Column 149: Only the Lucky Ones…
…get to see the “secret shows.”

They call them “secret shows,” but really they’re just last-minute concerts set up on a whim, performed to a lucky few, and remembered as legend. Afterward, most will say they were there, but most are liars. They create feelings of envy and betrayal, these secret shows. The same envy and betrayal people feel when hearing about the “party of the year” the day after — a party in which they weren’t invited.

But with secret shows, it’s not so much that you weren’t invited as you were out of the loop.

One of my favorite secret shows happened in February 2006. Cursive had just finished writing the songs that would become Happy Hollow and wanted to test drive them in front of a crowd. What better place than tiny O’Leaver’s? Word got out the day before, though even the guys at Saddle Creek Records didn’t hear about it until a few hours before it all went down. That night O’Leaver’s was a crush mob, but no one was left outside when the music started. By the end of the evening everyone knew they saw and heard something special, something that they probably would never hear or see again in such intimate confines. We felt lucky, and we were.

Another example: Two weeks ago, while half-dozing on my couch, my phone rang. Who the hell was calling so late? I glanced at the caller ID — Matt Whipkey! Forget it, Matt, I’m not picking up. I went to bed only to wake up the next morning to see the following text message on my iPhone, time stamped 11:51 p.m.: “Bright eyes at barley with friedman.”

It turned out that Bright Eyes drummer Clay Leverett had thrown together an impromptu country band that included Mike Friedman on pedal steel, Josh Dunwoody (Filter Kings) on upright bass, and Dave Rawlings on electric guitar. The band played country classics for about 90 minutes at the Barley Street Tavern — a hole-in-the-wall in downtown Benson. Conor Oberst was in the audience, and after the band wrapped up and most people left, he decided to join in on the fun, playing a set of seven or eight new songs backed by Leverett and Co. Whipkey said only about 20 people were in the crowd. Twenty lucky people.

Why keep these shows secret? Because Cursive and Bright Eyes regularly sell out large venues all over the country. If word got out about these shows in these tiny venues, well, someone might get hurt. Best to keep it on the down low. If you were meant to be there, you’ll be there.

That was the philosophy for what may be one of Omaha’s all-time best secret shows, which happened just last Friday night. Between gigs in Boulder and Chicago, Kevin Drew, Jason Collett and the rest of Broken Social Scene decided to spend their day off in Omaha. Broken Social Scene is one of the hottest indie bands in the country, spawning such acts as Feist (she’s the woman in the iPod Nano commercial) and Stars (who played at Slowdown last Sunday).

Wanting to make up for always missing Omaha on BSS tours, Drew got the idea of doing a “secret show” at the legendary Hotel Frank, an apartment used for house shows located near The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam. By 6:35 that evening, Omahype.com posted the rumor under the headline “Holy Crap Breaking News!” Ian Atwood, who runs Omahype.com with Andrew Bowen, said he heard about the show via an e-mail from Aaron Markley of Slumber Party Records. It could have been one of the best house shows in house-show history.

But eventually Drew decided he needed a venue with a better PA — he didn’t want to shred his voice. That’s where Slowdown came in. Val Nelson, who runs hospitality at Slowdown, said Drew and Collett were hanging out at the bar in the early evening and approached her about doing a last-minute show on Slowdown’s small stage. All their gear was available except for a drum kit. Nelson called Clark Baechle of The Faint, who said he’d be happy to let them use his. With that, the show was on.

I heard the “BSS rumor” well past 11 while drinking a Rolling Rock at O’Leaver’s, waiting for Life After Laserdisque to play its final show. The story seemed far-fetched. I knew I could confirm it with a single phone call, but what was the point? There was no way I was going to miss Laserdisque’s last hurrah.

The only thing worse than missing a great show is hearing how great it was from people who were there. It’s like listening to your co-worker blather on and on about his trip to Hawaii when you’re stuck in Omaha in January. That’s how I felt when Omahype reviewed the show the next day, complete with photos. Val at Slowdown said that if they could have, BSS would have played until 2 a.m., then she twisted the knife by saying Kevin Drew told her it was the best show they’d done on their entire tour.

Diehard Broken Social Scene fans who missed it had to be heart broken. In fact, Val said she heard a few sob stories the next day. But the fact was, if they didn’t have friends “in the know” there’s no way they could have found out about the show except for reading Omahype. And even then, chances are, like me, they could either have been asleep or indisposed and missed it anyway. Sometimes even being lucky isn’t enough.

