All Tomorrow's Parties 2008: Day 1

photos by Abbey Braden

[Above: The Meat Puppets]

Two firsts are happening simultaneously at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival this year: it not only marks the return of My Bloody Valentine to the United States, but it also mark's the first East coast festival for the UK based ATP, who has previously staged festivals in both London and Los Angeles. MBV is headlining the final night of the three-day, all-indoor festival, which kicked off with ATP's "Don't Look Back."

"Don't Look Back" features bands playing one of their seminal LPs in its entirety. That sort of nostalgia calls for a nostalgic atmosphere. One of ATP's two L.A.-based festivals took place on the Queen Mary; New York got Kutsher's Country Club, the Catskills resort where your parents or grandparents spent their summers. Built a century ago, it's currently past season, and maybe past the heyday of summer resorts. But for the weekend it's, as a friend who flew in from Tucson to attend put it, "an indie rock fantasy camp."

When my bus arrived Friday afternoon, we were still hours away from our first planned show, Meat Puppets playing Meat Puppets II. We ate carnival food, marveled at the decrepitude of the room (ATP pre-fest literature warned us to spread out our showers if we wanted hot water), and visited the mini-golf course. Here's where Kutsher's most showed its age: there were no golf balls, no working lights or windmills on the abandoned course. There was a hub cap defiantly shoved into one of the obstacles.

I skipped Bardo Pond, which played its Lapsed at 4:30, but arrived for the Meat Puppets in Kutsher's Stardust Ballroom with enough time to admire the room's decoration: swirling puffs of glittering white clouds, lights set up like stars, and worn midnight-blue carpeting lining the floor. Meat Puppets are elder statesmen here, even amongst other elder statesmen like Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr and Mogwai. Like the other "Don't Look Back" performances that would follow, the Meat Puppets played to a captive, but mostly passive audience, excited to hear something they love, anticipating every song. Because of that, there were just a few surprises: guitarist Curt Kirkwood has become a better guitarist since II was released in 1984, and his brother Cris, well, he's become a better everything, really.

[Above: Tortoise]

It's very hard to be nostalgic about Tortoise, and its record Millions Now Living Will Never Die sounds just as good as it did in 1996. The audience knew it well: every pulse of "DJed" signaled a shift in energy from members of the audience, who were familiar enough to recognize even the bits of static and ephemera in between.

[Above: Built to Spill]

The venue, for being older than most attendants, was still a better place to see indie rock than a lot of newer establishments. Besides a few sound problems, Built To Spill's Perfect From Now On (the headlining show of the night), went off well. Singer/guitarist Doug Martsch stuck even more closely to the LP that one would expect: only a few songs, like "Velvet Waltz," veered into the long solos he's known for. This was the loudest audience that night, and also the most fun, jumping around in a way that threatened the integrity of the Stardust Ballroom. On the way back to my room, I bought a bottle of water at the sundries shop, which was open far later than the make-up and resort wear stores surrounding it. I asked how late they'd be open. "We don't know," said the woman checking me out. "Nothing like this has ever happened here."