There could be no higher praise for a band than to say they’ve revitalized my love of rock & roll, which is exactly what My Morning Jacket did. I don’t even normally like the term ‘rock & roll’ for chrissakes, but here I am using it thanks to their show Saturday night in Detroit: I went and was just knocked out.
At other bands’ live shows, I’ve always been thinking things like, “They’d be better if they did X… there’s too much Y… Z was kind of cool but they didn’t quite pull it off.” But my only thought about Saturday’s MMJ show was, “That was perfect.”
So it was a little disconcerting to read on the Rolling Stone feed today that they’re postponing two or three weeks of shows after Jim James fell from the stage and injured his torso last night in lovely Iowa (the moment happens at the very end of this video):
It’s sort of unfortunate that this happened in the midst of their ascendence (though it certainly isn’t something capable of seriously holding them back).
They’ve already had a devoted following and critical praise for years and they’ve been steadily gaining momentum, achieving a kind of critical mass after their instantly legendary four hour set at Bonnaroo 2008, where they generated enough buzz to stack up with the likes of Pearl Jam, Metallica, and Kanye West as one of the event’s big stories.
There’s a video of My Morning Jacket being interviewed backstagealong with Mike and Jeff from Pearl Jam. It’s interesting to note that MMJ appeared and performed in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtownas bandmates to one of the movie’s characters. The last band to do that in one of Crowe’s movies (unless I missed something in between) was Pearl Jam in Singles (filmed back before Ten, before they were even called Pearl Jam).
I incredibly didn’t notice My Morning Jacket’s emergence (including their SNL performance and Spin cover story) until Bonnaroo in June.
I’d been a ‘music guy’ for a long time but I pretty much lost interest around 2004: too much work to keep up for the sake of far too little gain — you could get maybe three of four conversations worth of social capital by knowing about so-and-so, the hottest new thing, before getting sick or their music or moving on to something newer. I got tired of running on that treadmill and started exploring the history of music, going outside the popular genres, familiarizing myself with jazz, chilling to old-school country, trying to get a grasp of classical and experimental music…
Then that started getting wearisome too, and a year or two ago I was merely content to listen to anything churned out on mainstream radio stations (mainstream radio in London Ontario, no less — which has its highs and lows).
So, MMJ deserves the credit for getting me out of that. And my cousin and good friend Jeff deserves the credit for endorsing them to me in June, showing me their breakthrough Conan O’Brien performance on YouTube (and eventually getting me in on the trip to Detroit for Saturday’s concert).
For me, My Morning Jacket is everything that music should be: energetic without starting riots, sweet but not overly sentimental, catchy yet rugged, experimental yet visceral, ironic yet sincere, easygoing yet disciplined, rooted yet progressive, and ambitious yet down-to-earth: perfect.
Pingback: Need to Wail | B Frank