Dispatches from SK22

ISSUE #195

Well, if it isn’t time again for Atlanta’s good ol’ rock & roll festival, that old Shaky Knees that hijacks an issue every spring. It’s a weird festival, a heady mix of punks with strollers, aging rockers, and new blood all gunning for the same shade in the 80-degree Georgian glare. I love it. Let’s talk headliners.

Friday ends with Green Day, a classic around-forever, never-say-die type of legacy act. They’ve never been my band, but they were The One for many people I love—including my brother, who blessed our iTunes library with all of their albums and ensured that I, at least, knew what I was talking about once in a while.

Then what’s wrong with Green Day? Nothing, really. I couldn’t help but grow embarrassed of them as time went on—the Amy Schumer Effect—but it’s not their fault they never had punk credibility. If everything following American Idiot hadn’t been cavity-inducing Top 40, maybe things would be different, but that’s fine. In moments of grace, I see them for what they are: a solid pop-punk progenitor who managed to spin two masterpieces exactly ten years apart. Billie Joe Armstrong is the perfect vessel to deliver punk aesthetic to tweens with crushes, without the bite or blood or terrible politics that can come with the genre. It makes sense, their popularity. Not everyone has to be Iggy Pop.

Saturday is Nine Inch Nails—my most anticipated because they rarely ever tour now that Trent Reznor has two Oscars to his name. The exact opposite of Green Day in credibility, this is a band that rarely misses, that brought industrial to the mainstream, that played a full song on stage during the greatest episode of Twin Peaks: The Return and possibly all of television.

Did you know that Reznor was just a janitor in Cleveland at Right Track Studios when he asked studio owner Bart Koster if he could record his demos for free using the studio’s unused time? Koster accepted, saying it cost nothing but a “little wear on the tape heads.” Many of those demos went on to comprise Pretty Hate Machine, an undisputed masterpiece. “He is so focused on everything he does,” Koster said. “When that guy waxed the floor, it looked great.” I can’t wait.

Sunday closes with My Morning Jacket. They’re a band with the highest fans-who-must-exist to people-I-know-who-actually-listen-to-them discrepancy of all time. Not to rag on them—I like their sound—but for maybe ten years now I’ve popped into their songs, including the Jim James solo album, and waited for them to hit. Nothing has stuck. I couldn’t hum a single melody.

This may simply underline what different listeners get from music—it’s the energy/vibes dichotomy, those who listen for lyrics vs. those who listen for hooks vs. those who want to sink into a sound. Certainly, music critics only a few years older than I must love them, or else how would they be where they are today?

Or maybe they’re just those rock-and-roll lifers—hard workers, always on the road, game to join any lineup because that’s just what they do, man. They play music because they want to play music, and they’ve been around for long enough, been professional enough, garnered enough goodwill from everyone they work with to lead solid festival lineups for years on end. They’re solid; there are worse things you can be in this industry, as we saw with Julian Casablancas and The Strokes last year, god love ‘em. Now that was a show.

Mainly, it’s just nice to see aging bands. Like The Killers, it’s nice to watch artists make a long career out of an absolute hellhole of an industry. There are millions of bands with the talent to be big, who deserve to make, at the least, a living. But until we change things, it’s nice to watch artists age, to see how they reckon with time as they create. Some have to wait a long time between albums to make sure everything’s perfect; others are content to just explore in the thick of things, writing everything they can: the divorce record, the uneven middler, the flop, the return to form, the late-career masterpiece. These are all good things to hear, even if they’re bad.

I hope I’ll always get to go to Shaky Knees. Growing up in the corn stalks, I used to think music was something you only found in movies, thought bands existed in earbuds and never in the flesh. Now, it’s an honor just to live in a town that bands come to visit every year. I’ll always find something I like, even if I didn’t recognized a single name on the lineup. These are all songs from bands who will be here, to celebrate the beauty of seeing them live.

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