Column 148: Critical Mass
Stars and Pitchfork

When I was interviewing Torquil Campbell, one of the driving forces behind the band Stars (see feature), there was one topic I tried to avoid. I wanted to keep the interview focused on music, not on gossip, not on business details, not on web-based controversy.

But I couldn’t help myself. If you look up Stars in that vast online research junkyard called Wikipedia, there’s a portion of the entry dedicated to Campbell’s recent scrap with Pitchfork, the all-knowing, all-seeing online bible of the indie music world. Was a day when Option and Magnet were the key critical publications for all things indie. Not anymore. Pitchfork, an online music ‘zine located at pitchfork.com, has become a make or break critical entity for new and unknown indie bands. A rave review in Pitchfork can mean the difference between playing to 20 people on tour and 200 (or 2,000). This, despite the fact that music consumers can simply go to Myspace and listen to tracks for free and ascertain for themselves if they like a band’s music or not.

Glowing reviews by those “tastemakers” at Pitchfork have been cited for helping break bands including The Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah, The Go! Team and Tapes ‘n’ Tapes. But strangely, a negative review in Pitchfork isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. Just being mentioned on the site means possibly piquing the interest of some of its reported 200,000 daily readers. No, the worst thing that can happen is for Pitchfork to ignore you altogether. That means you don’t even exist.

I’m not a regular reader of Pitchfork, not because it’s a bad website, but because I generally don’t have time and almost never agree with their reviews, which are consistently too long and too wordy. When it comes to criticism, all I want to know is if a record is worth checking out. Pitchfork‘s 10-point rating system is archaic and noncommittal. The common denominator is that anything scoring over an 8.0 is good. The rest is mediocre.

Maybe that’s why Campbell was so pissed when he read Pitchfork‘s 7.4 rating of Stars’ new album, In Our Bedroom After the War. Most bands would kill for a 7.4. It probably wasn’t the rating, but the review itself that pissed him off, specifically writer Ryan Dombal’s descriptions of the songs. “The Les Mis-esque weeper ‘Barricade’ doesn’t fare as well,” the review goes. “Its storyline is trite (a couple brought together — then torn apart — by a common, radical cause!) and, accompanied by a lone piano, there’s nothing for Campbell to hide behind” and “Muddled by forced postmodern nonsense and an oddly lifeless narrative, ‘Life 2: The Unhappy Ending’ is about as boring as its title.”

Funny, but those two songs are among my favorites on the album.

For some reason, critics struggle with Stars’ lyrics. Take the All Music Guide description of the song “Personal,” a track about two people passing through the night via personal ads who never actually meet. It has one of the best lines on the album, sung by Amy Millan: “28 and bored, grieving over loss, sorry to be heavy, but heavy is the cost, heavy is the cost.” The AMG review interpreted the line this way: “‘Personal’ is a character-driven melodramatic ditty that chronicles a protagonist who places a newspaper ad and is stood up because she is too obese.”

Campbell’s response when I asked him about AMG‘s interpretation: “That’s what happens when a 16-year-old writes a review.”

He wasn’t as restrained with Pitchfork, however, which he lambasted on his Myspace page (the comments have since been removed though nothing ever really gets deleted on the Internet). He said “Barricade” is actually about two fascist soccer hooligans “who can only top a night of beating old people senseless by having rough anal sex and sniffing glue. I know, I know, figuring that out would require LISTENING to the lyrics…” Campbell went on to make some rather, um, unkind comments about Dombal, concluding with, “You know what a reviewer for Pitchfork makes? 40 bucks a review. You know what they should make? 38.50.”

AOL Music picked up on Campbell’s and Pitchfork‘s back-and-forth and asked about the controversy. “Pop music is the venue of the ridiculous,” he said in the AOL article. “If it isn’t ridiculous, it isn’t pop music. It should be simultaneously beautiful and profound and ridiculous. If you’re not amused by a piano ballad about fascist soccer hooligans, then you’re not amused by it. But I think it’s a good thing that people like us are around. I wish that journalists would write about what interests them instead of what doesn’t interest them. It just doesn’t seem to me to be very constructive.”

Adding to this discourse only gives it more relevance, yet I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask Campbell what impact the Pitchfork discussion has had on the band.

