On Stage

There was plenty to do on Saturday night with Tentareign's big rock show at the Tower, music at both martini bars and the Silver Moon, but still, there was a big crowd at the Tulen Center. And where the big crowds go, so does Sound Check (for the most part) which is why we found ourselves among a horde of well-meaning folks at the benefit show for Britt Leis and Lia Koehn, the Bend couple who was attacked while traveling through Ecuador.

Last week in this very column we discussed the geographical idiosyncrasies of the hip-hop world, specifically the influx of dope-ass rhymes emanating from the Bay Area. But this week, we're spinning the globe a bit to the right to take a look at the Midwest, which has long had a bustling indie hip-hop scene going down.

Keller telling us Why we need to wake up early. Sound Check wasn't quite sure what to expect from Keller Williams with Moseley, Droll and Sipe when the all-star quartet took the stage at the Domino Room last Wednesday (11/12). We'd put a few solo Keller shows under our belt over the years, but had never seen him in full band mode…other than a brief appearance with the String Cheese Incident a few years back. Needless to say…we were more than pleased.

The Commercial Underground: Real rockers.The Commercial Underground is about as much of a rock band as you're likely to find in these parts.

The Dirty Words Display the Ultimate Rock Star Stance.With Oktoberfest raging downtown on Oregon Avenue, wiener dogs
racing about and beers sliding down many a throat, a Floater show at
Midtown and Alaska's Paper Scissors indie jamming at the Silver Moon,
Sound Check sketched out a nice plan to hit it all on Saturday. But the
first stop was the Bend Roots Revival, where we'd poked our collective
head in on Friday night for the tail end of the Person People throwdown
and also returned later for the Grateful Dead covers by Rising Tide.

Saturday's
Bend Roots lineup was complete with all the local all-stars, and we got
started early with a show by Anastacia and her new band that showcased
the songwriting ability of one of Central Oregon's finest female
performers. Next we took in some Brit-flavored indie rock from the
young men of Space Hoax and chased that down with a rousing set by the
raging rock and roll sounds of The Dirty Words.

Austin-based Okkervil River's release The Stage Names, a beautifully crafted album discussing the obsession with celebrity and populated with "mid-level bands," washed-up porn stars, and poets jumping off bridges, was on several Best Of lists for 2007.
The Stand Ins is the sequel to that album-further expanding on the idea of life for those slightly outside of the spotlight. Is the idea of fame, a public face, and the emptiness of acclaim enough to fill two albums full of songs? Well, when the songs are written by Will Sheff, yes.

Editor’s note: Terribly agoraphobic, Sound Check couldn't muster the courage to get
out of our Central Oregon comfort zone to check out the brand spankin'
new Outside Lands festival in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. So,
knowing that we couldn't let this event go uncovered, we sent intrepid
Source contributor Kaycee Anseth-Townsend southward.

Serious music lovers often equate a festival schedule
with a tapas menu: scrumptiously delicious, but portions too small to
satisfy. That's how the first-ever Outside Lands Music and Arts
Festival in Golden Gate Park left me feeling.
A festival
experience is really about scale: The scale of a city you've never been
to, guided by an overpriced and inaccurate tourist map where an almost
2,000 acre park is shrunk to the size of ten city blocks, which is only
realized when suddenly you've walked ten miles and haven't even gotten
to the park yet. The scale of 60,000 people and the eerie silence of
such a large crowd that was heard when the sound system died twice
during Radiohead, amplifying the shared experience to those it didn't
annoy. As I waded through a sea of corn-based and fully-compostable
beer cups after Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers left the stage Saturday
night, the multitude of cups a visual hangover from the day.

Two brothers, two violins.Former child violin prodigies Mysore M.

And so are these bands.

Amidst much talk of pre-Wilco parties, Sound Check was determined not to miss the buzz heavy opener Fleet Foxes, having had a chance to listen through the Seattle band's solid debut album. Alas, we found ourselves marooned at a Westside all-you-can-eat fajita buffet and couldn't manage to extract ourselves before the culmination of Fleet's truncated set. Thankfully, Tweedy and Co. were good enough to bring the Fleet Foxes back on stage before the end of the night for all us stragglers that missed their set. But more on that later.

Headliners Wilco seemed to have found their niche in Bend where their blend of mashup alt-country-pop-rock and discord melodies resonate with our musical and cultural schizophrenia (The epic Wilco-Beck weekend is to be followed this week by former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald and an unnecessarily reunited Stone Temple Pilots). But we digress.

Back to Saturday night… frontman Jeff Tweedy took the stage at 7:30 sharp dressed in black, but in a seemingly light mood. Exchanging barbs with audience members, he carried on a casual monologue through the entire show, which included topics like the connection between Radiohead and Wilco (there is none), the emerging Lawncore movement, the impact of rock and roll (specifically Wilco) on women's fertility and an impromptu PSA for Bend's Breedlove guitars (the band's acoustic axe of choice). Between the banter, Wilco managed to put on an epic - by Les Schwab Amphitheater standards - show that spanned the band's entire decade-plus catalog of music with as much emphasis on earlier work as their most recent efforts, including the stellar Sky Blue Sky. Highlights included a shimmering "Impossible Germany" and an awesomely dark "Spiders/Kidsmoke" to round out the band's roughly hour and fifteen minute set. Thankfully, the lights stayed down and the house music was nowhere to be heard as the band took a quick breather and marched through two encores.