Sunday, 10 Dec 2006
Last night Joanna Newsom played University of Wisconsin’s Great Hall as part of the grand finale of the Madison Pop Fest, which once again proved to be a brilliant sucess for the city of Madison and the UW student body. Tardy arrivals by Joanna and Bill Callahan combinded with an overwhelming turnout lead to a sense of apprehension and tension at the beginning of the evening, but those who stuck around we treated to a night to remember.
As alluded to above, the attendance of all Madison’s hipsters and their hair greatly exceeded any of my expectations as I arrived a little late to find myself and hundreds of others lined up on the stairwells waiting to be ushered into the Great Hall. With high praise coming from Pitchfork and bloggers alike I guess the throngs of people shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Her recent album, Ys is already beginning to land on many critics year end favorite lists much like its predecessor, The Milk Eyed Mender did. I recently provided 9 reasons supporting the purchase of her latest album, however it still falls quite far from anything that I would ever find myself listening to repeatedly. That’s not because I don’t find her work to be interesting or enjoyable, it’s just that they just seem much more like a performance and less like a record, which makes it hard for me to make repeated listens.
I think the above is one of the reasons her recent stop in Madison worked out so well. In a live setting Joanna’s music is spellbinding and gorgeous. There is nothing left on the table, and the collective jaw of the audience, at least from where I was situated remained in a permanent position on the floor for the duration of the show. As great as the performance was it wasn’t enough for me to head to the turntable and listen to her records. It did, however ensure that I’ll definitely seek her out each time she’s in town.
Thanks to the organizers of the Madison Pop Fest for a wonderful weekend of live music at no cost. Your time and talent brought to the UW campus is well appreciated and confirmed by the turnout of last night’s performance. Looking forward to next year.
Update – Two other bloggers report on the scene:
December 10th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
I was incredibly dissapointed by this show. The ineptitude of those running it was evident immediately aftering getting to the Union and being informed that there would be no line for entry, resulting in a mad dash to the stage after the doors were opened. This was followed by the show starting an hour late and a stage on which bill callahan was visible only to those standing in the front row. A complete lack of visibility coupled with constant chatter throughout the entire room left me so upset that I couldn’t bear to stay for Joanna Newsom. I saw her last month at a near flawless performance in Chicago and felt that seeing her last night would have done nothing but tarnish the memory of that show. It’s too bad that a high rating on pitchfork combined with a free show brought out an incredibly irritating and disrespectful group of people to last night’s show. For those of who weren’t there you missed nothing.
December 10th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Ryne,
I agree with you, and I think next year tickets should be given out in advance or something needs to be addressed to correct the size of the crowd and ensure organization. That being said, I doubt anyone that coordinated the event had any idea that the turnout would be what it was.
December 10th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
“It’s too bad that a high rating on pitchfork combined with a free show brought out an incredibly irritating and disrespectful group of people to last night’s show.”
Sounds about right for hipster-fodder acts in Madison. Last winter’s sold-out Feist and Andrew Bird shows at the High Noon featured great performances and wretched audiences. I didn’t stick around for Newsom and Callahan but I enjoyed Ambulette quite a bit, and I’m looking forward to seeing Mason Proper, from the Friday night Union South show, again.
December 10th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Ryan, I would have been willing to give the WUD the benefit of the doubt and agree with you but I heard the show’s organizer, Jamie Hanson, say before the show that they were expecting well over a thousand people for the show and would fit as many people into the Great Hall as possible (in violation of the Memorial Union’s fire code). I agree with you that making this a ticketed event would have been a much better idea. I have no idea why the show’s organizers didn’t feel the same way.
