It's Only Like Three Blocks: Hopscotch 2012 Recap

I’m not sure what it says about my experience at the Hopscotch Music Festival this past weekend when the most indelible memory involves my friend dropping his beer. Or rather, seeing his beer knocked out of his hand when an unidentified object came flying across Berkeley Café (tossed by the guitarist from the band Last Year’s Men) and made contact with my friend who was at the time quite oblivious to the threat of aerial attack. But that was the first thing I thought of when I began writing, just a few dozen hours removed from the festival, thinking of a way to define my third trip to Hopscotch in downtown Raleigh. Like the previous editions of the festival, everything was a whirlwind and hazy blur—though I saw only about 30 of the 175 acts performing over the course of the weekend, I felt like I never stopped moving and was never not listening to music coming from somewhere. I never got to digest anything whole before I was whisked away into the thick night air and down Martin Street once again. I don’t count that as a bad thing, though. There’s a kind of  maddening excitement that comes from knowing there’s music being made behind every brick wall in a one-mile radius and feeling you must do all you can to see as much of it as possible.

If this were a real music review, I would tell you about how Yo La Tengo’s quiet whisper somehow filled the massive (for Hopscotch) Memorial Auditorium, or how I could have sworn Jenn Wasner from Wye Oak was wielding not a guitar, but some kind of swift blade that kept rousing me from near slumber early Sunday morning at Lincoln Theatre. But the trouble with describing things this way is the fact that they feel less like solid memories and more like slowly dissolving dreams. I know as fact that I saw these things happen. I know how much I enjoyed seeing Roomrunner at Tir Na Nog, and how I sang along too loud with Built to Spill on City Plaza, and how I kept thinking Zeus seemed a million times better at a sparsely crowded White Collar Crime than the time I saw them with thousands of people in the hot sun in Toronto. But the fine details of the sounds that we paid good money to hear? Lost, it seems, forever.

As the number of festivals I’ve attended has grown to more than a handful, I have begun to realize these events really aren’t all about the music after all. They aren’t about checking off dozens of bands from some wish list or being able to tell your friends you were at X seeing X (so be impressed).  It’s about sitting under an overhang while the clouds unleash torrential rain on a Saturday evening, mumbling about the band Oneida, and thinking of all the numerous places and possibilities that were around you. It’s about stumbling into a place out of the rain and being pleasantly surprised by music you’ve never heard before and will probably never hear again. It’s even about taking a stupid rickshaw down the street to the next venue just to say you’ve done it.

Thursday night, as we stood in an ever-growing, yet unmoving queue outside the Pour House, we came to the realization we were not going to see Dan Deacon as we had planned—even though it was supposed to be the must-see show of the day and we would have scored major cool points for being there. But then it dawned on me, in just a matter of steps we could be somewhere else, and it didn’t really matter who we saw or what anyone else thought about it. We could have a good time around the corner, down the street, or just sitting on the balcony at Busy Bee watching all the people stumble around down below (which is exactly what we did).

I’ve now come to the conclusion that music festivals are ‘big picture’ events, made up of a sloppy stew of bits and pieces of sights and sounds you really can’t make out. But they all need to be there in order for it to work. I may not be able to make sense of a lot of what happened. I may not be able to replay perfectly in my mind Lonnie Walker’s exact set list or figure out the name of that Pictureplane song that I couldn’t get out of my head. But I know that I enjoyed it. And I know I can’t wait to do it all again.