster bouncing a red ball on a drum while he sings "Song for the Death of Parents," which, with it's line, "Try and find a world where every parent is just a daughter and son," isn't as dark as its title suggest. In fact, the music is light in mood throughout (at least without knowing all the lyrics); it's circus music, or carnival music. Koster is having a great time. He's taken his task of closing PopFest seriously, and he's not disappointing. In many ways, The Music Tapes embody everything we love about the Athens music scene: it's a bit too weird for mass consumption, but it still has the pop/rock hooks and beats to keep us interested and dancing along. Koster has a unique vision of what rock (and I'll still call it "rock") music can sound like, and the Athens PopFest crowd is thrilled to be here to share the experience.

It's going on 2:30, and I'm wondering how he's going to end things, when friends of the band start to pass out kazoos to everyone in the audience. They must pass out a few hundred before they're done; I'm in the back, and I manage to get one. More people on stage now (friends of the band), all with kazoos as Koster leads everyone in a simple kazoo melody with the horns in the band adding some extra oomph. It's an epic experiment in breaking the fourth wall (a common theme to PopFest, in general), and it's the most majestic use of kazoos I've ever heard. Koster tells the audience "Follow us," and he leads the audience out of the 40 Watt and down Pulaski and then Hancock in a kazoo parade.

The stream of concert goers dwindles as we make our way down Pulaski, but the kazoo melody can still be heard and we continue down Hancock to an open field off Harris street where about 150 of us finish the song and cheer. Koster tries to keep us quiet, to not draw too much attention to what we're doing out here in the dark (the plan was originally to do down Clayton to North campus, but that evidently was considered to be a bit too visible). The song is over, but Koster's not done yet. He explains that we're going to play a game that I'll call blindfolds and bells, where the final goal is for the blindfolded to find all the belled with everyone in blindfolds at the end. The game lasts for about 20-25 minutes (shorter than I expected), a final cheer goes up, and the game and the show and PopFest is over.

I walk back to the 40 Watt with some friends, and around 3:30, at the last possible second, I even get to meet Yetter! My PopFest is now complete. What a great week it's been. Kudos to the organizers, the volunteers, the bands, and the fans. Someone should give Mike Turner the key to the city. This is why we live in Athens.

It's late, and I'm too beat for after hours . Goodnight Athens. Goodnight PopFest. See you next year.

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