Photo credit: Graham Tolbert
Has a single figure ever loomed as large over a music festival as Justin Vernon did at Eaux Claires? The inaugural festival in Eau Claire was co-curated with The National's Aaron Dessner and realized with the kind of massive team it takes to make any two-day gathering of 22,000 people happen, but at its heart it was unmistakably a monument to the tastes, loyalties and connections of one man. No act on the lineup was more than a degree removed from Vernon's circle, and each carried the stamp of an implied personal recommendation. Vernon named the festival after his home town, but he could have just as easily named it after himself.
Like every new music festival, Eaux Claires made promises about not being like every other music festival. Unlike most, however, it made a real effort to follow through. Though it couldn't sidestep the inevitable annoyances—the brutal lines, rumbling generators and thick barnyard smells; the nightly letdown of thousands of fans staring at a screen when they wish they could be staring at a stage—it was roomier and more inviting around the margins than most festivals, with wide open fields to retreat to and illuminated paths in the woods to explore. Compared to the corral-like confines of similar gatherings, this was an open sandbox. Even the event's layout fostered an element of fantasy. After being shuttled in by buses, fans followed a long, wooded passage that revealed the grounds. It was like discovering a secret retreat that, given all the myth-making surrounding Eau Claire's music scene, out of towners could imagine exists year round.
Headlining performances from Bon Iver and The National were the weekend's marquee draws, but where the festival really distinguished itself was with its small auxiliary stages, usually an afterthought at these kinds of events. Eaux Claires's featured a variety of imaginative performance art and surprise collaborations that were often more memorable than the marquee attractions. Text notifications from a festival app alerted attendees to some of their pop-up shows, like songwriter S. Carey's performance with the UW-Eau Claire jazz band; others, like a spontaneous, 45-minute improvised set between Volcano Choir's Chris Rosenau and Sylvan Esso's Nick Sanborn, were truly word-of-mouth.
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At an unusual domed stage called the Banks of the St. Coix, attendees were supplied with headphones to watch artists perform behind three walls of translucent video screens. That odd setup couldn't have been more perfect for Jon Mueller's Initiation, an album he recorded solely for live exhibition. Mueller played the record in the most literal sense, queuing up each side on a phonograph, then disappearing to the back of the stage. Dancer Dawn Springer sweated through an expressive routine during the A side, which synthesized ritual chants with the rhythmic builds of contemporary dance music. The record's bleaker B side was set to an intense projected film from Chris Hefner. Given the novelty of the format, Mueller could have coasted with second-tier material, but these compositions were as thrilling as his best album cuts, each loaded with surprise turns and magnificent payoffs.
Elsewhere, at a revival tent, visitors could take a number to confess their sins to a seedy preacher played by Minneapolis rapper Astronautalis. And at creative kids area dubbed the Piddle Tractor Family Zone, Megafaun's Joe Westerlund provided hourly performances with his live-action storybook freak show Grandma Sparrow. Little kids looked on, some intoxicated with delight, others silent and baffled, as Westerlund and his crew milked demented noises from their instruments. In its own way it was every bit as avant garde as anything Mueller has performed.
The main stage performers weren't nearly as form-breaking as the side attractions, but they were reliably solid. Country singer Sturgill Simpson embraced his jammy side, imagining a lost live record from Waylon Jennings and The Allman Brothers. Brisk as ever, Spoon demonstrated once again that they're one of the most consistently good bands nobody gets overly excited about. And Low delivered a scorching set that was perfectly timed for the hottest, most sun-baked stretch of Friday afternoon.
Closing out the festival's opening day, The National provided a lesson in covert showmanship, proving you don't have to look, act or even particularly sound like a flashy rock band to deliver a big, crowd-pleasing rock show. Their set also teased Saturday's headliners, with appearances from Vernon and Sufjan Stevens.
Poliça's walloping grooves boomed brilliantly from the big stage during a Saturday afternoon slot, though their show, like their records, succumbed to the fatigue of Channy Leaneagh's one-note, auto-tuned voice.
Sylvan Esso's Amelia Meath avoided that trap. Rather than piling digital on top of digital, Meath played her bright, unadorned voice in contrast to Sanborn's roiling, electronic beats. The weekend's biggest dance party, their set for a giddy overflow crowd was counter-programmed by the Indigo Girls, who performed their 1994 album Swamp Ophelia (one of Vernon's favorites) for a far more subdued, but no less satisfied, audience. The middle-aged folk-rock act was the most notable departure from the lineup's overarching young, hip and indie ethos, but it was refreshing to see the festival clear a spot of honor for an act that doesn't cleanly square with its target audience.
Early in his set, Sufjan Stevens told his audience he never plays festivals, citing a fear of crowds. Of course there are other reasons for Stevens to avoid the festival circuit: His solemn folk isn't a particularly good fit for sprawling outdoor crowds. Standouts from his suffocatingly sad new album Carrie & Lowell didn't land nearly as well as they did during his recent theater tour. "Even my happy, strummy songs are about death; I'm sorry,” he apologized to the crowd after playing "Casimir Pulaski Day." The mood lightened when he brought onstage The No BS Brass Band, a New Orleans-style brass band that moonlighted all over the festival, for the double-pronged Illinois suite "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" By that point, however, much of the crowd had left to stake out a spot for Bon Iver's closing set at the opposite stage.
In hindsight, Vernon might have done well to lower expectations for the performance, Bon Iver's first in years and possibly its last ever. Smart money says this won't actually be the end of Vernon's best-loved project, of course, but the mere possibility, combined with the heightened setting and the weekend-long buildup, imbued the show with a significance that it couldn't possibly live up to. For the first half of the set, the crowd remained oddly silent, and it was difficult to tell what to chalk that impassive reaction up to. Reverence? Probably, to some degree. Awe? Possibly. But is it possible there was some disappointment in there, too—a gradual realization that this special set wasn't going to be the spiritual experience it was built up to be?
Photo credit: Graham Tolbert
Vernon certainly put the effort in, but that might have been part of the problem. For much of the show he served less as a focal point and more as a conductor, ushering guest after guest on stage for grandiose renditions of songs that were perfectly good the first time around. The vocal trio The Staves served as a chorus. The classical ensemble yMusic provided strings. Josh Scott sang. Aaron and Bryce Dessner did... something; I couldn't see. Many of these guests were introduced with effusive, rambling praise from Vernon, who spoke so passionately about how their work shaped his music that at times it felt as if the singer was hosting his own episode of “This Is Your Life.” Some of the super-sized arrangements worked better than others. A No BS Brass Band-assisted version of “Perth” rumbled with regal authority, while a glitchy, deconstructed version of “Holocene” sputtered like an interrupted fax transmission. It's not easy making a song that pretty sound so ugly.
During one of his many addresses to the crowd, Vernon spoke of a shared lesson that everybody took away from this special weekend, a lesson he couldn't articulate but nonetheless felt deeply. Yet watching him with his bloated band on a big stage, it was hard not to wonder whether he'd taken away the same lesson as everyone else. Capping a festival where most of the highlights came from small, shared experiences, he kept swinging for the fences, trying to force magic in an environment where it didn't need to be forced.