“I don’t think it’s had the slightest impact,” he said. “Most people don’t care what I think of Pitchfork and what Pitchfork thinks of me. Most people listen to music and go on with their lives. I think it’s a pretty trivial detail that only interests other journalists.”

Maybe, maybe… But in an age when the music industry seems to be in free-fall, and bands as big as Springsteen are struggling just to get noticed, is there such thing as a bad controversy? Or a bad review?

Just placed online, a chat with Stars frontman Torquil Campbell. Torq talked about the new album, In Our Bedroom After the War, the rise of the Canadian music scene and how it reflects what happened in Omaha, and more. Read it here. Part of what didn’t make it into the story was Torq’s comments on the slow rise of Stars, how just a few years ago the band was virtually unknown beyond the its core underground fanbase. “We spent the first three years with the seven of us in a minivan, sharing a single hotel room and playing to nobody,” he said. “We played in Chicago and Boston and New York and Philly six or seven times, and each time a few more people were there.”

Campbell said it wasn’t until last year that the band saw a jump in show attendance. Part of the reason — opening for Death Cab for Cutie. “They helped us connect with an audience that hadn’t heard us before,” he said, adding that the connection with Death Cab came from mutual associates and the fact that DCFC were fans and wanted to make it happen. “It’s not very often that you get a band who cares so much for the opener and would be so generous to an unknown band. Most of the time when you open you get a couple hundred dollars. They gave us a thousand. We got lucky, man.”

Up until the DCFC show, however, there were some dark days for Stars, and Campbell said giving up was in the back of his mind. “We lived in a permanent state of doom through most of our careers,” he said, “but on some very fundamental level we knew it would happen because we kept on doing it. There for sure were a lot of times when we asked ourselves why we were doing what we were doing. Sometimes you ask yourself if it’s worth it, but the essence of it is if you can make music and find people who connect to it, it’s incredibly rare and satisfying.”

The other part of the interview that didn’t make it into the story involves a recent review in Pitchfork and how Campbell responded. That’s the topic of tomorrow’s column: Is there really such thing as a bad review these days?

And speaking of bad reviews, Aversion posted their review of the Capgun Coup debut and it is hands-down the most negative review of an Omaha release that I’ve read in years (if not ever). Among the bombs dropped in critic Nick Loughery’s one-star review: “Capgun Coup isn’t just unbearable, it’s obnoxious. It’s the worst of the DIY underground — the egotistic notion that your music doesn’t have to conform to anyone’s standards of listenability, structure or purpose. It’s individualistic past the point of no return, an exercise in ego over artistic aesthetics. It’s a train wreck from beginning to end.” Yeah, but but did you like it, Nick? Read the entire review here. Despite Aversion’s comments, live reviews for Capgun opening for Bright Eyes on his past tour have been glowing, some comparing the band to Desaparecidos — quite a compliment.

For once, there are actually some solid shows happening on Halloween night. Too bad I’ll be skipping all of them because I f**king hate all the costume bullsh*t. The best show of the bunch is at The Waiting Room: Bad Luck Charm, Brimstone Howl, The Bombardment Society and the new, improved Virgasound — all for just $7. This is such a good line-up that I might pick through my old clothes and create my own hobo costume (always a favorite in my trick-or-treat days). Meanwhile, just down the street at Mick’s, Kyle Harvey, Matt Whipkey, Sarah Benck and Korey Anderson will be playing a free show. Both shows start at 9. Happy Halloween.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—

Musicians (or non musicians) take note: Slowdown is looking for people to perform Nirvana songs as part of their Nirvana Tribute Night, an event being held in conjunction with Filmstreams’ premier of the documentary “Kurt Cobain: About a Boy” Nov. 10. Choice of covers is being handed out on a first-come basis — i.e., you’ll need to contact Val at Slowdown ASAP to secure your favorite song before someone else does. There’s no door charge that night, so you’ll be working for free. Still, for anyone who’s ever wanted to play Slowdown, it’s a good intro (The show is slated for the “small stage” we call Slowdown Jr.). Go here for more info.

What else…

Tonight, Austin electronic pop band The Octopus Project is playing at The Waiting Room with Kite Pilot and Darren Keen (a.k.a. The Show Is the Rainbow). Will Kite Pilot pull out that Protoculture cover? We’ll see… $7, 9 p.m.

Tomorrow, look for a feature/review/interview with Stars. It’s Part 1 of a two-part piece. Part 2 is this week’s column, which will be online Thursday.

–Got comments? Post ’em here.—