I Went To The Deutschtown Music Festival And Didn't Even Get A Lousy T-Shirt

     I am officially old.  I have had suspicions of this development for quite some time but this past weekend provided irrefutable confirmation.

     I ended up dipping a toe into the Deutschtown Music Festival for the first time.  Not because I had an interest in any of the several hundred bands that played but because my daughter had friends that were playing in a few of the bands that were scheduled to play.  Normally, I'm the one dragging her about town to see bands that I'm sure she could care less about.  With no amount of uncertainty, I have been relegated to driver and ATM.

     Earlier this century, I had sworn off attending all day festivals in any capacity.  My only exception to this rule was if Iggy Pop were somehow coaxed into coming to Pittsburgh to play one of these things.  I won't even go to an evening show out at whatever their calling the Starlake Amphitheater these days because outdoor shows have never been anything but frustrating to me whether I was working the show or just there as a spectator.

     I have always believed that live music belonged in a poorly lit room.  I have heard tales of larger metal acts that have large scale light and pyro/smoke machine setups having to play in the middle of the day because of festival scheduling.  They end up looking like a bunch of dead guys having a cookout on stage.  How embarrassing.

     Trying to piece together the logistics of seeing two bands in a sea of stages and venues took a bit of planning.  Since I hail from the South Hills, traveling to the North Side of Pittsburgh involves bridges and tunnels so I have never spent all that much time in that part of town.  I have no knowledge of side streets, short cuts or places to park the car that don't involve meters.

     I'm more familiar with the side streets around rock clubs in other towns than I am with the North Side.  I can't even get over to there without GPS.

     The bands that the kid wanted to see were playing an hour apart from each other on opposite ends of the festival.  Luckily the organizers of the festival saw fit to have a shuttle bus running in a loop throughout the day.

     The first stop was the parking lot of a distillery that had what could theoretically be called a stage in the back corner.  We got there just as a band was starting their set.  It was two saxophone players and a drummer that were bent on trying to play hip hop covers as jazz songs.  When they weren't slaughtering current hip hop songs, they were trying to be a more upbeat version of Morphine.

     Needless to say, the day drunk white hipsters were eating up this off tempo bullshit like it was the second coming of John Coltrane.  I've seen Morphine.  Fuck these people.

     After a few minutes of trying to politely stay out of the way, a food truck pulled into the parking lot and I had to find a new spot.  This made a not so crowded area suddenly heavily populated.  Then the food truck fired up their generator so they could start slinging tacos which made it more difficult to hear what the band was trying to do.

     I started having flashbacks to every nightmare show that I ever worked.  Those shows where the organizers didn't really care about the music and only used it as a vehicle to sell booze and food to people.  Trying to lug equipment through a sea of drunkards that are unaware of their surroundings.

     I tried as much as I could to be on my best behavior so as to not sour the day out for the kid. Luckily for me, after saying hello to her friends she came back over to where I was hiding and asked if we could leave.  After dealing with the crowd and the heat for an hour, she had had enough and was ready to head home before her friends even played.

     I did have a moment of pride on the drive home when she mentioned how she felt a sense of community was lacking in the crowd compared to the punk shows that I've taken her to.  That's when I had to explain that most music festivals aren't about music.  I also told her a few stories about Warped Tour, X-Fest and M-Squared that were more trouble than they were worth.

     The Deutschtown Music Festival felt like it was more about putting the North Side and the local businesses on display than it was about putting music on display.  And that's okay.  It reminded me of the street fairs and neighborhood carnivals of my youth.  Only on a much larger scale that immediately cranked my anxiety up to eleven before I even left the house.

     I was glad to see that she was smart enough to recognize a crowd that she didn't want to be part of and took action to get away from it.

Submachine At Club Laga, December 1998

     While in the midst of some hardcore procrastination, I opened a drawer in my desk that I had not opened in at least fifteen years.  That's where I found these photos of Submachine from a show at Club Laga sometime during the holidays in 1998.  I'm certain that Crayon Death was on the bill but can't remember any other bands that may have played that night.

I Typed For Miles

     My main intention with writing these posts on a somewhat weekly basis was mainly to keep my brain from locking up from the mundanity of my day to day.  Trying to write five hundred words a week in order to prevent atrophy and to see if I could still string a few words together in a manner that made any sense.

     I also try to use this space as a form of therapy to get the poison out.  Spending most of my time out in the wild wondering how it's taken society this long to start falling apart is very taxing on the small amount of sanity that I have.  Writing has turned into my metaphorical Pepto Bismol when I end up getting mental heartburn from some shithead that should have never left the suburbs.  Especially when I'm out in what's left of “polite society” and I'm unable to call bullshit without hurting someone's feelings.

     Another purpose was to see if I was still capable of getting the work done and then to continue toiling away and getting the work done on a consistent basis.  There was never a goal to achieve or a finish line to cross.  Adding my own personal grain of sand to the garbage covered shoreline that is the internet.

     Adding a camera to the mix in an attempt to document my nights in sweaty rock clubs, and to have a visual element to go along with the writing, had unintended consequences.  A small amount of people were actually into what I've been doing.

     Having a bare minimum of social skills, I am now having to learn how to be normal around people in a social setting.  I have spent decades as a recluse that stood in the back of the room or near the soundboard, always with my exit plan mapped out and ready to execute as soon as the last band was over.

