• Bipolar Images
• Health

By the time I found the Center Square Stage (it’s really close to the EMP, fact fans), LA quartet HEALTH were halfway through their set, but I caught enough of it to suss that they would be one of the day’s most exciting shows. They let off a manic tribal-industrial clamor that still allowed beauty into the equation amid the abrasive angst. This contrast—Kevin Shields-ian moans over a soundclash between Nine Inch Nails and Savage Republic, or indeed, My Bloody Valentine and Crash Worship—elevates HEALTH’s music above most in the American indie scene. Their Bumbershoot set possessed more funk than I recall from their recordings with drummer Benjamin Jared Miller slamming the hell out of his kit—which he had to do to be heard over the corroded metallic oscillations generated from the group’s self-built Zoothorn effects pedal. HEALTH provided a vital blast of apocalyptic weirdness on a blah late summer afternoon.

Walking to the Leo K. Theatre, I overhead a young white woman say, “I don’t like loud noises.” o_0

At Leo K.’s Words & Ideas Stage, musician/music historian Pat Thomas was schooling folks about the music of the Black Power movement. (The crowd, for what it’s worth, was about 99 percent white.) Thomas dug deep into his record collection to present a series of tracks that detailed the social plight and political struggles of African-Americans in the ’60s and ’70s. If the subject matter was familiar to those aware of that strife-laden, combustible time in American history, the music mostly was not.

I arrived at the presentation just as Stokely Carmichael was warning the populace (on an LP issued by a Motown Records subsidiary, a record that sold so poorly it probably gave Berry Gordy an ulcer) about the U.S. government’s plot to engineer a black genocide. Thomas proceeded to play and discuss tracks by Elaine Brown, the Lumpen, Amiri Baraka, Last Poets, Kain, Watts Prophets, Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, the Temptations, and… Bob Dylan, who wrote a song called “George Jackson,” about a murdered black activist. (Thomas noted that Black Panther Huey Newton was a big Dylan fan, which I didn’t know.)

• Josh Bis
• Budos Band

From there to Fisher Green for Wheedle’s Groove all-star jam, which was pure 100-percent-aged-in-soul-music joy for the four songs I caught. I hustled to Broad Street to try to see some of Atlas Sound, but they finished before their scheduled 5 pm ending. (I heard they killed it, despite frontman Bradford Cox reportedly being ill.) So it was back to Fisher Green for the Budos Band, who chopped out some evergreen variations on blaxploitation/porn/spy/TV-cop-show funk, with Afrobeat accents scattered throughout. Unstoppable grooves executed by molten-hot players—the Budos Band made me think that Bumbershoot should set up an enclosed area decked out with huge waterbeds where people can wantonly fuck when the urge strikes—as it often does at Bumber. Call it the Sextant (Sex Tent, geddit?). Hey, Bumbershoot always bills itself as a family experience—why not help to perpetuate families while it's happening?

(More opinionating after the cut.)

At the forlorn Northwest Court, Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra bust out some excellent library-music eclecticism. An American living in Britain, Lee assembled a killer ensemble of musos for this ultra-rare live performance. It was kind of like watching David Axelrod operate in a a well-appointed studio in 1970, but with longer silver hair. A highlight was a phenomenally funky tune called “Bongo Fury,” which came off as a homage to the Incredible Bongo Band (there just aren’t enough Incredible Bongo Band homages these days).

• Josh Bis
• Solomon Burke

My companion wanted to catch some of Solomon Burke’s set at Starbucks Stage, so we hoofed it there to see the man seated on a throne with what looked like Santa Claus’ getup draped over it. Burke was bedecked in a sequin-y tuxedo, surrounded by his large band of soul pros. His voice is still robust and he is still a consummate entertainer, but we booked it after a couple of numbers to see Bob Dylan at the Mainstage.

Holy shit, the stadium was damn near packed; not even the Stooges drew this many people back in ’05. We were over a football field’s distance away from the stage, so Dylan was but a tiny figure in black with a white rectangle on his noggin. His voice made me wonder how many millions of cigarettes he’s smoked in his 69 years. His band mates, as usual, were super competent, and they roughly sketched the contours of overly familiar songs, so it took you minutes to figure out chestnuts like “Desolation Row,” “Tangled Up in Blue” (done in Balearic funk style; it could’ve worked swell in a mashup with A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It”), “Just Like a Woman,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Cold Irons Bound.”

You have to give credit to a vet who treats his sacred-cow catalog with such cavalier attention to its recorded entities. This set was a seminar in grizzled growling over tight blues-rock professionalism, a quizzical wallow in Baby Boomer nostalgia from a figurehead who didn’t say a single pandering word to the crowd, unless I missed something in the opening and closing 10 minutes.

At the Crocodile for the "secret" gig by a Warp Records recording artist, Jamie Lidell and his five brothers in sound tore the roof off the sucka and then meticulously reconstructed said roof so it looked even more glamorous than before.

They ran through a lot off the new, better-than-expected Compass album (“The Ring,” “She Needs Me,” “I Wanna Be Your Telephone,” “Enough’s Enough”), plus “Green Light” and some Multiply cuts (title track, “What’s the Use”). But the highlight for me was when Lidell reverted to his solo guise for one track, in which he beatboxed a fantastically funky rhythm and then went to sweet soul nirvana with his honeyed yet gritty voice. I could've done with more of this biz, but, thankfully, Lidell's descents into maudlin balladry were outweighed by the party-igniting funk/soul burners.

As Wonder-ful as his Gaye Green Redding emulations are, it’s this brand of improvised future soul where Lidell really excels. But never mind the quibble: Lidell and co. wowed the crowd till 1:30 am while wearing a shredded suit jacket that probably cost more than what you pay in monthly rent. The show was totally worth the lost sleep it cost us.