Rites of Spring 2010

The flowers are budding, the sun is starting to shine and the Rites of Spring Festival has returned again to Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee!

This weekend however, the sun decided to only visit us sparingly. Still yet Friday night provided a fun atmosphere for Vandy students and fans alike. Alvin Love, the winner of the Rites of Spring battle of the bands competition, kicked off the afternoon with some brief but quality local performance. While the crowd for the opening act was not huge, the guys still gave it their best.

Chris Hennessee was the next performer and was strangely different from the rest of the weekend’s lineup. As a Tennessean, it came as no surprise when the band starting nailing out some traditional southern-rock jams. Obviously coming from a different generation, these guys kind of looked like the dad who plays in the small-town tavern’s cover band every Saturday. Long curly hair and unbuttoned flannel shirts fittingly clad the energetic musicians. The guys played for a set of fans, which seemed to know every single word Chris was singing. To wrap things up Chris said, “We have 5-minutes left so we have time to perform one long song or two short songs. We like to solo so we are going to do one long song.” Then the guys did one nice long southern anthem kind of tune and left the stage.

While very different, the next couple of shows shared a pretty similar vibe. The crowd was growing; far more people were standing up and that sense of festival community started really building. At 5:30 Giles Corey jumped on stage looking like the lead singer of Blues Traveler. He and the rest of Lubriphonic performed an almost New Orleans Zydeco style of music. Corey was having a good time and doing his best to get his crowd involved, but the most impressive part about this show was his backing band. Seven different musicians were on stage and spent an equal amount of time jamming as they did performing real songs. Corey told the Rites of Spring to rise up and then the group played an impressive cover of the 1967 hit, “Soul Man.”

The next act was The New Mastersounds. This English funk band played a 30-minute set, but promised everyone that if they would come and see them again the set would be at least two or three hours. Throughout the show, front man Eddie Roberts would crack jokes between almost every song. He even accused his own band of pretending to play American music and then asked the crowd how they liked the funny British sound of the band. As the sun began to go down over the beautiful Vanderbilt campus, The New Mastersounds provided an excellent transition to the evening.

Then in a blaze of reggae glory, Sierra Leone and the Refugee All Stars appeared. I doubt one of the seven musicians on stage was under the age of 50, and yet this was one of the most energetic shows of the weekend. The entire band was dressed in colorful, matching attire. They sang and danced in a way that immediately had every person at Rites on their feet and moving.

“We bring you the gift of African music and dance!” –Thanks guys. We appreciated it.

The 8:20 act, Cold War Kids, were one of the more anticipated shows of the weekend. Fortunately this anticipation was worth the wait. Although the band’s last album came out 2-years ago, this crowd was as enthralled as ever to see this intriguing performance. There was an echoing chorus of thousands of kids screaming, “HANG ME OUT TO DRY,” as Nathan Willett guided them as if they were his personal choir.

Then the lights went down for about 20-minutes before Phoenix entered the dark stage and the crowd went wild. The lights suddenly burst bright colors and the sounds of “Lisztomania” poured out of the speakers to an audience ready to sing every word. Gaining their biggest popularity after the recent release, Wolfgang Ammadeus Phoenix, Thomas Mars mentioned how Pheonix had played Rites in 2005 for only about 12-people. He humbly thanked “beautiful Tennessee” for being there to support the band. Mars was explosively entertaining. He jumped into the crowd and sang directly to the fans, climbed the scaffolding of the stage and never missed a beat. The band closed with their biggest hit, “1901” and everyone went wild.

Unfortunately, the evening’s headliner was far from the greatest show of the night. Drake did bring out a huge crowd of obsessive fans, and delivered an on point performance. The set was filled with antics. Drake did a shout out to Lil’ Wayne and then had the whole audience sing along as his DJ would play a track and then mute it so the audience could be heard. Drake said, “I like a lady to be built—Vander-built.” He then pulled a student out of the audience to come on stage. He danced with her and kissed her neck as thousands of young girls screamed in jealousy.

The disappointing part was many of Drake’s songs have a really slow R&B feel to them. While he had some fun tracks, much of the night’s energy was lost during his show. This was also just about the time that Nashville started getting rained on. The bad weather coupled with the exhaustion from a long day of music cued much of the Rites audience to begin making their way toward the exit.

Saturday:

Success was not in the cards for day 2 of Rites of Spring. Saturday started off with a series of crazy storms thrashing through Nashville. There was a tornado watch over middle Tennessee for the entire day. Then at about 2:00 p.m. news was released that Passion Pit had cancelled their performance due to illness. As the day progressed things just kept getting worse. The gates were originally supposed to open at 3:00, however the storms would not let up and therefore things kept getting pushed back.

Finally at about 8:30 the skies started to clear. Within 30-minutes one could see every star in the Nashville sky. Luckily, there was still time for three artists to perform.

Regardless of the day’s misfortune, both Doug E. Fresh and Melanie Fiona managed to pull a pretty good-sized crowd. The two performed just as if nothing had happened. The Rites of Spring audience seemed appreciative of the fact that Saturday was salvaged at all; everyone was right up front dancing through the mud. Doug delivered the hip-hop and Melanie brought the soul, which was a perfect set up for the night’s headliner Ben Harper and Relentless 7.

It seemed like yet another obstacle was about to face Rites of Spring when Ben Harper took nearly double the time scheduled for the set change. However he did finally come out and looked ecstatic to perform. The crowd went wild. Ben started the set playing his signature slide guitar and then never slowed down. The guys played a lot of the new Relentless 7 material, but made sure to keep the old fans happy with some Innocent Criminals stuff like “Diamonds on the Inside” and “Steal My Kisses.” Ben and Relentless even covered a Jimi Hendrix track and the classic “Under Pressure,” originally performed by Queen and David Bowie.

The night was coming to a close and the band decided to say farewell with a long-time favorite. The final song of the festival was “Burn One Down.”

What a roller coaster of a weekend. Rites of Spring 2010 is yet another festival to prove that rain or shine, music lovers cannot be stopped.

–Landin E. King, Contributing Editor

–Photos by Andrea Pinkard

–Ben Harper photo by Brian Waters