I have this on a shirt from a show I attended in 1998. That's right, baby, the "Being There" tour. Jay Bennet played fiddle while hanging by his knees from the HVAC.

Broadening PitchKnives’ scope from comestibles to ingestibles, allow me to recount last Friday night at the Americanarama Music Festival in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The overwhelming takeaway from the evening was a trio of rock n roll reiterations and a surprise:

1)    My Morning Jacket is the weirdest, mightiest, stadium-sized ROCK! band alive.
2)    Wilco is an unstoppable, deeply organic live act that covers a sweeping stylistic range in realizing some of the very best songs of the last 20 years.
3)     Bob Dylan can deliver a much better performance than you might expect.

That these are the takeaways is a testament to what the bands accomplished.

Because approximately 90 seconds into My Morning Jacket’s set, the crowd two feet in front of us scattered apart to reveal two men, each roughly twenty-five pounds over weight and with a bronze badge swinging from a chain around his neck, slamming a college-aged kid in loafers into the grass.  My first thought was of festival security and the fact that they weren’t interested in what I took out of my backpack and jammed into my pockets, only that I leave the empty backpack in the trash.  The Boston Marathon was on my mind.

But it immediately became clear that Hoboken’s Finest had, at the instant the kid broke out a dime bag to roll a joint, tackled his ass, twisted his limbs around, pressed his face into the ground, and cuffed him.  Why bother, after all, with something like, “Sorry, buddy, you’re busted; you’re under arrest; let’s go” when you can save your breath and rough up the threat to society?  The kid had no chance to run.  He didn’t even know what hit him.  Continue reading →