December 10th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
while i agree that there should have been more organization with a line, i do not sympathize with those bitching about the way it was organized.
a)this was not a free joanna newsom show. this was a weekend long festival meant to showcase smaller regional and local bands alongside larger national acts, the intention being that people should go check out the other acts, not linger around in line for one act.
b)the shows were free. as long as you aren’t getting screwed out of a ticket price we have no obligation to make you happy. sorry duder. if you don’t like how it was organized put something together yourself. i’m sure with your foresight you will be able to please everyone who expects to be pleased.
up until a week or so before we had no idea that it would be as huge as it ended up being, unfortunately too late to set up a ticketing system (and really an unnecessary cost that we would have had to sacrifice other acts for). but it looks like we’ll probably have to resort to that next year, thereby restricting the event to students and union members, something i don’t think we wanted to have to do. fortunately most of the people bitching about how it was organized were people who weren’t students or members and don’t frequent the rest of the programming we do anyway, so maybe it will be a good thing.
otherwise i felt the crowd was very respectful, at least for newsom, toward the end of callahan’s set they were getting restless, but still i don’t know how you could expect a room that big, full of hipsters, at a free show to be much more quiet. as for the other issues you mention, we had little control over her set times. she knew what time doors and show start was, she chose to take her time with dinner, we aren’t in a position to do much about that. and sightlines? sorry if you couldn’t see, that’s the highest stage we had to use, up until a couple of weeks ago the show was going to be in the rathskeller. imagine the bitching we would have had to hear about that…
December 10th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
I feel obliged to reply to the above post.
“the intention being that people should go check out the other acts, not linger around in line for one act.” Who are you to determine what people should or should not see? Anyone who wanted to wait in line to get into the Great Hall should have been allowed to do so.
“the shows were free” Yes, I am aware of this. This is no excuse for an extremely poorly run show.
“up until a week or so before we had no idea that it would be as huge as it ended up being” Perhaps you should have looked into this. Without Smog, Joanna Newsom was able to sell over a thousand tickets for her show last month in Chicago. This was a relatively expensive show ($20) on a weeknight before the rave reviews for her album came out. Anyone would have been able to see that last night’s show was going to be a bigger draw.
I’m a student and I don’t frequent Union programming because of its overall poor quality.
As for sightlines the problem would have easily been remedied by using a riser which likely could have been obtained for nothing. Better luck next year.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:23 am
it’s too bad that the other acts weren’t to your liking and you feel it was poorly run. but, as a student you have full opportunity to change everything you are complaining about. meetings are tuesdays at 5pm. i honestly challenge you to show up and make shit happen instead of sitting at your computer and bitching that those organizing the fest didn’t accomodate your needs or that we don’t book enough of your favorite bands. though i think some reasoning was misguided i applaud jamie and danny for their work and sticking to their efforts to maintain entropy. fact is they are making shit happen and you are whining about it, guess who i have more respect for.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:28 am
I as well attended the concert and wanted to comment on the planning, or perhaps lack there of. It seemed to me that the concert was excellent in thought but not in practice. It’s a lovely room and the artists were fantastic, however, from my (admititly a bit tardy) arrival things seemed to be out of control. The line wasnt a problem because it was long but because it started in about three different places. and merged into a small stairwell. Seems like something as simple as a “line starts here” sign may have made this easier for everyone. Once i arrived near the door I was told that only union members or students could enter with an ID, contrary to what I had read in all of the ads. Although I am neither luckily I am an alumnus and for some reason still carry an expired student ID in my wallet and was able to enter unlike many less fortunate people around me in line. Then the delay…which i would be ok with (not all the planners fault) if people were allowed to leave the room to get something to drink, smoke outside etc…instead i was told we just had to stay in the room until the concert was over, or we wanted to leave for good. Im happy i heard the concert as it was great but i think there is quite a bit of work to be done next year to make it better.
December 11th, 2006 at 1:07 am
ryne you need to chillthefuckout. yes there were organizational problems that i’m sure many other people would’ve run into in this situation, but you should be greatful that some people took the initiative to organize the festival in the first place. maybe you should take the initiative to lend some of your brilliant ideas next year.
