The Post-Rockist

Of Montreal, Wilco, and other musical acts in Milwaukee

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As a six-year-old, picturing myself at a rock concert, I would have imagined a concert hall, with a heavy red curtain and a crystal chandelier. With my six-year-old musical horizons limited to classical works, Motown, and Josie and the Pussycats, the band I imagined would come from that narrow world – they would be theatrical but light-hearted, catchy but musically deft. There would be flashbulbs, flooding lights, and everyone would be charged with the uncontainable, hyperkinetic energy that only six-year-olds can understand. A rock concert would be friendly, colorful – there might even be cartoons; six-year-olds love cartoons – but there would be a sense of danger, a pushing of boundaries, because rock concerts were a thing that little kids didn’t do, and those sorts of things usually involved trouble. And it would be the future – 2007, maybe (a year I would have called “twenty-oh-seven,” because at six years old, the nineteen-nineties would not have given way to the two-thousands), and the world would be streamlined, cordless, colored with glitter and silver.

Imagine me, then, at Milwaukee’s historic Pabst Theatre, an opera hall built by a beer baron in the 19th century. Now mostly a rock venue, the Pabst is plush – all white marble, gold leaf, and Austrian crystal. Imagine the curtain pulled back after two welcome-overstayed opening acts to reveal a costumed band – the keyboard player in ruffles, the bass player draped in a silver lame gown, wearing huge black wings – on tiered platforms that illuminated when the hook of the first chorus kicked in, bathing our astonished faces in bright white light. Three screens behind them looped psychedelic cartoon.

Imagine the awe of the six-year-old self, somehow incorporated into my confident, gratifying-job-holding, well-dressed, alcohol-consuming, sexually-realized adult being, that this was it, the rock concert of the future as seen from 1990, and it was Of Montreal.

A week later I saw Wilco in a smoky, delapidated ballroom in a poor part of the city (a neighborhood that Marquette University is slowly overtaking). The stage lights cut through the fog, the sloppy sound echoed. The band sounds so much rowdier live, so much fuller and so much more southern – like they belong in a barroom, not on reverential indie hit lists.

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There is nowhere to sit in the ballrooom, although there are scalloped balconies where people get close to the railing and dance. Wilco bothered with none of the misanthropic, reluctant-showmen affect that seems to define so many of the musicians I’ve seen live this fall. I think at one point Jeff Tweedy even said, “Keep cheering, because we’re not gonna stop.” He was wearing a cowboy hat, for God’s sake.

I think seeing Wilco was like seeing the rock concert I imagine to have existed in the past – maybe, 1978. Yeah – it was like seeing some cocky, sweaty, straight-shooting rock and roll band in 1978, the way we romanticize rock and roll bands to have been like once.

Tonight I’m seeing The New Pornographers, again at the Pabst. I wonder what sort of imagined times and spaces this show will bring to terra firma.

-Posted by Amy