Hippies!

Akron/Family
July 24, 2008
Castle Clinton
NYC

With Megafaun and a mess of horns.

Castle Clinton, the pre-revolutionary stone fortress at the tip of the Battery that becomes an outdoor concert venue in the summer, was filled with a youthful, almost childlike, exuberance on Wednesday before that evening’s free Akron/Family concert that felt rare for a rock & roll show. I’m not sure if the crowd actually was demographically younger than at other rock shows, or if it was the effect of the early evening sunlight streaming in over the downtown skyline that made everyone look all shiny and dewy, but of all the free summer shows I’ve been to this summer, it sure felt like this was the one that was for the kids. When the band came out, I heard one young man near me say to his friend with what seemed like genuine awe, “Wow, that’s a lot of beards onstage. Do you think you could grow one like that?”

While the ascendancy of the beard among a certain subset of rock musicians is not unique to Akron/Family, the beards in this band are of a very distinct kind from other facial hair clogging stages across the land – this was the hippy beard. But it’s not just the beards (in fact, some of the 10+ musicians on stage were clean-shaven) – you can almost smell the hippiedom emanating off the stage in the back rows. But the brilliant part is that they manage to evoke this without being annoying (amazing, I know.) Because they are the kind of hippies that just love music, and playing it, and in doing so, have decided to let their freak flag fly, which is the cool kind. As such, they possess a cultivated eccentricity, at once taking their way of paying homage to classic Americana rock & roll very seriously while simultaneously evoking an incredibly silly sense of humor at the whole thing. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much at a show, well, ever. Not because there were Weird Al-style lyrics or comedic banter. It was more a joyous laughter, reveling at once in the intensity with which one experiences rock & roll and the absurdity of that intensity.

The Akrons transition from a capella crooning, with wheedling voices that evoke The Band and other classic Americana, to full-on jamming mode by hinging at the waist, turning away from their microphones with their backs to the audience, and bobbing their heads, long greasy locks of hair flailing in their faces. And they actually do rock out, which is cool. It’s clear they owe a debt of gratitude to the Grateful Dead with song lyrics that cite “mountains of the moon,” and at their last show at the Bowery Ballroom they flat-out covered both I Know You Rider and Turn On Your Lovelight.

If the audience has half as much fun as the band seems to be having on stage then they’re doing all right. And the audience seems to still know how to react to a band that’s jamming out - everywhere in view heads bop, arms flail, and fists pump the air. At one point the band coaxed the audience into a scream -off, counting off and then asking everyone to scream their heads off. A microphone was passed into the crowd so that everyone in the audience would be equally enfranchised with amplification as the band on stage. By the last song, Ed is a Portal, all hell seems to have broken lose, everyone's out of their head, the musicians are perched on each other's shoulders, and band and crowd have become one as everyone chants the lyrics, which everyone seems to know by heart, together.