5 Hours at Bumbershoot
 The water fountain at Seattle Center during the Bumbershoot festival
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Fellow Newporter (and former babysitter of my younger brother) Kristin Hersh provided a quietly hilarious, emotionally intense start to my 5 hours with Jay at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot festival. It’s a 3 day festival of music, comedy, and other performing arts (Saturday-Monday) with 12 stages spread out across the Seattle Center for simultaneous performances. I had to choose either Saturday or Sunday, as I wanted to spend one of the days on Bainbridge Island, and I had to leave Sunday evening. As I reviewed the list of acts, the decision made itself when I was amazed to see NoMeansNo – one of my favorite bands – listed for Sunday afternoon, just a couple hours before I had leave for the airport. They hardly ever play in the US anymore, so I felt incredibly lucky. I haven’t seen them play for at least 9 years.
But before NoMeansNo, I have to tell you about Hersh. I’ve never seen her perform before, so I had no particular expectations. It was a combination of a one woman musical show and a very personal, intense, often dream-like spoken word performance. I was struggling with how to describe it for this blog post. Fortunately for me, someone else wrote a review of one of her earlier performances that captures it well. I recommend the whole article, but here are the key parts:
 Kristin Hersh at Bumbershoot
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[Her songs] were marvelously complementary to the texts and never obscured the words. And God, what words. Quite apart from the content, her fluid and laconic delivery was a joy. It was also frequently laugh-out-loud funny; Hersh is an undisputed and somewhat unexpected mistress of perfect comic timing… Her storytelling powers made each passage utterly vivid, combining a keen observational eye, a sense of momentum, awareness of the need for a story arc and the scattering of memorable details like jewels across velvet… She was strongest on her emerging creativity and the relationship between this and the bipolar disorder with which she was eventually diagnosed after a failed suicide attempt. Although she has spoken about this in various interviews over the years, this is the first time I’ve heard her describe this period of her life in such detail. It comes across as something that was initially an intoxicating whirl, gradually progressing into an all-consuming blizzard that nearly destroyed her. She talks about the recurring visions of the snake, the wolf and the bees that she experienced and suddenly songs like And A She-Wolf After The War (written, or at least captured, in hospital as she was recovering from cutting her wrists) spring into sharp relief.
Hersh’s approach to creativity has long fascinated me. She insists that she doesn’t “create” or “write” the songs, that they exist outside of her – or at least somewhere deep within her – and she is merely setting them free. This might sound rather precious and even a little pretentious, until you hear her describe the visceral means by which these songs demand to be articulated, and the consequences for her mental and physical health if she tries to contain them and refuses to let them out. It’s “creativity” in its rawest form, more akin to the hot, wet and bloody process of childbirth than the refined piecework of an artist in her ivory tower. It sounds both exhilarating and terrifying.
As a teenager she spent her savings on studio time, trying to exhaust her supply of material. The songs simply kept coming, at a pace that only sped up and eventually nearly defeated her. If this intense subject matter sounds at odds with the humour that I described earlier, in the context of the performance it is anything but. She describes these weighty issues with a lightness of touch that marks her as a writer and raconteuse of considerable ability. Even the section covering her suicide attempt seeks no pity, describing her teenage self with a restrained compassion. It was intensely moving, without being either sentimental or harrowing.
It was quite a shock going from Hersh’s performance to see the utterly banal Lonely Forest. I wasn’t familiar with them, but I knew they were darlings of the NPR music reviewers, so I thought they’d be worth a listen. The music sounded ok, but the “I want to hold your hand” variety of lyrics was a huge comedown after Hersh. In her performance, Hersh described her band (Throwing Muses) as “spinach” (chewy and bitter, but good for you), while most other bands were candy or beer. Lonely Forest was definitely sweet but uninteresting candy.
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More in the category of beer is NoMeansNo. A really good, thick draught beer. A beer you’ll have to try at least a few times to fully appreciate, and it’ll become a favorite you’ll come back to year after year. They sound like no other band. In an interview I heard years ago, they described themselves as “the Ramones crossed with the Replacements.” I’d describe them as very tight, bass-heavy punk with serious groove, a noticeable dose of blues, and sometimes jazz-like improvisation. Below is part of a new song I recorded at the show – “Slave”. I didn’t record the whole song as I could resist my feet for only so long. If it doesn’t grab you in the first minute, give it until at least the second minute. But I’d also say to not judge them by the tinny audio quality of my pocket camera. A fairly accessible first song to try is Humans, which you can hear on YouTube.
Thanks for the quote and the link. I write little these days, but that review remains one of the pieces I’m most happy with. A testament to the inspirational nature of its subject matter, of course.