Intro
Legions of music lovers flowed through the festival in a white-water torrent of wine-drinking and rapturous grooving on the second day of BottleRock. Across the Napa Valley Expo, a number of stages simultaneously presented artists from rising indie-rockers to old legends.
In addition to the main-stage acts, the event featured a silent disco, roller rink, bar, club alongside other attractions. It was a certified carnival buffet of all-day entertainment. Many establishments served bounties of Napa County’s famous wine, while a whole bend of stalls dedicated to delivering beer. People of all ages swarmed the festival, including the confused children of millenial and Gen X Foo Fighters fans.
Folk Bitch Trio
Folk Bitch Trio came all the way from Melbourne, Australia to serenade the NorthBay Health Stage with their dreamy indie folk. Acoustic guitars resonated with hypnotic melodies, each carrying equal parts melancholy and catharsis. Their airy vocals swirled together in an atmosphere of youthful emotionality.
Their music blended folk lyricism with a lo-fi soundscape of reverbing minor chords that built into an outburst of pressurized angst. The songs explored the female experience of young adulthood through poetic lyrics of love and vulnerability, all the while sardonically observing people’s funny little faults. It was about finding some humor and beauty even in the darkness.
Make no mistake though, when it truly mattered they weren’t afraid to boldly speak truth to power. “Free Palestine and fuck ICE,” they said.
“This is a good excuse for day-drinking with your friends,” Folk Bitch Trio said.
Despite the heaviness of these themes, they explored them with an understated, glassy gentleness. Their lullaby-quality excellency kicked off the afternoon as an eye of gentle stillness in the chaotic hurricane of the rest of the festival.
The Return of Jackie and Judy
“The Return of Jackie and Judy” is a classic song from foundational ‘80s punk band Ramones, it also happens to be the name of the Ramones tribute band made by Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney fame and superstar comedian Fred Armisen.
Known for co-creating and acting in the legendary satirical sketch comedy show Portlandia, Brownstein and Armisen always make for incredible creative partners. All their satirizing punk culture in Portlandia clearly came from a place of love, while their set on Prudential Stage was a love-letter to the punk community from start to finish.
Their performance brought all the raucous, classic punk rock energy that the culture might just desperately need right now. Brownstein and Tucker controlled the audience with their raw vocals while Armisen reprised his past role as a punk drummer. Flaunting his signature jet-black Ramones mullet and leather jacket, the set was a time machine back to the punk rock n’ roll of the ‘80s.
“Who here has seen the Ramones live?” Armison asked. Met with a lukewarm pittance of applause he said, “That’s a respectable amount of people.”
Being a comedy duo, Brownstein and Armisen couldn’t help but bring their dry humor to the performance. “Do they play Napa?” Brownstein said.
“I think they’re a Napa band,” Armisen responded.
Flipturn
Florida indie-pop-rock band Flipturn came in hot with their uptempo sound atop the T-Mobile Stage. Their surfy riffs and dramatic slide guitar sounds were eminently danceable. The drummer was especially skilled, playing shuffling, high-velocity beats that formed a dynamic base for the rest of the band to play to.
Their set was summer in a bottle: the spirit of a Florida beach, old high school friends and college house shows. Their energy matched that of a group of young friends messing around in their garage and having fun, who also just happened to be playing in front of thousands of people.
The lyrics featured themes around coming-of-age and young love, capturing the feeling of youthful nostalgia. It was like a film-adaptation of a YA teenage supernatural romance novel, unquestionably fun despite its adolescence. Their songs weren’t incredibly deep, but they put on a damn fun show.
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Decades since the start of her sweeping music career, Joan Jett absolutely still had it as she performed at Prudential Stage. Keeping in theme with BottleRock itself, her music aged like a fine wine. Her raspy vocals sounded like ‘80s rebellion, carrying all the anger of a time when female rock n’ roll stars were unimaginable.
It was a reminder that the ‘80s weren’t that long ago and that women are still fighting for the respect of the music industry.
Over 40 years since its release, “Cherry Bomb” elicited a full-crowd singalong. Seeing Joan Jett perform is watching a piece of living rock history thrash around on stage. Keyboard player Kenny Laguna told the story of how her classic band, The Runaways, got started.
“We printed up some records, we put them on the trunk of our car, and started touring,” Laguna said.
Her truly revolutionary music didn’t come from generational wealth or pandering to the industry. Joan Jett made herself up from the ground and, with a generous helping of luck, became a legend through her steadfast refusal to conform.
LCD Soundsystem
Absolutely cutting through all the noise, LCD Soundsystem enchanted thousands of audience members in their intricate web of bewitching dance-punk.
The visuals were far above and beyond all others at the festival; a vortex of psychedelic colors, phrenetic flashing and layered abstractions danced across Prudential Stage jumbotrons. It was impossible not to dance with the bass pounding underfoot and disco hi-hat grooves above.
Frontman James Murphy gave a thrilling, unbeatable performance of theatrical falsettos juxtaposed with frenzied belting. It was the peak of fun, start to finish. The experimental synth and resounding guitar feedback made for a wildly original soundscape.