“For those of who weren’t there you missed nothing”
as any sane person who stayed for the show knows, it was kickass, and more than made up for any uncomfortable waiting and disorganization. i’ve been to shows with disrespectful audiences, and this was not one of them (minus the end of smog’s set). if i had to guess (and i’ll take that liberty) ryne is the annoying little hipster who wears $100 pants his mom bought, cries when he masturbates, and complains when he is slightly inconvenienced in any way. Those who stayed, saw a great free performance and walked away beaming. really. who still cares anymore about the long lines. i don’t.
December 11th, 2006 at 1:07 am
“I’m a student and I don’t frequent Union programming because of its overall poor quality.”
Oh Ryne, how this hurts me. In the last month or so the Union programming has hosted recent Pitchfork favorites Tokyo Police Club and Annuals.
All the shows are free and operate on limited budgets funded by the Union Directorate. It’s remarkable that acts like Joanna Newsom even play free shows at Madison. Instead of criticizing, I think we need to do more embracing of the fact that Joanna Newsom did play a free show at the UW.
December 11th, 2006 at 1:25 am
I’m not sure where the person complaining about crowd noise was standing, but there was VERY little crowd noise from where I was, in the way back on the floor, and LOTS of applause. People were getting a little restless during Callahan, but that’s probably because his music was boring and he didn’t even bother to connect to the crowd. I mean, if that’s just how he is that’s fine with me, but then you can’t complain about the audience not caring when the performer (who ostensibly played the role of the opener) doesn’t care about them. In hindsight, it would have made a lot of sense to have put the show in the Union Theater (assuming there wasn’t someone already scheduled to play there, which I’m sure there was). The most disturbing thing to me was them asking for IDs after they promoted the show as open to everyone, and seeing someone here post about possibly coming in from out of town. All in all, Maps & Atlases, Sleeping in the Aviary, Bracelets & Joanna Newsom all played great sets.
December 11th, 2006 at 1:43 am
hats of to danny, jamie and the rest of the WUD crew, an all around fun weekend of shows. The Bracelets set was the best i’ve seen them play, and probably my favorite of the weekend. Hockey Night was a fun surprise.
I think y’all should back off on the complaints about the show. You need to remember these are volenteers who are throwing these shows because they love music. They put in a hell of a lot of work to make sure this thing happened. I could understand anger if the show was ran by some random “professional” promoter who’s only concern was getting some money out of you, but it wasnt. It was some nice people throwing a free show. Again hats off to the music committee, keep those good shows comin.
December 11th, 2006 at 8:28 am
I came. I saw. I was disapointed. I came late with friends with passes, therefore avoided the mass of a line… but according to those who have posted, my sympathies go with you.
to w. and danny. I know you guys tried real hard. but you’ve both still failed to impress me with your shows and event management skills. getting 1000+ people to a show is commendable, but it doesnt automatically make for a good show. it was largely your responsibility to see that the show got off on time. if your rockstars tried to play their rockstar cards and go to dinner (or want a 4 hour sound tracking session), it was your job to put your foot down and say no. it’s your job to manage the crowd. it’s your job to have a fair gating system. all of which seemed to fall apart.
as to the music of ms. newsome, she irrepairably hurt herself by not showing up til the near morning. her music would have been fine at 10:30. it was (fill in the negative adjective) by 12:15 am when people were tired/ no longer tipsy and tired/ bored and tired/tired and had other parties/places to go to. I left after seeing a stream of 30+ people file out infront of me inbetween her 3rd and 4th song. everyone from the girl in the bathroom to collegues i’ve talked with post-show were absolutely disapointed by the whole experience.
may this go down in your books as a lesson learned. that pitchfork causes evil. that ego-centric musicians are not worth what you’re paying them to be there, that you need to invest in finding support staff that can properly handle the chaos of concert crowds. that while you are running the risk of chaos and heh, riots, by drawing 1,000+ hipsters to the same room, you need to then know how to appease the 800+ hipsters and 200 hangers-on that showed up, when things aren’t going well, especially since you’re the one that’s brought them there.
