Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band took to the stage at the intimate Bearsville Theater in Woodstock to a sold out crowd so tightly knit, it felt like the audience was ebbing and flowing on some Extra Terrestrial spaceship that had just landed for the sole purpose of reminding humanity to witness all of its multiplicity and forms before it vanished into some complex, ethereal vapor. Oberst sings of this existential vortex on his new albums, Conor Oberst and Outer South, (2008, 2009/Merge Records), where he and the extremely talented Mystic Valley Band are only eighteen tour dates short of finishing their crazy American domestic quest, exploring themes of nihilistically religious love, American exile, economic torpor, and modern political delusion.
The two albums range in style and emotional complexity – but they both draw from Oberst’s well known spare and emotionally exquisite lyrics. (One could teach Oberst’s “songs” in a poetry class, and students would never be bored by the heavy guitars combined with symbolic titles like “To All the Lights in the Windows.”) On both albums, Oberst’s hard core/folk protest tradition is mixed with alt/country and some more mainstream but rhapsodically edgy and twangy summer rock songs like “Nikorette” and “Danny Callahan.”
Oberst and his cadre of gifted musical brothers proved there really is no one genre that can contain the forces of nature. Tickets were a mere $22 making the Indie show accessible to all, proving that Oberst is quite serious about bringing his band’s talents to those who are simply intelligent and passionate about music, without the high price tag of commercial vipers.
The Mystic Valley Band is comprised of a group of superb musicians, some are regulars associated with Oberst’s critically acclaimed Bright Eyes touring band (Nate Walcott, keyboard/piano/organ, Jason Boesel, drums, Nik Freitas, guitar, and Conor Oberst himself), with the added beastly talents of Macey Taylor (bass) and Taylor Hollingsworth (electric/acoustic guitar and slide).
The night began for most fans outside by the rambling stream, with many overflowing into the Bearsville Theater’s Kyoto Temple-like garden grove of ancient trees; others drank in the clear night with buoyant relief after days of ceaseless rain, spilling out into the glass and wood open bar. There was a warm summer wind, and a glowing yellow moon that looked carved and clear and aching to be full. Once the music started, there was no room in the packed Zen-like barn illuminated by paper pink and orange Japanese lanterns, and Oberst opened the show with a tight rendition of “Sausalito,” (from the self-titled: Conor Oberst), a romantic and passionate recollection of heavenly love too fragile and beautiful for this world. “The kind of love that makes my back hurt, wearing nothing but a t-shirt…she’s turning over on a mattress made of air … I close my eyes, I see a staircase, leading upwards into blank space … all of creation makes a sound too soft to hear.” Meanwhile, heavy guitars wailed and the audience morphed into an immediate and bouncy responsive taught string.
Splayed like a four-pointed star across the stage for this song and others were the heavy, raw, and tight-like Creedence Clearwater Revival electric and acoustic guitars of Oberst, Hollingsworth, and Freitas, and the steep bass grooves of Macey Taylor. Off to the side, but of no less import, Nathaniel Walcott (piano/keyboard/organ) reared monstrously beautiful analog sounding keyboard and organ sounds reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright, or Ray Manzarek from The Doors. The music coming out of his corner on the stage was otherworldly, and recollected heavyweight seventies rock bands that altered the consciousness through reverberating sounds grounded in some parallel high octave alternate universe. Walcott’s eerie and ghostly multilayered keyboard and organ strands distilled Oberst’s soulful lyrics throughout the show with a psychedelic poignancy that cannot be described as anything other than “being in a man’s mind, with himself and the lonely phantoms of existence.” Walcott is an ornately refined dragon on the keys, holding back and letting go at all the right moments, and the sounds coming out of his corner on the Bearsville stage were wildly original and unprecedented, both retro and modern at once and highlighted in powerful songs such as “I Got The Reason #2,” (Outer South), where Oberst sings about the perils of religion, worldly reckoning, and the complexities of ambition and alienation.
