Pitchfork

While the cool kids spent the weekend at Coachella, a little piece of the hipster stratosphere broke off and fell on Fayetteville, Arkansas. Pitchfork's Joe Tangari headed to the Dickson Street Music Festival to catch Sonic Youth playing with a lineup of good ol' boys and frat faves, and he lived to tell the tale.

Stay tuned for our Coachella coverage...

To a starving man, there's nothing better than a good meal. The indie rock fans of Northwest Arkansas do a lot of starving. A few bands a year come through George's or JR's, and the University of Arkansas books somebody decent at its Greek amphitheater about once a year... and that's it. So when Sonic Youth showed up as the day two headliner of the first annual Dickson Street Music Festival, indie rockers from about ten counties in Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma came out in force.

At a glance, the bill for the festival looks incongruous: Shooter Jennings, .38 Special, and the Charlie Daniels Band on the first night and Little Feat, Michael Franti & Spearhead, and Sonic Youth on the second. Strange as it is, though, splitting the acts like that made it a lot less so.

On day one, cowboy hats and camouflage attire filled the audience in abundance and the crowd got exactly what it came for. .38 Special had 30 years' worth of rock star moves, complete with mic stand twirling (yes, the whole stand-- I thought someone was going to be killed or at least injured), jet noises as they walked on stage, drum stand lights that mimicked police lights, and a prolific smoke machine.

For a guy who looks vaguely like Santa Claus in denim and happens to be 71 years old, Charlie Daniels has a ton of on-stage energy. I listened to Daniels a lot when I was around 12 years old, and on Friday I was struck by how prog some of his old music is. The band played their hit "El Toreador" and it sounded like it could have come off a bizarro Old West Yes album. Charlie's fiddle is still as mean as ever.

CHARLIE DANIELS BAND:

On day two, about the only camouflage I saw was the ironic netting on Michael Franti's amplifiers. The crowd morphed pretty smoothly from Little Feat's mostly older audience to an enthusiastic jumping and hula-hooping mob of college and high school students for Franti's idealistic blend of reggae, funk, alt-rock and rap. Juxtaposed against the Charlie Daniels t-shirts with the words "these colors don't run" printed across an American flag, Franti's huge banner depicting some kind of faux-Hindu deity in a gas mask holding a bloody cheeseburger, an airplane, and a pistol under the words "caveat emptor" made for an interesting clash of ideologies.

SHOOTER JENNINGS / MICHAEL FRANTI & SPEARHEAD:

SONIC YOUTH:

Much of Franti's audience hung around for Sonic Youth, and dozens of people I hadn't yet noticed in the crowd moved toward the front. As we were in a massive parking lot, these people had plenty of places to go before the band they came to see went on. The audience worked up a Sonic Youth chant twice during the interminable sound check (the sound guy did a great job, though, and the mix was fantastic), and the band played a hell of a set, aided by the addition of Pavement's Mark Ibold to the lineup.

The all-ages admittance policy didn't stop them from ripping through a careening version of "Bull in the Heather" or going on extended feedback sorties that whipped the crowd into a frenzy. They've earned a few rock star moves of their own-- Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore each spent some time busting crazy guitar moves on the amplifiers that jutted out toward the crowd, with Lee giving a few fans up front a chance to do a bit of strumming.

During one of the SY chants before the show, I heard two guys behind me-- one was in an instrumental metal band from Lawrence, Kansas, called Lethe and the other had on a Washing Machine t-shirt--commenting that the odd festival lineup (did I mention that Blind Melon played the after-party?) was pretty cool, and after watching the whole thing, I have to agree. The festival ran right next to the town's yearly Springfest, and it's not easy to serve such a general audience with music, but it seems just about everyone went home happy.