Concert Review: Farm Aid 2007

Nothing reminds you of your age more than going to an outdoor music festival or any kind of large concert. The places wreak of nostalgia, inspiring story after story, all with a similar intro: “They were selling Warp Tour t-shirts for $13 in ’99 but we didn’t have any money left so we…” or “Two years ago, the port-a-potties at Bonnaroo were so full my buddy Adam puked on his falafel…” After you reach a certain age, your concert memories and stories suddenly seem to belong to someone else; a younger (and hopefully) more obnoxious version of yourself. Your experiences are sealed in a giant beach ball, collecting variations as it gets tossed around from stranger to stranger. But whether it's your disgust with being covered in beer all day or your annoyance with that asshole whose standing on a chair even though he’s only 30 feet from the stage, you realize that the whole concert experience just isn’t the same anymore. If you’re watching a newer band and you glance around the sea of raised cell-phone lighters only to discover that more than one person within kicking distance is wearing braces, you feel old. If you’re watching one of your favorite bands that you’ve known and loved your whole life and you allow your mind to wander back to when you kissed your first boy at the Junior High snowball to their first hit single, you feel old. If you’re watching a classic band, one that learned how to rock back when bands actually rocked, and you’re having a hard time seeing over the middle aged couple in front of you because they simply refuse to take their fists out of the air even for one second (actually, you can see over them just fine, you just can’t tear your eyes away from his nearly-retired college professor ponytail and her “want to see pictures of my new grandson?” mom-ass), you feel young. But then you think about the fact that they’ll all be dead soon and how when you were a kid you never thought about things like death, and then you feel old again. It’s inevitable. But the main reason you might be feeling old these days is because so many festivals are now run the exact same way you’ve always remembered them and the distinctions from one to another has become as blurry as your fading eyesight.

But not every concert is created equal. On Sunday, Farm Aid rocked Randall’s Island, reminding me that good music and good causes are still alive and kicking. For the first time in it’s twenty-two year history, the all-day concert was outdoors in a field, where it belongs. Farm Aid is a non-profit with a mission to support local family farms and to motivate people to boo/hiss/boycott the destructive factory farming system. Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson started the organization in 1985 and Dave Matthews joined in 2001. These are some powerful names in music and they’ve got some equally powerful friends. The early day highlights included the always spectacular Supersuckers, whose three-song set was so short it left me feeling cold, lost and empty like I just lost my virginity to a frat boy who called me Stacy and gave me $20 for a cab home. Guster, the notoriously eco-friendly east-coast rockers, and Matisyahu, the Jewish reggae superstar, also delivered. If there was one problem with the day’s lineup it was getting fans of all these amazing bands to accept that each one was only there to do a few short songs in support of the overall Farm Aid cause.

Unless of course you’re the Allman Brothers, who had the longest set of the entire show (PS they weren’t headlining). Legends indeed, but some of their jams can make you feel like you’re listening to your baby brother tell a long, digressive story about something that only makes sense in his mind. You’re with him for the first part but by the end you just want to scream in his face with a megaphone, “Just get to the goddamn point!” The only act of the day that seemed a bit out of place was the Counting Crows, mostly because their cover of “Thunder Road” was just too weird and poorly executed. The remainder of the evening was a mash-up of collaborations and covers, most notably Greg Allman, Nelson, Matthews and Warren Haynes did a sweet, easy-paced version of “Melissa” that has got to be one of the best ever performed. Haynes’ cover of U2’s “One” was moving....barely. I honestly don’t see the point in putting the breaks on an already painfully slow song, but then again I don’t have a “U2 4-Ever” tattoo on my ass, either. Derek Trucks, one of the greatest guitar players alive today, got a work out performing with the Allmans, the Derek Trucks Band, and sitting in with others throughout the night. Many people were there to see Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds and they definitely satisfied with acoustic hits like “Gravedigger” and “Crush”. The show closed with a series of sit-ins and mash-ups that gave a real sense that many of the songs were at least partially improvised, which made the night just that much better.

Neil young’s performance was by far the highlight of the evening. He and Nelson performed the Farm Aid standard “Homegrown” which Young explained, "used to be about one thing and now is about another." Ok, it’s cheesy, but in a time when every musician is suddenly an activist and feels the need to impart their only recently realized political agendas onto innocent ticket-holders, you have to have infinite respect for these guys who have been unassumingly planted in a cause for over two decades. To hear Young and Nelson talk about the travesty of family farms fighting a losing battle to factory competitors, you’d have to be Satan (or Bush) himself not to care. These guys are the real deal and there’s just something endlessly soul-quenching about that. And maybe it was the nine solid hours of drinking organic beer, but when Young, his wife Pegi and pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith did “Heart of Gold”, I let myself sink pretty deep into the moment. Then I started to think about the fact that I was getting misty at a concert…Jesus I’m old.

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