Shaky Knees, Day Two

Okay, we'll admit up front that on Friday we had overestimated the protection from the sun the visor of a backwards baseball cap would have on the human neck, and we wound up sunburned there.  A little too much color on the face too (arms were properly sunscreened).  The sun was pretty intense Friday and we're the sorer for it, but that's better than it raining outside.

It took a couple years to overcome, but this festival had a reputation for rain.  The inaugural year, 2013, it rained the entire first day, non-stop, and pretty steadily on Days Two and Three as well.  By Year Two, when it also rained as well, people were wearing Shaky Knees t-shirts that proudly said, "100% Chance of Rain."  

Rain-soaked field at first Shaky Knees festival, 2013

We finally broke the curse by Year Three, and it hasn't rained on the festival again until yesterday. Yesterday was overcast and there was little chance of getting additional sunburn, but by late in the day, the rain finally arrived.  It only rained a few minutes (and fortunately we were in the tented Ponce de Leon Stage at the time), but the streak of good weather finally ended after four good years.

But enough about the weather.  Here's who we saw on Saturday.

Sun Seeker

Nope, never heard of them before, but they were a pleasant psychedelic rock band that seemed more surprised to find themselves playing at Shaky Knees than did the audience.  Their name was also very fitting for the day.

Torres

We've seen Macon, Georgia's Mackenzie Scott, who performs under the name Torres, play before, including at this festival (Shaky Knees) at this same location (Central Park) on this same stage (Piedmont).  We've enjoyed every show of hers so far, including yesterday's, and we're still expecting her to break through as a bigger star someday soon.

Bully

We've also seen Bully several times before, including last December at Terminal West.  Yesterday's set was just as good as the Terminal West show, and possibly even a little more amped up by Alicia Bognanno's obvious excitement at playing to such a large audience (a security guard told me that they estimate about 30,000 people attended yesterday) and at playing on the same stage where David Byrne played the day before - there was still tape on the stage floor indicating where Mr. Byrne should be stand during the set, Bognanno told us.

 BRONCHO

We hadn't seen or heard from Oklahoma's BRONCHO since the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle back in 2013, but, my, they've changed since then.  What was once a loud scruffy garage-punk band has transformed into a loud shoegaze band with goth overtones - nearly unrecognizable, even when they closed their set with their signature song Class Historian. They also got a new bass player, exchanging former member Jonathan Ford for Penny Pitchlynn (below).

We don't mind bands changing their sound or exploring new approaches to music, and we don't resent BRONCHO for branching out and trying something new.  All we're saying is we were surprised, and found the new band totally unrecognizable from their former selves.

Cute security guard

 Parquet Courts

We stuck around the Piedmont Stage for a while after BRONCHO's set to see Parquet Courts on the same stage.  Following the apparent theme of the day, we'd seen Parquet Courts several times before, including at Shaky Knees during one of the years (2016) it was held at Centennial Olympic Park.  It was another great set by another great band on an overall great day. Also, speaking of Parquet Courts, the Boston Celtics won Game Three against the Philadelphia 76ers yesterday in overtime, taking a 3-0 lead in the seven-game series.  We were following that game on our iPhone during the day's musical events.

 Andrew WK

We'll just come right out and say it at the very start - we didn't like Andrew WK.  It was our first time seeing him and we weren't sure exactly what to expect, other than his reputation to "party."  He lived up to that reputation - we probably heard the band chant and use the word "party" at least 50 times before Andrew himself even took the stage.  But the band's performance barely even counted as "music" as much as a constant 4/4 beat and a consistent exhortation to "party," and to "party hard," and to be "a hardcore partier."  His stage antics and histrionics would have made even Meatloaf wince, and there was nothing he did in his 60-minute set that wasn't a repeat of the things he did in the first five minutes of his set.  Bozo Dionysus in extremis.

Do we have to state the obvious and tell you that the audience loved it?  We heard people way it was the best set of the day, the high-water mark of the festival.  

We've been reading social psychologist Johnathan Haidt recently, who writes about how the human mind appears to be hard-wired to bond with groups that share in common ritual, especially rituals involving chanting, choreographed group movement, and pursuit of a common identity.  Haidt uses this observation to explain the effects of morning calisthenics at Japanese industries, tailgating at football games, and religious rites.  It would also explain a lot about political rallies and Andrew WK shows, where the audience chants "party" along with the band and engages in the seemingly pointless ritual of crowd surfing.

In the ritual, individuals "sacrifice" themselves to the experience and are lifted up above the crowd and passed overhead until they inevitably arrive at the front of the stage, where the security guards grab them and lead them out of the venue.  The act makes no sense if viewed from the perspective of the individual crowd surfer - not only are you risking injury and liable to lose sunglasses, shoes and other personal belongings, but once security recovers you, you're tossed out of the very show you were there to see.  But the purpose of crowd-surfing is apparent not in the context of the individual but in the larger context of the crowd.  It's a ritual "sacrifice" with the ultimate goal of group bonding, and the individual surfer transcends their role as just one out of many individuals at the show and becomes part of something larger, part of the whole seething, dancing crowd.  Your identity is no longer that of just another face in the crowd (the mundane), and you become the focus of the collective energy of the audience (the sacred).  And just like with Japanese auto workers, football fans, and religious zealots, the crowd collectively approaches a state of ecstacy and bonds closely as a group, and remembers the event as a fulfilling and emotionally cathartic experience.

Of course, this happens at many concerts, especially punk-rock and hardcore shows, but with the Andrew WK set, the show is solely about audience participation and the crowd ritual alone, with very little musical artistry for support.  It's all "party" and crowd-surfing and "let me hear you say yeah!", with little to no recognizable music that would make any sense in any other context.  So while the set offered an interesting anthropological study for us, there was very little else to enjoy.

But it was during that set that the rain had started.  Fortunately for us, Andrew WK was performing in the tented Ponce de Leon Stage so we didn't notice the rain until the set had ended.  We thought about running over to the covered VIP viewing area at the big Peachtree Stage to see The War On Drugs, who had already started their set, but realized that everyone else with a VIP wristband would be doing the exact same thing too, and the viewing area would be packed to the point where we might not even get in.  We thought about waiting around in the rain, maybe getting a bite to eat, until Matt & Kim or Cake took their stages, but if you think we're going to wait around for an hour to see Matt & Kim or Cake, much less in the rain, then you don't know very much about us or our taste in music.  

The headliner after Matt & Kim/Cake was Queens of the Stone Age, who we don't even like (another big draw for the normies and the box office, just like Jack White the night before), so we took an Uber home for the day.

Even before we got in the car and left, the rain had stopped and the sun came out, but because of the unfortunate scheduling of the festival (so many great acts on Friday), there was really nothing left that we really wanted to see on Saturday.  We enjoyed what we did see, especially the 1, 2, 3 triple-header of Torres, Bully, and Parquet Courts. Andrew WK was if nothing else an interesting socio-psychological field study, and we discovered one new band, Sun Seeker.  So all in all, not a bad day, and we still have one more day of Shaky Knees left for today.