Lydia Lunch – Memphis Flyer

A week ago, the man in the chainmail and shimmering cape would have been broiling in the Memphis heat, but rain swept in on cooler winds, and the first night of Gonerfest 15 is just cool enough for the assembled punks, rockers, and music fans to break out their denim jackets — or, in some cases, chainmail.

The emcee takes the Hi-Tone stage just after 9 p.m., wearing sunglasses and leather, and says a few kind words about Chris Beck, Goner’s “Muddy Spear,” who recently passed away from brain cancer. Members of the crowd shouted that they wished Beck could be there, displaying a communal spirit central to the festival.

Music fans come from the world over for Gonerfest, and there always seems to be a happy reunion happening in the parking lot or by the bathrooms. Then the emcee kicks off the night’s festivities, introducing the “King of the Gras,” who “tours in a cage on wheels … just take it — Bênní!” Then the man in the chainmail hood smiles and steps onstage and up to a stack of keyboards and synthesizers. And he conjures magic.

Allison Green

BÊNNÍ, master of analog synths

Bênní’s set is dark and hypnotic, but there’s a touch of humor in his deadpan stage patter delivery as he sets up each synthesized swirl of sound. He speaks (and sings) into a talk box, explaining that the diamond man character was a vision that haunted him until he put it in a song: “This is who I am — a diamond man.”

The New Orleans-based musician plays an instrumental song in 6/8 time. It sounds at once sinister and rising, like an old-school video game theme played on a church organ at the bottom of a well. “I haven’t played that one in a while,” Bênní says casually. His delivery is wry, as if to nudge the audience and say, “You know we’re just getting started, right?”

Between sets, the garage-rock true believers slip outside to smoke cigarettes or scarf down barbecue from a smoker pulled behind an RV. Cincinnati-based Bummer’s Eve take the stage after a quick turnover, summoning the crowds with violently strummed guitar. The band is raucous and bopping, fuzzed-out punk. They crash into a noise breakdown, a wall of feedback and distortion, before plunging seamlessly back into the rhythm of the song. Where Bênní’s set pulsed, Bummer’s Eve shakes and rattles. Their set seemed to end far too soon.

The Hi Tone, already crowded for opening sets on a Thursday night, swells with the addition of late arrivals. There is a constant sense of rising energy throughout the night, a shared knowledge that this is only the first night of the festival. Conversations buzz and grow louder as the ever-growing mounds of beer cans in the trash continue to rise, and people fight to be heard over each other and the ringing in their ears. People dance and bop, and Memphis-based Aquarian Blood and Tampa party-rockers Gino & the Goons continue to escalate the energy. Aquarian Blood wails, frenetically running chromatic scales up their fret boards, urging the party to a wilder pitch.

Aquarian Blood

Aquarian Blood build a bomb, and Gino & the Goons light the fuse. They’re party punk, solid songs punctuated by grunts of “ooh!” and “uh!” The Florida-based band plays on as the singer shouts from onstage, “You’re not dancing, we’re not stopping!” Then the rhythm changes, and the singer rips into a chorus of “hip-hip-hypnotic” before everything crashes to a stop with a squall of feedback. Lydia Lunch Retrovirus is up next.

Lydia Lunch, backed by a band so tight they seem telepathic, is the penultimate performer on the opening night of Gonerfest. Dressed in black and laughing, she warns the crowd of her band’s “nasty,” “raunchy” ways. Her guitarist strikes a deft balance between crunchy, palm-muted riffs and wild, dissonant squeals of noise. The rhythm section is locked in, propelling the performance forward through moments of angry, brittle complexity and explosive breakdowns. Red and green lights seem to drip from the Hi Tone sign above the stage. Lunch’s voice floats above it all, singing, screaming, and crooning. Local singer and multi-instrumentalist Luke White leans in to shout in my ear, “She’s pretty badass” before admiring the guitar and bass tones.

Jasmine Hirst

Lydia Lunch

White is waiting to go onstage with Harlan T. Bobo, who is closing out night one of the festival. Lunch’s vocals rise, casting a dark spell, while the band pulses with barely restrained energy and she chants, “There’s something witchy in the air.” The music rises to a final crescendo, and Lunch, a master performer, relinquishes the stage with a shouted, “Start the disco!”

Harlan T. Bobo’s set is magnetic, hypnotic. He looks like a man possessed, his eyes going wide as he sings, his smile like Conrad Veidt’s in The Man Who Laughs. He has the strangely compelling charisma of someone who hears holy voices.

His band crafts a dark atmosphere, making them a perfect bookend to Bênní’s darkly filmic opening set, a complement to the eclectic lineup. Frank McLallen’s bass lines are expert, a framework on which to hang the keyboard swells and whine of a slide guitar.

Bobo’s second song is “Human,” the simmering opening track from his new A History of Violence. The song builds to an electric instrumental ending, setting a fevered energy level that the band maintains for several songs, before Bobo pulls out a harmonica and eases up on the gas slightly, giving the captive audience a moment to catch its breath.

It’s the briefest of moments, though, before Bobo starts up a swinging, country-inflected song. It’s an inspired performance, and a fitting end to the opening day of the festival.

As the always unpredictable Gonerfest has grown over the past 15 years, it has cast its nets ever further afield, spotlighting bands that one doesn’t see at other festivals. Though we’ll hear plenty of that trademark Goner slam-and-bash (as with Aquarian Blood, NOTS, Negro Terror, the Carbonas, the Neckbones, Ten High, the Oblivians, and others), there’s a true smorgasbord of other styles and sounds (including many beyond category). Landing two major artists as different as Robyn Hitchcock and Lydia Lunch is a major coup for this most DIY of festivals, and yet the contrast between them can’t obscure their shared quality of bucking trends, even punk, since the ’70s. One of them does it through a tenacious and ever-inventive historical stubbornness; the other through a kind of “musical schizophrenia.”

Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock

The ascent of Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians in the 1980s, with such albums as Element of Light, marked the ascent of his previous work as well, as college radio junkies went digging through bins to find LPs by his first real group, the Soft Boys, and the solo albums that followed. While the former were full of slashing and chiming guitars, and the latter were more intimate affairs, all his work had the common thread of harking back to the perfect marriage of guitar jangle, harmonies, and songwriting that first peaked in the late ’60s. The genius was in the way Hitchcock’s songs subverted classic rock cliches by embracing surrealism and weirdly pointed lyrics.

Memphis Flyer: When you were starting with the Soft Boys in Cambridge, did it already seem like the ’60s were antique? In hindsight, Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd had only started 10 years earlier.

Robyn Hitchcock: It seemed like that kind of music was not there, or accessible. But that was the vein I wanted to work in. I wanted to play 1966-67 music, whatever that was. It wasn’t exactly psychedelic. It’s a bit of a misnomer. I suppose it’s more accurate than saying I was a punk or something industrial. But there was never an exact definition for what it was, and there still isn’t. You could say “It is that which was played by people in 1966-67” — it was when pop became rock. And like all movements, it was unstable. It existed in transition. It existed really in motion.

If you come see me at Gonerfest, I’ve got three Nashville guys backing me up. It will have that sort of sound, the spangling guitars and the harmonies, which we had in the Soft Boys. The Soft Boys had more intricate arrangements than my more recent material, but all of it is now absolutely vintage. It’s like an old car, and it has some of the beautiful qualities that old cars have. It may not be that reliable and you can’t travel that far in it, but it should make it to Memphis. And you’ve got the old street cars there, so I’m kind of a complement to that, really. I’m the equivalent of a vintage street car.

Do you feel like an anachronism, being an English psychedelic folk-rocker living in Nashville?

No, it’s very appropriate, because Americana itself is a throwback. Americana is basically white music before punk happened. Punk is never gonna happen. It’s always 1974. People are playing “Cortez the Killer,” you know? Gram Parsons is still touring. That’s what East Nashville is. I was even touted as an Americana artist last year, which you would think is a misnomer, but 10 years ago, Americana was alt-country, and 10 years before that it was alternative. As I used to say, if the Beatles had come out in 2004, they’d have been an alt-country act.

Still, the Beatles’ songs may last a long time, because they were so good. Through some freak of nature, they just happened to have three great songwriters, and they made each other greater through competition. It was sort of like an egg with three embryos in it. But sooner or later, there will be no Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan or Rolling Stones. That generation that were born in the early ’40s will be gone. People like me will be the seniors about to go over the waterfall.

I’m not really, technically rock anymore. Essentially, I’m a folkie. It’s all music that’s written without a click track. But no definition really covers me very much. So you could say, well, he’s a psychedelic folk singer, but what does that mean exactly? And I think it’s hard to sell things if you can’t define them. Is that a banana or an apple? What are these fruits you’re selling me? Do you eat it with a skin, do you cook this, or where does it go? And I think I’m one of those unidentified fruits, you know?

Jasmine Hirst

Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch

This multi-media subversive has been on music fans’ radars at least since the 1978 Brian Eno-curated collection, No New York, which featured Lunch’s band Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. Not long after that, though, she took a stylistic left turn with her jazzy debut LP, Queen of Siam, and ever since she’s followed unexpected muses, while always keeping a taste of the downtown New York performance art scene, and its radical politics, that first nurtured her. Memphis Flyer: Who were your greatest inspirations when you started playing in the 1970s?

Lydia Lunch: They were all writers. They weren’t musicians necessarily, but writers like Henry Miller and Hubert Selby. The Marquis de Sade, more for his philosophy. His outlandishness was just painting a picture of what goes on behind closed doors in parliament, for instance, or the White House.

You played dissonant noise in the No Wave days, but your debut solo album was very jazzy. What inspired the change?

Well, as a musical schizophrenic, I was always trying to contradict what came before it. There are many sides to express. Actually, half of the album is big band jazz, the other is nursery rhymes. I was listening to a lot of cartoon music at the time, and just wanted to do something that was just totally in a different vein. Something kind of noir and sassy. And then, bringing Robert Quine into the mix was just a highlight of my life. My favorite guitar player. He played with Richard Hell and Lou Reed and produced some of Teenage Jesus.

Then you quickly moved beyond that big band sound …

But I’m actually back in it now. I came back around to it with an album called Smoke and the Shadows. And I’ve just finished recording an album with Sylvia Black, who is a very diverse musical schizophrenic herself, out of L.A. We’ve almost completed a totally jazz noir album that’ll come out sometime at the end of the year. It’s like swamp rock; I come in and out of it. And jazz noir as well. And also psycho ambient.

And at Gonerfest, you’ll be upping the rock noise quotient again, playing your Retrovirus material.

I’m constantly flipping the script. What’s interesting about Retrovirus is that it’s chaotic, but somehow there’s a cohesion when you hear it all together. The band somehow unites the mania into a different beast altogether. That’s what I’ve been focusing on the last few years. Working with Weasel Walter is great. It’s a fun, maniacal musical mayhem.

Gonerfest 15 runs from Thursday, September 27th to Sunday, September 30th. See www.goner-records.com for the full schedule.