At one point in the show, Oberst and Walcott played “Lenders in the Temple,” (Conor Oberst) with a simple acoustic guitar, spare mono-tunnel lighting, and Walcott’s linguistically fluent organ, as Oberst lamented, “There’s money lenders inside the temple. That circus tiger’s going to break your heart; something so wild turned into paper, if I loved you, well that’s my fault.” The eerie and totally original keyboard sounds combined with Oberst’s famously haunting verses echoed through the awestruck audience like a borrowed love that’s crossed the River Styx, complete with the self-aware ferryman of fearful death, a stillborn love murdered by a man’s own ego, corrupt society, regret, and time.
The Mystic River Band could not exist without the precise, spirited and low funky back beats and vocals of drummer Jason Boesel (Rilo Kiley, Bright Eyes, The Elected). Nik Freitas’ guitar playing and vocals are solid and intensely grounding for the band with both traditional and anarchic classic rock guitar riffs and hooks, and Taylor Hollingsworth, bobbed up and down humbly with his baseball cap to the band’s synergistic vibe until he played a couple of solos… proving himself to be a guitarist and young musician with potentially world colliding and dwarfing supernova capabilities. When he played the Slide, it was almost as if the band was being transposed into the eye of some Hubble observed exploding blue star, with Hollingsworth’s electric swamp rock moans prompting inner worlds that opened into subsequent unfolding nubile galaxies, meanwhile, Oberst’s voice echoed like a not quite vanquished warrior into the melancholy of milennia. We will be hearing much more from this Alabama “guitar” player and Oberst, hopefully, working together again in the future. At times, Hollingsworth sounded like a monolithic musical sculpture of influences forged in the underworlds – bringing sounds to the band recollective of Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Neil Young, and other blues/country/rock legends – and Hollingsworth was completely original and authentically himself, and as unassuming as a teenager you might meet mailing letters for his mom at the post office. On Outer South’s “Roosevelt Room,” a great song on the new album, it’s easy to imagine Hollingsworth playing in some remote basement by himself, worrying his parents that their roof might disengage or that their carpet might simultaneously combust with their son’s fire.
Oberst has been called by many who know music to be a “songwriting genius,” and his emotional and politically charged lyrics have been described often as Dylanesque; his verses are transfigurative and symbolic on deeply felt levels. But also to his credit, Oberst, the front man, has surrounded himself with talented musicians worthy of time. The most beautiful aspect of the night was watching them connect with each other in a highly egalitarian collaboration, a unique blending of the individuality of each on different songs each had a hand in shaping, and recognizing on some spiritual level, that in the case of the Mystic Valley Band, that indeed the sum of the band’s symmetry is greater than each part on its own. On some archetypal musical level, the audience responded to Oberst’s latest more “mainstream” Rock collaboration with deep appreciation. One fan screamed out to the singer/songwriter, “You’re a fucking genius,” mirroring what many felt, but kept diplomatically inside.
Perhaps it was the old Kyoto barn by the river; perhaps it was Oberst himself or the way Walcott breached sounds no one had ever yet heard. Maybe it was the ironic and bittersweet lyrics in hauntingly lonely songs like “White Shoes,” where Oberst nearly wears his worn lover’s heart on his chest …“If You want to be common, I can claim that I tamed you… a demigod in a bonnet…they’re gonna’ know, it aint true…”…Or maybe it was the impromptu joining of “musical brothers” on stage at the end of the show with an unexpected triple encore building to a crescendo with “I Don’t Want To Die (In the Hospital)” and a surprise guest visit from the local and famous Felice Brothers, turning the stage into a collectively joyous and lamenting existential party. Ultimately, it is not every day in the modern world, one can walk into an elegant “barn” like the Bearsville Theater and witness a tribe of young musical mystics replete with courage, the sharing of gifted ability, and a range that dwarfs category skating together along a threshold refined by anarchistic experimental power. If the void is haunting Oberst still, as alluded to on his prior critically acclaimed albums (I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, and Cassadaga), he always has his band to touch down upon the steel black and blue inner waters like lightening storms on a cold, ancient sea. Yeah, you can call the Mystic Valley Band “Alt Country,” or “Rock” in the old tradition of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, or Stevie Ray Vaughn — but to name it anything other than itself, is to pigeonhole a group of young artists who defy categorization, genre, and gravity.
Oberst will be opening for Wilco at Dutchess Stadium, Wappingers Falls on July 18.
This article appears in July 2009.
