All Tomorrow’s Parties 2009: A Retrospective

A well-run music festival with a collection of artists sparklier than the family jewels can invigorate the spirit and can bring a soul back from the edge of Top 40-saturated despair. This year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in New York was exactly this sort of festival.

With musical acts hand-picked by the Flaming Lips and myriad gorgeous films screened by the Criterion Collection, ATP blew brains out of the ears of its some 3,000, certainly odd attendees.

Wayne Coyne, the Flaming Lips’ lead singer and nappy-headed host of this year’s mid-September madness, described it, in a promotional piece for the festival, as “a collection of unprecedented phenomenal entertainment.”

Coyne seemed genuinely excited about all the acts his band had chosen, like hard-rocking old-timers Jesus Lizard.

“Jesus Lizard are probably as potent as they ever were,” said Coyne. “By my guesstimation, it’ll be one of the greatest musical events humankind has ever known.”

While few, aside from the late, great Les Paul, have been around enough to evaluate such conjecture, ATP certainly comes darn tootin’ close to hitting Coyne’s mark.

Anticipation ran high as music fans from all over the world converged on Kutshers Country Club in Monticello, NY, a well-preserved vestige of what must have been some Othodox Jewish Rat Pack heyday. With a stranglehold on local hotels for the weekend, show goers flocked to late-night diners and brewhouses, confusing the locals and drooling too-hip music criticism across the hills and valleys of the beautiful Catskill Mountains.

It is not without import that the Kutshers site is mere miles from Woodstock, famously first overtaken for a similar brand of festival debauchery in 1969.

Forty years on, a legion of obsessive music fans can still manage to work up the patchouli and caffeine to wake by noon and catch a surprisingly eclectic range of acts.

From mellow to metal, the range of musicians involved lent itself to incestuous creativity; collaborations abounded, and each act seemed strengthened by the energy of having so much talent in one small venue.

“My name is Sufjan Stevens and I am going to play all of my Seven Swans album. That should be a good early afternoon hangover sort of thing,” the uncharacteristically tie-dyed troubadour spoke to an appreciative audience before flowing into a note-perfect rendition of the 2003 album.

The musical melding of No Age and Hüsker Dü frontman (and hardcore hero) Bob Mould, a near musical antithesis to the whispery Stevens, was every bit as hypnotic.

Their set, built around a mix of Hüsker and No Age tracks, culminated in an adrenalized blast through Johnny Thunders’ “Chinese Rocks,” featuring an additional guest spot from the seemingly omnipresent Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound.

One of the more surreal moments of the weekend involved a rack of mounted guitars and a spastic drummer being carried to the stage through the crowd like a long lost pagan god. The Boredoms, a Japanese collective recently renowned for their Boadrum experiments (77 drummers played together on 7/07/07, and 88 on 8/08/08), split ears and inspired awe. Singer/cult leader Yamantaka Eye led the drummers like a crazed Dadaist witch doctor, alternately dancing and screaming towards the heavens.

Film and comedy fans were likewise sated. Ongoing screenings were augmented by a lengthy Q and A with fêted director Jim Jarmusch. In addition, a comedy lineup was curated by David Cross, of Mr. Show and Arrested Development fame.

Electro-thrash duo Crystal Castles’ Alice Glass stormed the strobe-lit stage looking like a possessed doll hell-bent on destroying her audience. One of the most energetic of many high-energy shows, Castles chased listeners through a terrifying Zelda-gone-wrong escapade.

The list of superb performers goes on and on; if everyone got a summary, we’d need our own newspaper (that only we would read…). These brief paragraphs could have just as easily been devoted to Iron and Wine, Grouper, El-P, Deerhoof, Malcolm McDowell, the Circulatory System, Caribou (complimented by a star-studded orchestra including legendary sax virtuoso Marshall Allen), punk heroes The Feelies… etc. Ad nauseam.

All said, three days of love and music culminated in the Flaming Lips orgiastic, confetti-drenched headline set, where Coyne was so freaked-out and effervescent with joy that his smiles could have spawned a thousand giggling glitterkittens.

So ask yourself: do you enjoy loud music? Do you like free ice cream? Do you like scary movies, skinny jeans and throngs of burly dudes that look eerily like Ben Coleman, all in one too-kitsch to be true pastiche heaven? ATP 2010!

With Justin Levy and Davis McGraw