     Now when I walk into a venue, people say hello to me and I have to figure out how to engage in general conversation.  This may not seem like a difficult task but for someone that can go days without speaking this is quite the challenge.

     Learning to accept compliments and positive reinforcement is something that I should have taken care of by now.  Making nice with my fellow humans is something that I should have had a handle on before I entered my teens.  I don't have enough hours in the day to figure this shit out now that I also have all of the responsibilities that go along with hurtling toward middle age.  Instead of spending all of that time in my room reading and listening to records when I was a bored teenager, I probably should have spent some time learning how to socialize.  Now I'm an old man that sits in his house reading and listening to records and I still don't have a clue how to be a functioning adult.

     Responding to someone that says, “Hey man, I really liked that thing you wrote” or that picture I took with “ARE YOU THREATENING ME!?!?  THAT SOUNDS LIKE A THREAT!!!” followed by my running away can be rather off putting.  I try my best to keep it together.

     I have thought of submitting work to the two alt-weeklies in Pittsburgh but they seem to be heading in a friendlier direction than I am.  They do have a citywide readership to try to cultivate so having this miserable prick on their roster might not be in their best interest.  Especially since one of the usual targets of my ire are the yocals that I encounter with confounding regularity when I step out the front door.

     Music sites and other publications are not really an option given the massive amounts of consolidation and layoffs that are going on.  They all want writers that are freelance and then to not pay the writers for their assignments.  If I'm going to write for free, I'll at least do so on my own terms and without the pop up ads.  Bad grammar and typos be damned.

     No one reads anything beyond a few words as they scroll by on their phones so it is rather difficult at times to proceed with this exercise in futility.  Having so few consistent readers is discouraging but that's when I stop looking at the analytics, put my head down and get to work.

     This thing has led to a few potential opportunities that will hopefully come together.  Time will tell on those and they at least add fuel to the fire for me to keep at it.

Sleep: Live At Third Man Records

     A while back, the Sleep Live At Third Man Records box set showed up on my porch.  As much as I'm enjoying the seven sides of music, the manufactured rarity of the thing is a pain in the ass.  This thing should have been made available far and wide for everyone to enjoy.  Instead, it was only made available to people that signed up for the Third Man record club.  I signed up in order to get this thing but forgot to cancel my membership before they charged my card again for the next club release which had something to do with Jack White's band The Raconteurs.

     To an extent, I have great admiration for what Jack White has done for music but I really don't care for what he does musically.  Keeping the names of artists alive and keeping records in print with his label is a great service that he does but I have always found his music forced and predictable.  I can see why people are into what he does but it's just not for me.

     The downside of Third Man is the way the label turns music into a novelty and seems to forget that they put out music and not trinkets that are related to music.  Short pressing records to create a false scarcity and driving up the after market prices is not a way to get money out of my wallet.  I bought this box set to listen to it not flip it on eBay.  And they didn't even take into consideration making listenable records for this release.

     For some reason, Third Man felt compelled to put locked grooves at the end of sides B and G when they pressed the records.  For the folks that have lives, locked grooves are sometimes put at the end of a side of vinyl instead of the usual lead out groove that will draw the tone arm to the center label.  Locked grooves can best be described as an intentional skip at the end of the side.  Keeping the needle going over the same bit of information repeatedly and looping that sound until the tone arm is lifted.  This will shorten the lifespan of the needle and it will have to be replaced sooner.

     At least there weren't any skips or pops on the LPs so I was able to get a clean recording when I jammed them into my laptop to make my own digital copy.  Almost every other Third Man release that I own has some sort of defect on it that effects playback.  They tend to put more focus on quality control when it comes to their specialty releases than their records that are pressed on black vinyl for the masses.

     Outside of my frustrations with the circumstances that led to the records landing on my turntable, Sleep definitely played a set that was worth packing a lunch to go on the almost two hour journey with.  This was recorded in Nashville, TN four days after their stop in Pittsburgh back in December 2018 and was a very similar set list.

     Sleep was in fine form and this performance lacked the minor miscues from the Pittsburgh show due to the monitor issues at Stage AE.  The other difference between this set and the Pittsburgh show was the loudmouth yinzer that wouldn't shut up the entire night while I was trying to watch the band play was noticeably missing.  For that reason alone, it was worth it to me to pick this monster up.

     The new songs off of The Sciences and the 12-inch single “Leagues Beneath” sound incredible in a live setting and this recording captured that perfectly.  Matt Pike's guitar tone came blazing through the speakers with the correct amount of weight that sometimes gets lost on live recordings.  For all of my grumblings about the physical release of Live At Third Man Records, there was a lot of attention to detail paid to the nuts and bolts of the actual recording of the music.

     The performance was recorded straight to acetate and mastered on the spot.  That was no small fete for the engineers to pull off a recording of that high quality in that manner.

     Now that the hysteria around the box set has settled down, after market prices are around $80 or $90 online.  It's seven sides of music with an etching on side H so given the current retail prices on vinyl, that really isn't that bad compared to the $200 prices when the thing first came out.

     Hopefully, Third Man will see fit to release the music for everyone to enjoy at some point.  The work that the band and the engineers did that night deserves to be heard and recognized by everyone that wants to hear it and not just record club members.

And look at that.  Someone posted a vinyl rip of the entire set to the YouTubes.