if nothing else, you could have perhaps seen if you couldn’t have gotten one of the rathskellar acts to come up and play another set for the larger, bored crowd upstairs and gotten everyone in the door on time.
good luck in future WUD endeavors. I’ll say though i’m not holding my breath because there’s 1)been a total lack of quality shows the past 6-12 months (partly sarah cantor’s fault, i know) and 2) then when you do seemingly pull off a line up like this weekend, it gets completely mismanaged and butchered beyond belief.
i believe you’ll be doing damage control on this one for quite a while to come…
December 11th, 2006 at 8:47 am
While it’s certainly fair to criticize the Joanna Newsom show and the problems that were encountered it is also worth noting that this was part of a larger collective of shows. While I realize this was the most sought out and attended it’s also not fair to entirely judge the sucess of the Madison Pop Fest on the last show alone.
That being said, I think we can all agree that future shows will require better planning and preparation. I think nobody will argue with that, but I would hate to see that all the dissapointment leads to no future endeavors like this past weekend.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Kudos to the organizers for putting together a great weekend of music, free, eclectic, and all here in our fine little city. My only complaint about the festival is the door policy of student ID’s/union membership, which was an unadvertised and inane policy that ended up turning away lots of people. I’m a big hater of the small type that sneaks up on you like that.
And, can’t we retire this stupid moniker “hipster”, and stop counting who’s one and who’s a “hanger-on.” How do you tell? The ironic t-shirt, buddy hollies, bored look? Encyclopedia knowledge of Smog’s catalogue? I guess all of the older, square looking people I saw there were hangers-on, right? Stop your posing and just enjoy the music.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:44 am
“Oh Ryne, how this hurts me. In the last month or so the Union programming has hosted recent Pitchfork favorites Tokyo Police Club and Annuals.”
I could really care less about the lame buzz bands you book. Where are acts like Xiu Xiu, Ted Leo, Fugazi, Neutral Milk Hotel, Cat Power, and Spoon? These acts and many more like them have been booked in the past but are nonexist now, withe the exception of last Saturday. I think it was great that Joanna Newsom was booked as a free show, however, it could have been a much better show for all involved had some painfully obvious problems been addressed before hand. As for disorganization, it’s not as if this is the first time this has happened. Perhaps others remember two years ago when Of Montreal played at Club 770. All advertisements listed the show starting at 9:30, yet for some unknown reason it started two hours before that.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:48 am
whoa there little tiger, maybe if you had any actual background on the budget we work with and the constraints of working in a town with a well established promoter you would understand why it isn’t reasonable for us to get acts like that (not to say that we haven’t hosted some in the past ie. xiu/spoon, and aren’t trying again ie. ted leo). but rest assured we’ll work on bringing neutral milk hotel back for ya, i’m sure they are clamoring at the opportunity to reunite in our beautiful cafeteria that we have to use as a venue. not to mention i would love to have people like you out at all of our shows, you really seem to embody the best of the madison music scene.
again, if you are unhappy with the quality, do something about it. tuesday at 5, see you there.
and mmg, i understand your criticism, but there really wasn’t any way we could drive out to where she was eating and tell her the crowd is getting antsy. we knew what we were getting ourselves into when we booked her (as far as artist demands go), and i for one am happy with the end result. we didn’t have the resources to manage a line, even if we had picked some arbitrary point to start it there are so many ins and outs to the union that the same situation would have happened. everyone that stuck around to get in got in by joanna’s set, and barring the ridiculous number of people that showed up, the weekend went off without a hitch.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:56 am
People who complain about “the lack of quality shows” should have thought twice before moving to a city of 200,000. Seriously, find another city our size (in the world) that attracts big-name acts. The best we can do is bring the big names before they’re big which inevitably leads to shrill complants later on from those who realize what they’ve missed.