Beyond all else, their stage presence was impeccable. Murphy switched poses with a compulsive, ceaseless flare, all the while seeming to never tire. He joined in on the percussion, using a single drum stick as his weapon of choice to rhythmically tap on anything and everything within a tappable range. Mic stands, drum pads, cymbals — nothing was safe from his percussive rampage.
The musicians turned dials on synths and fiddled on their instruments like mad science geniuses using their dark knowledge to create sick electronic music. Getting to experience LCD Soundsystem perform was unquestionably a highlight of the entire day.
Rilo Kiley
Los Angeles indie-rock band Rilo Kiley performed cinematic bangers of sweeping sentimental guitar and crescendoing vocals at T-Mobile Stage. Their tear-jerking bluesy riffs only enhanced the half-screaming, half-weeping emotional quality of their singing.
Even though their music is devastatingly sad, it’s also extremely catchy. It’s a true feat of artistry to make a song called “The Execution of All Things” a danceable anthem that can induce the rare dual-state of crying while boogying.
Since the early 2000s, Rilo Kiley has crafted layered compositions featuring beautifully sad, poetic lyrics, vulnerable to the needle’s point of unraveling. They’ve played with all the titans of ‘00s indie-rock: Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service, Elliot Smith and Bright Eyes to name a few.
Also, it must be said that the ASL interpreter for Rilo Kiley was just as much a part of the performance as the band was. He was absolutely grooving the house down during the entire set, perfectly capturing the vocals’ emotion with his signing.
Foo Fighters
Generationally iconic post-grunge band Foo Fighters performed Saturday’s climactic headlining set. If anyone was feeling tired by the day’s end, their volcanic eruption of hard rock ruckus woke everyone up. Screeching guitar coated in distortion and frontman Dave Grohl’s impassioned fry screaming filled the Napa sky with that Foo Fighters grit.
The visuals featured industrial landscapes grazed by darkness. With megalithic heaviness, the aesthetic only added to the performance’s raging feel. Projected on towering screens that loomed over the massive crowd, these literally larger than life musicians were like kaijus rampaging through BottleRock.
“I rocked that shit so hard, I broke the fucking strings on my guitar,” Grohl said.
A veritable army of fans crowded the vast field in front of Prudential Stage. It was somewhat distracting to be packed tighter than a bed-in-a-box between several thousand people, few of them sober, but that was just the price of seeing Foo Fighters live.
It can’t be understated just how powerful it was to see the legacy of Foo Fighters manifest in the flesh. During his time as the drummer of Nirvana, Grohl helped to catalyze the hugely influential grunge subculture. It’s a testament to his work that he managed to cut to the heart of millions a second time with the creation of Foo Fighters.
Their set was the perfect end to the night, easily putting the “rock” in BottleRock.
Zedd
Russian-German DJ Zedd also happened to headline BottleRock concurrently with Foo Fighters, playing to a somewhat smaller but still gargantuan crowd of fans at the T-Mobile Stage. While Foo Fighters were giving their incredible performance, his music amounted to amazingly simplistic EDM remixes of Kohl’s commercial style generic pop music.
For allegedly being famous, his stage presence was virtually nonexistent. Standing in front of an enormous 8-foot wide DJ turntable, Zedd’s performance consisted primarily of hopping up and down in place while occasionally making minuscule adjustments on his DJ set.
A far cry from the unique, experimental and highly active synth music of LCD Soundsystem a couple hours earlier, Zedd barely played any active role in DJing his high-school-P.E-pop-mix-garageband-EDM-preset-esque set. He might as well have hit play on a laptop and taken a smoke break for all the musical talent he showcased.
If this assessment seems unreasonably harsh, consider that Zedd has amassed 20 million monthly listeners and unimaginable wealth for remixing other more talented artists’ songs with all the creativity of an AI chat model.
It seems statistically impossible that such a bland, mediocre DJ could end up headlining BottleRock in front of thousands of people, and yet he did. Even more astounding is how all those people chose to listen to Zedd’s set within a five minute walk of seeing Foo Fighters. For any passionate musicians out there with BottleRock dreams of their own, this was a chilling reminder that the music industry is random and getting famous might as well be throwing a dart backwards while blindfolded at this point.
The day was a winding odyssey through armies of fans and wildly varied acts. Individually, most of these acts were fairly good, with the exception of a certain artist whose name perhaps rhymes with bed.
Unfortunately, the selection of artists may just have been varied to the point of thematic incongruence. Rock and rock adjacent bands like Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, LCD Soundsystem, Rilo Kiley and Foo Fighters made perfect sense for a festival that catered mostly to fans of wine and nostalgic rock music.
Acts like AJR, Busta Rhymes and Zedd, while maybe not inherently bad, certainly created an odd dissonance with the festival’s general indie-rock vibe. The organizers likely made this choice to draw in a younger audience at the cost of sacrificing some thematic cohesion.
What’s certain is that at the end of Saturday, everybody left BottleRock thoroughly exhausted. It was exciting, chaotic, fun and often overwhelming, but ultimately a one-of-a-kind experience worth having. To be able to see so many artists in a huge, decadent festival of music-lovers was an immense privilege, one which deserves thorough appreciation.
