Cropped Out Festival, Louisville Kentucky

The fourth annual Cropped Out festival  took place in Louisville, Kentucky last weekend, September 27-29, and since it was a relatively inexpensive ticket ($40 for both days) and a reasonably short drive, my girlfriend and I decided to go. A total of 36 bands played on Friday and Saturday, and due to a late start on Friday and tooling around the city on Saturday, I saw around half of them perform. (Freakwater and Lambchop played Sunday night as a separately ticketed event, which I didn’t attend.)

Cropped Out was started by a couple of Louisville guys who look to be in their early to mid 20s, and as the name implies they started the festival to host bands that tend not to be invited (or don’t want to play) some of the bigger music festivals. This primarily means a lot of bands who’ve had limited exposure, and the lineup did lean heavy toward young bands doing the standard garage/psych/punk moves with guitar/bass/drum and occasional organ. Given the predominance of these kind of bands, combined with a Google Image search I did to get an idea of what the venues looked like, I thought we would be walking into a raucous rock and roll weekend packed with drunken kids crammed into filthy garage-like venues. That turned out to be about half right.

What I wasn’t expecting was how many middle aged and older people attended, and a kind of county fair-like atmosphere created by the presence of food trucks, record and crafts vendors, dudes skating and playing basketball, and generally just how laid-back the whole vibe was. There weren’t many children running around, but some teenagers were there with parents, and it seemed like a lot of family members of band members were there. There were three performance spaces: an indoor bar a little smaller than Pilot Light, an outside alley and a larger outdoor covered space. One of the best things about Cropped Out is that unlike most festivals, there is hardly any overlap of bands, maybe 5-10 minutes at most, and as the stages are literally half a minute walk next to each other, you could see every band if you so desired. Oddly, though the stages were so close, there wasn’t any real audio spill over.

As for the performances, the oldsters in general turned out to be more cutting edge and out there than all the young dudes doing the garage/psych/punk rock thing. I love a lot of these bands, but I doubt I would have made the trek for a weekend exclusively made up of them, as Pilot Light does such a good job of bringing these kind of acts to town, and Knoxville has a number of rock bands every bit as good as a lot of these acts that get nationwide exposure. (That being said, my favorite rock act of the weekend was Bloomington’s Thee Open Sex, who stop by Knoxville with some frequency.) But mainly I went for the weirdos, which happened to be mostly old guys. No acts was harsher or more intense than long running jazz terrorist trio Borbetomagus, no guitarist wilder than noise veteran Bill Orcutt, nobody’s songs more lustful and surreal than Mayo Thompson’s, and nobody’s freak flag flew higher than Endless Boogie’s, headed by old head Paul Major.

Bill Orcutt and Chris Corsano’s guitar/drum duo performance turned out to be a weekend highlight. Watching the looks on people’s faces as they took in what these guys are capable of with just guitar and drums was almost as fun as watching Corsano work his way around his kit as Orcutt sort of sang along as his fingers leaped around his fretboard. As Borbetomagus’ blistering set started I happened to be eating an insultingly hot pork belly banh mi, so my mouth, stomach, ears and brain were all on fire. (btw, the best food I had in Louisville was from that banh mi truck and a taco truck parked at the fest, and both were much more reasonably priced than the city’s raved about restaurants. No wonder Market Square restaurants are worried.) Borbetomagus’ twin sax and electric guitar trio are pioneers in using traditional jazz instruments and methods in a noise setting, taking the lessons of Ayler, late Coltrane and Brotzmann to extremes. Their physical involvement with their instruments was about as intense as any group I’ve witnessed. Wolf Eyes were working on a fantastic outdoor set in the vein of their more subdued, barely “noise” at all new album (though I did have to move toward the back as the bass vibrating my entire body started to become uncomfortable), when they cut it short about 25 minutes in after Nate Young made some punk rock remarks about the cops, who had apparently made some complaints about the noise. Wolf Eyes did, however, play a make up indoor set later that evening after the scheduled festival wrapped up around 1 a.m. Guitarist Steve Gunn’s sets are always a pleasure, and his newish rock trio is flat out fantastic. Shit and Shine brought the grotesque Halloween and bunny ears but only three drummers, instead of the more expanded battery they sometimes have. Their set seemed a bit short, too, and I have a feeling their trance stylings work better in an extended periods.

Will Oldham (sorry, I hate calling him Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and Matt Sweeney were the festival headliners, performing for the first time their 2005 contemporary classic Superwolf. Oldham is always a joy to watch perform, in part because he has such an odd physicality when singing. It’s as if he has to twist and contort his limbs and face to get to the right note or emotive quality he wants in his singing, which is probably why he favors loose shirts and short shorts on stage. The lust, longing and heartbreak that appear throughout the songs on the album proved a nice compliment to Mayo Thompson’s earlier performance of his comically bawdy album Corky’s Debt to His Father. It turned out to be a fairly lighthearted performance of such heavy material, but Oldham is a hometown hero, so the mood was pretty good all around.

In fact, this mood dominated the festival, probably in part because so many of the bands had Louisville connections. At times it felt like I was interloping on a big reunion, and a cursory look at license plates in the parking area didn’t reveal many other cars from outside of Kentucky. Probably the most heartening and impressive thing about Cropped Out, in fact, is the celebration of Louisville’s music scene. Not just in wider known acts like Will Oldham and Freakwater, but through giving other local bands a bigger stage. Juanita are a Louisville institution whom I’d never heard of them until last weekend, and their set was probably the most fun and festive. First forming in 1978, Endtables mean a lot to members of Louisville’s influential post-punk and post-rock scene, and they were given a prime spot. Younger bands were given lots of time, too. (It was a great reminder of how important “local” bands are to any city. An ongoing criticism of many Knoxville bands is they don't tour enough, or don’t try to promote their recordings beyond the city or are just lazy or apathetic or what have you. There's some truth to this, though not as much as some people seem to think; week long or regional tours can matter a lot to people with day jobs with limited vacation time and families. Even if these bands don't get around much, though, they can have a huge impact on the immediate community. Cropped Out does a good job celebrating this fact.)                  

The venue also made the weekend memorable. A gymnastics camp that has seen better days, American Turners overlooks the Ohio River. A camping area was set up behind the stages, and tents were lined up on the banks of the river, with a large fire in their center. At dusk, we walked out on the not entirely safe, rickety dock to watch the sunset, and heard a Stevie Wonder cover drowning out the keyboard pointilism of Louisville outsider artist Montag at Cropped Out. We looked down the river to see some sort of large khaki-clad picnic going on at Louisville Water Tower Park, and the contrast between the aggressively PA’d cover band playing at a restored city park and the underground sounds bleating out from the crumbling site of Cropped Out seemed to underscore the spirit of the festival and the music it supports. Hearing the cover band’s cheesey sax solos as a family took to the water in a small yacht from the Water Tower’s new dock, we were happy to turn away and walk along the rotting dock, back to the those who, by choice or chance, are Cropped Out.