Thank you to everyone who came out, and a big apology to those who couldn’t get in. We should have planned a bit better, but everything turned out just fine–that is, the maximum number of people got to see Smog and Joanna and no one’s safety was compromised which became our main concern the day of show when the turnout was twice the expected. We were all disappointed with the set times, and if you want to pass on a complaint I’m sure JN and Smog have their respective emails or myspace pages. I could address the other complaints people have listed, but the details of the discussion aren’t suited for a public blog. I can be reached at the email address listed on the festival website.
December 11th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
pitchfork said it was cool that we were going to have this “festival.”
so quit bitching.
December 11th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
wmanningiv, I think that you missed my point. Of course I don’t expect Neutral Milk Hotel to play the Rathskellar anytime soon. My point was that bands that are in the position that NMH was in eight years ago are not coming to UW. For instance, last spring small schools in Iowa and Minnesota booked Sunset Rubdown and Frog Eyes, a show that undoubtedly would
have been a big draw in Madison. Could Cornell College possibly have more funding than UW? I doubt it. Also, I am well aware that Last Coast / True Endeavors has a monopoly on most acts that come to town. However, this does not apply to bands below a certain threshold.
“The best we can do is bring the big names before they’re big”
I completely agree, and this is what I am suggesting you do as it is not happening now. A few decent shows a year is not unreasonable, even in a city of 200,000. I don’t expect every act that is booked by WUD to suit my tastes, but the last few years have been atrocious. Just as a frame of reference consider our Big Ten rival Ohio State. In the last few years Ohio State has booked acts such as Explosions in the Sky, Edan, Prefuse 73, Bell Orchestre, John Zorn, Rhys Chatham, Ladytron, Matmos, Steve Reich, Califone, Boris, SunnO))), Mogwai, Vetiver, The Boredoms, Andrew Bird, Girl Talk, Wynton Marsalis, Wilco, The Books, The Rachel’s, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Mouse on Mars, and Hot Chip. How many of these acts have played at UW? None.
December 11th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
I thought the complications were relatively silenced by the weekend’s stellar performances. A sincere thank you to everyone involved.
December 11th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Wexner Hall is not student-run. It’s a University arts space that is funded by the state, the city, and by corporate donations. All programming is managed by a professional staff of 20+ people who receive salaries and don’t have to worry about ticket sales, much less final exams. Plus, Columbus is 3-4 times bigger than Madison, closer to the east coast, and far warmer and less snowier.
December 12th, 2006 at 7:13 am
Andrew Bird played the Orpheum this fall, High Noon last spring, Girl Talk was apparently scheduled to play Union South at some point this semester but it didn’t work out (same as LCD Soundsystem, & DFA1979 was sick and didn’t make their scheduled union south date), Hot Chip played the Annex recently I believe, as did Spoon (I think it was some sort of promotional/private show thing, but they were there), and I think Califone + Mouse on Mars too, Wilco JUST played the Orpheum or Barrymore around Thanksgiving, Rachel’s played the Sidedoor within the last 2 years. We haven’t had the Boredoms, but we did have Melt-Banana and Envy a year ago. We haven’t had Silver Mt. Zion, but Sigur Ros was at the Orpheum last fall. We haven’t had Sunn0))), but Wolf Eyes played Union South last semester (to a not very large crowd either) and Pelican multiple times (ditto there too), plus there was that whole Noize fest thing this fall I wasn’t able to make it out to.
December 12th, 2006 at 7:14 am
Ohio State also has a 30% bigger student population, fyi.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
There has been way too much crying, everybody needs to remember this was a FREE concert, with the optimal word being FREE. Yes it did suck the scenesters were out in force, gabbing away, just wanting to be spotted. But for the idiots that didn’t stick around for Joanna because people were talking over the opening act made a mistake. Yes, the views did kinda suck, but i’m 5’6” and I had a nice view of her mad harp skills, but what did kick ass was the music. If you had been paying attention you would have been listening to a vastly supperior version of Ys. The drums, back up vocals, and insturments that I have barely heard of (and by no means could spell) made this concert a great experience.