Fest 411: Wilco + MASS MoCA + Incredible Music & Art = The Sublime Solid Sound Festival

Thank you, Sweet Baby James.

Sometimes a Plan B can so far surpass Plan A that the misalignment of stars that was once the impetus for changing plans can seem like destiny and/or kind of hilarious. Take Wilco’s wondrous Solid Sound festival at MASS MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in the small Berkshires town of North Adams, Massachusetts, which for eight iterations over the last 14 years has become a biannual touchstone for the band, its sprawling community and fanbase with sublime sounds and brilliant contemporary art in a stunning industrial art temple. The thing is, the whole shebang might very well not exist if, in its first year, a certain iconic singer-songwriter hadn’t been touring.

“Originally Solid Sound was going to be on the grounds of Tanglewood,” says Frank Riley, Wilco’s agent and founder of High Road Touring, who’s happily attended every Solid Sound since its inception. “But those folks reneged on our holds and gave them to James Taylor. A surer bet at the time, maybe – but a lost opportunity for Tanglewood, these past 14 years.”

Tanglewood shmanglewood. No offense to the lovely outdoor amphitheater and summer home to the Boston Pops, but compared to the massive and spectacular industrial complex that houses Mass MOCA (a former factory built in 1860 for the Arnold Print Works before the Sprague Electric company took over in 1942), it’s easy to see why the Plan A now seems ill-fated. As the largest contemporary art museum in North America — with some 500,000 square feet of interior space and brilliant installations by artists like Anselm Kiefer, James Turrell, Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt and Joseph Grigley as well as by musicians like Jason Moran and Laurie Anderson — the labyrinthine space, which wouldn’t look out of place in an industrial part of Berlin or Brooklyn, provides continuous discovery and epiphanies.

Adding to that foundational frisson are incredible live music performances spanning genres, geography and generations and attracting some 25,000 over Solid Sound’s June 28-30 weekend. That’s more than 8K a day paying a reasonable $299 for a three-day pass, roughly $2.4 million gross for those keeping box office score. The fest, which went to an every-other-year format in 2011, features some 30 acts ranging from foot-stomping rootsy rocker Jason Isbell, guitar-based African blues act Etran de L’Aïr, electronic and late-night DJ sets by Sylvan Esso to omnivorous guitarist Marc Ribot, young noise rockers Horsegirl and veteran rock and popper Nick Lowe to post-punkers Dry Cleaning, avant-gardeners Horse Lord and singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews along with the always-effervescent Young Fresh Fellows. Also effervescent: John Hodgman’s Comedy Cabaret with Eugene Mirman, Todd Berry and Brittany Carney among others.

Performances take place in a variety of settings, including bigger acts performing on the large grassy hillside stage (Joe’s Field), which can accommodate the entire festival, to smaller gallery “stages” that get packed-out with a couple of dozen, along with more moderate courtyard stages surrounded by the factory belt and installations of MASS MoCA (check out the suspended airstream above the food trucks and the brilliant Turrell skyroom in between sets).  At the eye of this surfeit of swirling glorious culture is one wildly adventurous six-piece. 

“This festival begins and ends with Wilco,” says Alex Crothers of Higher Ground Presents, which co-produces Solid Sound with Wilco and Mass MoCA. “All six members have their own projects,” the Burlington, Vermont-based promoter explains. This includes Wilco prime mover Jeff Tweedy along with Nels Cline, Pat Sansone, John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche and Mikael Jorgensen.  “The idea came up that there’s never been a festival where all of their bands would ever be hired to come play,” Crothers says of Wilco’s myriad side-projects which have included Autumn Defense, Tweedy, Mellotron Variations, Nels Cline 5, Loose Fur, Minus 5 and Saccata Quartet among others. “So the kernel of the idea was, ‘let’s create a festival that we’d want to go to and that all six band members’ projects could play.’”

Wilco, over the course of the three-day festival, will perform three prime-time sets at Joe’s Field. The first night features deep cuts and obscurities and the entirety of 2004’s Grammy-winning A Ghost Is Born, which turned 20 this year; Saturday is a full-on Wilco set featuring expansive song interpolations that run a sonic gamut from Americana, noise and tuneful melodies – sometimes within a song. Sunday night’s looser early-evening festival closer set featuring the communal Tweedy & Friends with Tweedy’s kids Sam and Spencer, James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart and Liam Kazar.

As Crothers is explaining some of Wilco’s expansive lineage, we pass the festival record store housed just off Mass MoCA’s courtyard (near the amazing Wilco merch store where I scored the Wilco band magnets). The record store has entire bins of vinyl labeled “Wilco Family,” “Solid Sound Artists” and “Wilco Adjacent,” which encompasses a huge swath of music.

“So Mary Halvorson (a jazz guitarist), she’s here tonight,” explains Crothers as we rifle through the Solid Sound bin. “Soul Glo was here yesterday, they’re a great example of the diversity of music at the festival. They’re a hardcore band from Philly that is amazing. At most festivals, you have to stay within a certain lane to a degree and stick within sort of whatever the zeitgeist is of the moment. One of the beauties of Solid Sound is the music programming gets to be all over the place.” To wit, Crothers describes the evening before when Marc Ribot did a live film score to a 1924 silent Soviet film called “Aelita, Queen of Mars.”

Solid Sound’s curation process is far-flung and collaborative with Tweedy taking something of a lead role. “It usually starts about a year plus out,” Crothers explains. “All six band members in Wilco send me a list of things that they’ve seen, people they know, connections they have and things that are aspirational. I go through that. Jeff usually sends me a list that’s about twice as long as those lists. And then I send him my list and we start to frame it together. We see who’s available, who’s touring.”

Solid Sound also has non-music and art programming all day from gallery talks, performances and events to nature hikes, yoga and “Friends of Bill” meetings and free banned books boxes. This year included miniature golf, an NPR “Song Exploder” interview with Hrishikesh Hirway and Tweedy and a contest to create the cover art for Wilco’s new E.P. “Hot Sun Cool Shroud.” In years past, there’s been falconry and an astrophysicist leading a star-gazing session.

The crowd here is longer in the tooth with a preponderance of gray hair but open-minded to all and everything and well-versed in fest etiquette. It’s a very reasonable adult festival and incredibly user-friendly (though the lack of racial diversity needs to be addressed).

“The highlights for me are often the impromptu performances in the larger galleries at MASS MoCA, and then also the deep dive into the Wilco catalog too,” High Road’s Riley says of Solid Sound. “The museum itself is a wonderful adjunct to the musical event … the exhibits there can range from the momentous and awe-inspiring to the perplexing and confounding. And any place that includes 11 semi-permanent installations of James Turrell (a light, space and land artist) is a wonder.”

When asked how this year ranked, Riley helps put it all in perspective. “Number one” he says before qualifying. “Only because it’s the one that happened most recently … and each of these has been more memorable than the last …”