Hudson Project spotlight: Dr. Dog
The Hudson Project Music & Arts Festival has chosen to stage its new-paradigm music festival on the site of an older one, but not the older one: in Saugerties, on the site of Woodstock ’94, where Billie Joe got mud-bombed. I was playing with Wormwood at the Rhinecliff Hotel on the first night of Woodstock ’94. A Freeman reporter came to interview us on what it was like not to be one of the area bands invited to play the local stage at the festival; we said, “Now that you mention it, it sucks.” My mother was delighted, as usual, to see my name in the paper.
From July 11 to 13, the preponderance of performers in the Hudson Project Music & Arts Festival will have little to do with the land of Levon or classic guitar rock generally, centering instead on what might be described as the Pitchfork aesthetic cocktail diluted with some upstate jam-centrism: some indie-rock royalty, a lot of hip-hop and a lot, a lot, a lot of electronica and synchronized iPads.
While the festival can be in some ways read as a retort to Mountain Jam and the old guard of the Valley, one band on the bill, at least, will have been a veteran at both festivals – and a bit of an odd fit at both as well. Philadelphia’s retro guitar-pop tricksters Dr. Dog have been reinventing all the wheels of rock for over a decade now. The two-songwriter outfit is endlessly creative and obsessive in the studio and a legendarily hot and spirited live band as well. (I have seen them twice – once before I knew their records, and once since. I was floored both times.)
Dr. Dog’s like-clockwork releases get slicker and slicker, tighter and tighter and more and more competent over time; but if you want to hear what it sounds like when a bunch of talented young music fanatics go to the basement to try to reverse-engineer everything from the Beatles to the Beach Boys to the Band, the Small Faces and Marvin Gaye, getting it all gloriously wrong, check out their delirious third record, Easy Beat. And then work forward from there. It’s all good.
Like Australia’s the Go-Betweens, Dr. Dog (pictured above) are pretty much committed to the strict alternation of songwriters on their records. One, guitarist Scott McMicken, is the more adventurous and assured lyricist. The other, bassist Toby Leamen, is the deep-groove master whose songs bring some serious soul to their otherwise pretty Britty studio play. Both are high-character singers (with Leamen seemingly determined to leave a spot of blood on the 58 on every song), and both are crafty and resourceful melody writers with a lot of classic music deep in their ears.
With their unfettered studio experimentation and an approach to pop imperialism that could be described as organic, meatware sampling, Dr. Dog, it turns out, is one of the few bands out there that could bridge the current Balkanized indie scene with the good old play-it-yourself rocking that has always moved these particular mountains. So, while they are not one of the top-line acts of the Hudson Project (fourth line, in fact), they may be one of the most important.
– John Burdick
Dr. Dog, Friday, July 11, 4 p.m., Hudson Project Music & Arts Festival, https://hudsonmusicproject.com.
Want to know more about the bands at this weekend’s Hudson Project? Listen to this:
For more background on the Hudson Project:
The ABCs of EDM
Dance music is big business, and the Hudson Valley is beginning to get a taste. EDM (electronic dance music) is the fastest-growing sector of the music industry, with an estimated worth of 15 to 20 billion dollars annually, approximately 4.5 billion of which come from a worldwide circuit of festivals that deejays and their Macbooks travel. With brand-new festivals kicking off their runs in 2014, you can add this weekend’s Hudson Project Music & Arts Festival in Saugerties and Bethel Woods’ recent Mysteryland festival to that list.
Modern EDM is a phantom of a genre. Even if you don’t think that you’ve heard it, you probably have. Emerging from local movements like Chicago’s house scene and Frankfurt’s trance crowd, EDM is a global music, with the best-known deejays hailing from many countries. Though one could go in-depth with each scene, the broad outlines, and those seen at most festivals, are as follows: steady beats; simple, insistent melodies, that repeat dozens if not hundreds of times each song; guest vocals with broad, easy-to-memorize lyrics; builds that escalate tension until a late-song drop, or release; finally, a feel-good tone that never threatens to ruin the party.
This music has been quickly appropriated into the pop mainstream in recent years, with artists as famous as Madonna, on her MDNA album, consulting up-and-coming deejays for beats, songs and style. If you’ve heard a pop song with an endless bass drum on every single beat, then in a certain sense, you’ve heard EDM.
Though it began in 1993 in the Netherlands and later opened an iteration in Chile, the Mysteryland festival made its first move to an American outpost with May’s Mysteryland USA festival, a multi-day music event with camping at Bethel Woods during Memorial Weekend this year. The festival sold 20,000 tickets to attendees from 27 countries, and was headlined by crossover successes like Steve Aoki, Kaskade and Moby, as well as no fewer than two deejays with Nostradamus-pun names. Mysteryland was billed as an all-EDM fest dedicated to the raver ideals of peace, love, unity and respect, or PLUR for short, and in addition to main and side stages featured a Healing Garden and a Spiegeltent. Mysteryland has a tentative three-year deal to continue the festival at Bethel Woods.
The Hudson Project Music & Arts Festival, taking place July 11 to 13 in Saugerties, is aiming for a more general appeal. Over three nights it will host indie-rock titans Modest Mouse and the Flaming Lips, hip-hop star Kendrick Lamar and popular deejays Bassnectar (pictured above) and, again, Moby. The festival segments its three days into rough categories: hipper indie-rock on Friday, EDM on Sunday and a mix of the two on Saturday. This is not exact; long-running Minneapolis hip-hop group Atmosphere will perform on Friday before Modest Mouse, and MGMTers Cults are slated for Sunday.
EDM is a business force that few festivals or pop artists can ignore. While major EDM-focused events like New York’s Electric Zoo and Miami’s Ultra Music Festival make a mint, even traditionally rock-oriented gatherings now bill electronic musicians high up on their marquees. Skrillex received near-top billing at this year’s Coachella and Lollapalooza festivals, where Flosstradamus, Netsky and Zedd join him. Pop stars have increasingly turned to these producers and deejays to give them hits, and the strategy is working. Skrillex was even reportedly consulted on sound effects for this year’s Transformers: Age of Extinction movie.
Risks come with running any music festival. Drug use was common in the raver culture out of which EDM and its PLUR ethos emerged, where stimulants like MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly) were regularly used. New York State Police conducted traffic stops around the recent Mysteryland USA festival in Bethel, and only 20 arrests, or one per thousand attendees, were made. A sheriff quoted in the Times-Herald Record called the festival attendees “polite and decent” and stated, “Everything went smoothly, and it was a wonderful event.”
Whether Mysteryland and the Hudson Project Music & Arts Festival return and prosper, however, is another matter entirely. Though EDM festivals grew between fiscal years 2011 and 2012 – the last years for which analysis is available – the largest festivals still stick to huge markets like New York City and Miami. Is there a true base for EDM in the Hudson Valley?
The Hudson Project Music & Arts Festival’s diverse lineup hopes to pull in a musically diverse crowd, and by marketing Mysteryland USA as a PLUR experience, as opposed simply to another music festival, promotions company ID&T managed to sell out. However, it should be noted that Mysteryland set its cap at 20,000: a small number compared to the 300,000 tickets that Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival sold this year. Whether these festivals become Hudson Valley institutions remains to be seen, but it will undoubtedly depend on what happens with the EDM bubble.
– Rob Rubsam
