MUSIC REVIEW: Wilco at Solid Sound Festival, MASS MoCA

Submitted by Seth Rogovoy on August 15, 2010 - 12:41pm

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FIELD REPORT: SOLID SOUND FESTIVAL 3
MASS MoCA
NORTH ADAMS, Mass.
August 14, 2010

Review and photos by Seth Rogovoy

(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., August 15, 2010) – I don’t know how Solid Sound can top last night’s culminating performance by Wilco.

“Beauty” is not an aesthetic value that ranks high on the list for rock music. But it’s the word I keep coming back to when going over last night’s stunning, transcendent concert by Wilco. Beauty. In every sense of the word. The music was beautiful. The setting was beautiful; downright gorgeous. The visuals – the lighting and tableaux – were beautiful. The weather was beautiful. The sky blue sky was beautiful. The overall vibe was beautiful.

It was so beautiful that to write a narrative review of the concert, I fear, would be to miss the forest for the trees. I could talk about individual songs and moments; I could collect all the funny and tender things Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy said from the stage (he was a downright gregarious frontman last night). I could talk about the wonderful pacing, the fun guitar duels, the self-mockery and the broad and deep eclecticsm of a band that just may be the closest thing we have, or have ever had, to the Beatles.

But none of that would capture the real experience of what it was like to see Wilco on

this marvelous “Joe’s Field” just to the southeast of the main MASS MoCA campus – a hidden gem of an outdoor venue that easily could be North Adams’s answer to Northampton’s Pines Theatre at Look Park.

It was memorable, transcendent, and beautiful, and in twenty-five years of reviewing literally thousands of rock concerts, it easily ranks in the top ten, if not the top five, if not the top three, if not vying with Patti Smith (in MASS MoCA’s own Courtyard D) and David Byrne (at the old Berkshire Performing Arts Center in Lenox, Mass.) as the greatest concert I’ve ever witnessed.

Wilco = beauty.

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning music critic and editor-in-chief. He is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet,

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