2007 NadaMucho.com Bumbershoot Preview

Unless you’re a recent transplant from parts unknown, the details of Seattle’s annual three-day music and arts festival should be second nature by now. For the uninitiated, Nada Mucho is here to help.

Bumbershoot goes like this.

• Weeks before the actual event, the schedule is released.
• Seattleites scan the listings and moan about the lack of “Must See” bands. (Full disclosure: we do this too.) This year, many of them probably also bitched about how long the lines will be for the Seaweed reunion show in the SkyChurch.
• After the schedule is released, hipsters attend the Capitol Hill Block Party and lament why Bumbershoot couldn’t be more like it.
• Then, as the summer coughs and sputters to a close, we remember the age-old tradition of attending one more blowout before retreating to our holes, hobbit-like, to endure the cold, dark autumn.

Bumbershoot is that blowout.

If Robbie Fulks had been lucky, he would have been born forty years earlier. That way he could have enjoyed the hey-day of honky-tonk artists like Johnny Paycheck, Hank Williams, and George Jones. Unfortunately, a child of the '70s, he was forced to cut his teeth on Conway Twitty, Ronnie Milsap, and the rest of the mass-produced Nashville pap. It was hardly a fair bargain, but he's since come to terms with his lackluster luck, releasing a late 2005 album that combines his childhood memories with the best of his record collection.

Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Virginia and North Carolina, Fulks' future was probably always one of a fringe country star. Given a banjo at seven and adept at the fiddle by eleven, by the time Fulks dropped out of Columbia on a scholarship he had decided that guitar was the way to go. Following the girl who was carrying his child, he headed to Chicago, where he found work as a paralegal, proofreader, actor, and, fortunately, a teacher of folk music at the Old Town School of Folk Music (a place worth a second mention; check it out online at http://www.oldtownschool.org/).

Marah plays Seattle this week, and I’m gonna be there. I’m gonna be there even though it’s a Thursday night and I won’t get home until 2:30 a.m. I’m gonna be there even though my kids will be shaking me awake less than three hours later. I’m gonna be there even though my wife is 8 months pregnant and I’ve got a deposition on Friday and a mortgage I can’t pay unless I bill 10 hours a day, every day.

I’m gonna be there even though Marah’s previous Seattle show was like an awkward conversation with a best friend you haven’t seen in years. Even though they’ll never be able to match my glory days memory of the winter of ’98, when Let’s Cut The Crap and Hook Up Later on Tonight was just out and I was a kid in Philly who dropped dead during the first verse of “Reservation Girl,” then went to heaven on the chorus.

And how could they? Surely it could not have happened how I remembered it. Life is not an indie-rock fairy tale. There never was a boy raised by tongues-speaking, hand-waving, Bible-quoting, ex-hippie, well-meaning-but-ultimately-misguided fundamentalist Christians in the cultural wasteland known as Yakima, Washington. (When entering Yakima on I-82 by way of Wapato and other points south, a sign once read, “Welcome to Yakima, the Palm Springs of Washington” which raises the question, “If Yakima is the Palm Springs of Washington, why are all the old Jews speaking Spanish?”)

1. Ed Harcourt – A Storm is Coming – A (mostly) coincidental choice for the opener on a Year of the Hurricane compilation. The real reason is the swirling, somewhat ominous guitar part. From Harcourt’s Strangers release.

2. New Pornographers – The Bleeding Heart Show – “Bleeding Heart” is the best example of how this Canadian supergroup toned down the bubblegum on Twin Cinema without losing any of the joy from their previous releases.

3. Detroit Cobras – I Wanna Holler (But the Town’s Too Small) – Although technically released overseas in 2003, the Cobras’ 3rd album was finally released on Bloodshot in 2005, and what a great fit. These miscreants and misfits breathe dirty new life into slightly sanitized and obscure 50’s R&B tunes. Dig that opening bass line!

4. Bloc Party – Like Eating Glass – The year’s best breakup song comes courtesy of a band I should hate but don’t. England’s Bloc Party ought to sound like the rest of the trendy Britpop I’ve shunned for years, but there’s enough different about this band’s approach to keep things interesting. “Like Eating Glass” combines smart lyrics, angular guitars and jaw-dropping drumming in a catchy package.

5. Wilco – Handshake Drugs (Live) –This gem, from Wilco’s first live album, is the best example of how much more urgency Jeff Tweedy’s songs have live. The studio version on A Ghost is Born just doesn’t elicit them same reaction.