Yeah! Fest

The tires are slipping on the slick asphalt of Interstate 5, wet with the Northwest rain. The bridge to Portland is a blur in the rearview mirror. Eighteen-wheelers blow by. One hundred slippery miles until Yeah! Fest. Sixty-plus bands, including Deerhoof, The Gossip, Xiu Xiu, Scream Club, The Bangs, Calvin Johnson, The Decemberists, Mirah, et al. Three days, three stages; an old Eagles Lodge in downtown Olympia, Washington. Yes, it’s another music-related anti-Bush event. Yes, the bands are preaching to the choir. But the first Yeah! Fest is influenced by unique external factors: Bush v. Kerry, the third anniversary of September 11, cold wet weather, no booze, no big crowds. Just a weird old venue, a bunch of vinyl for sale, a basement for the dance-crazy kids, and brainy music geeks scattered across three floors of a “this is so DIY it hurts” music festival. If you understand that Olympia is a Left Coast incubator for vegans, gender-queers, small business owners, independent bookstores, activism, and art, Yeah! Fest makes a lot of sense. Yeah! Fest precepts (from the ‘official’ program) : Politics and music go hand in hand. Dubya is evil. There are a lot of bands. Everyone needs to vote. If you are harassing anyone for any reason you will be 86’d. There is a kid-friendly workshop on political activism. Indie rock bands grow like weeds here. Some stay. Most don’t. Calvin Johnson stayed, and he kept K Records up and running. Kill Rock Stars stayed, and they’re printing potent artists like Hella, Gravy Train!!!!, The Decemberists, and Sleater-Kinney. In a country drowning in a pool of our own ignorance, a city like Olympia, with its freaks and geeks and well-worn idealism, feels like just about the sanest place on earth. The Eagles Lodge is home for three days. But let’s name her correctly: Federation of Eagles #21. That means only lodge members get to patronize the bar. And there’s no smoking indoors. And it’s raining hard outside. Things are not well. People are cranky, and ornery. Stepping into the basement of the lodge, a volunteer with The League of Pissed Off Voters! shouts across the room, waving a book at me. “ARE YOU REGISTERED TO VOTE!?!?” He sounds terrified. Welcome to America’s hell: we’re all becoming afraid, angry, acidic assholes. My jeans are soaked, and flash! That’s a camera. The lovely table monitors need a photo for the laminated festival badge that’s now hanging around my neck with blue yarn. No.073. Glance to the right, Kill Rock Stars records, spilling out of boxes. Drool. Look past the girl at the door, there’s a dance party in the back room. No, a live band. No, a guy with a microphone and a sampler. Sweat. Musty, awful humanity. Jump up and down! Shake it off!

In the basement, Fitz of Depression is playing loud. Earplugs. People clutch their schedules like security blankets. It’s easy to miss one band while another is playing at the same time. Damn. Wet Confetti already played. Three sweet kids with a spooked ghost following them around on stage (an apparition that hums Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead), they’re one of the better bands to come out of the Portland Oregon music scene circa 2004. Scream Club is starting in the main ballroom. Find the stairs! Now there’s a minute to breathe. Scream Club is setting up onstage, with what looks to be five or six interpretive dancers. The duo — two dyke rappers with rad rattails and hard-ons for Eminem, Peaches and Roxanne Shante — asks us to “be peace”, to make a circle and hold hands. So we oblige, and do three rounds of punk rock “OM”s. The rapping commences. The audience presses toward the stage. The co-ed sequined dance troupe dressed in pink and blue circles us, running non-stop. Counter-culture, 21st century style. There’s a lot going on with Yeah! Fest. It’s a political dance party. A benefit for a local shelter. Information booths for the League of Pissed Off Voters and Indymedia.org. The kids in the basement are too young to vote, but the DJs are getting them off. There’s lots of “Lick Bush!” and stage wonking about polls and Swift Boats and weak-ass Democrats. The Christian right’s apocalyptic shit is starting to taste, well — almost familiar. Music festivals suck, right? Wasted concertgoers, wasted cash, wasted eardrums. But this one is cheap. ($50 gets you in all three nights). And you can’t booze it up, so no distractions. Just lots and lots of music. Some bands you’ve heard, most bands you haven’t. And unless you’re in the basement, you don’t need earplugs: this is a lo-fi, DIY production. Which means the sound system is lame.

The line-up is schizoid — the common thread being (for the most part) the Left Coast, Kill Rock Stars, K Records, and a deep, deep desire to see the President un-elected. Saturday is one astonishing revelation after another. Xiu Xiu pulls out the bell-tinkling anguished synth-pop. Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) pulls out the sweet (& nautical) soft-rock for book geeks. Beth Ditto and the Gossip shake their punk rock Arkansas sass, drunk and sloppy. Surprisingly, they’re the high point of the festival. (Ditto keeps announcing, in her exaggerated intoxicated Southern drawl, “It’s Saturday naaahht. Party naaaaht!”) They apologize for offeringl no new material and kick through herky-jerky tunes mostly from their last release, Movement. For the Gossip, who moved to Portland last year, Yeah! Fest is like a family reunion. “Anna Oxygen and I both started our periods today,” Ditto says. “We’re all We’Moon and shit.” (FYI. Olympia and the Wiccans are down like that.) King Cobra whips through a set of Devo-esque math-metal. Joey Casio blows minds with explosive post-punk dance insanity. K Records’ Mirah digs into boxes of jazz and Jewish folk and Django Reinhardt and sings us lullabies. And the pumped-up boys from downstairs lie on their backs, writhing and wriggling like worms cut in half. Trying to sum up this much music and information is tough. The diversity of sounds is astonishing, and lots of bands are relative unknowns to these virgin ears. (I’m running out and grabbing every thing related to the Mae-Shi.) The most surprising revelation, as a music geek living in a town notoriously inhibited at shows, is that Olympia loves to dance. (Bring some of that down to Portland, will ya?) But K Records founder Calvin Johnson zero sum totals it best. He’s doing his own version of Andy Kaufman’s shtick, swapping his baritone showman persona for an intensely precise, if not faltering, oddball alternate personality. Between songs, he enunciates carefully, hesitatingly. In the middle of the set, he stops, and stares out at the audience. Switching into Personality #2, he clarifies, both for himself, and for everyone in the room: “Um. So. We (pause) are here (pause) because we want to (pause) um, fire our Chief Executive Officer.” And that’s it in a nutshell. Some people in Olympia had to do something, and this is it.