Previously, on How To Sneak Into Governor’s Ball:
I get off at my stop at 6:30, six hours later than I had planned, due to two blunders of mine and one giant blunder of humanity. My father’s car had been here for like 18 hours now, but there’s no ticket. You did it again, Kev-O. I drive back, the king of the streets. Gleaming with pinkish-orange daybreak, this terrible place has never looked so serene. There are no other cars on the road. I swerve a bunch, I drive on the wrong side of the road for a bit, I take my foot off the gas and just roll. I pull in the driveway, crawl into my childhood bed, and sink into oblivion.
DAY 2: SATURDAY
I’m awoken three hours later by the crying baby in my house. What crying baby? There’s no baby. I’m hallucinating. Nope, that’s a crying baby. Okay, now I’m really awake. What? A couple minutes later spent in denial, wishing it would all just go away, and I hear my neighbor’s voice trying to soothe her baby daughter. What is Corinne doing here at 9:30 in the morning? Why did she bring her baby? Why does God hate me?
I wake up again at 1 p.m. I got just enough sleep to not be any more tired than I was at 6 a.m. I walk down Main Street to the train station, my thumb out the whole way. Impossible to hitch a ride in this town.
I get to the city, meet up with Bongo for real this time, and we head to the festival. Over the bridge, through the cop-tunnel, under the bridge, “gotta meet our Uber, excuse us,” walk down the street, pass the little league fields, dodge the falling s**t-liquid, “Isn’t this like a biohazard?” I ask Bongo. “Yeah dude,” he says, “this is how people get Ebola.” Walk around the stadium, put on our flannels, walk behind the stage, behind the beer truck, go.
We lift up the fence and go under, only to make eye contact with two security guards sitting at the perfect 2-and-a-half-feet from the ground eye level to be able to see us under the truck. We stare at each other in disbelief for a second, and then I say, “go back.” We slide right back under the fence, and as I start walking away Bongo runs past me like a headless chicken.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “Why are you running?” He stops.
“I think I broke my arm,” he says.
What? How? “Uh, do you want me to like, call an ambulance? What do you wanna do?”
“Crap, ow, I don’t know.”
We walk up to a security guard on the outside. “Excuse me,” I say, “he fell and broke his arm, is there anything you can do, or anyone you can call?”
She looks at us like a disapproving mother. “Did you try to hop the fence?”
“No! No, no, no, no, I fell,” says Bongo.
She motions to a security guard on the other side of the fence. “Did these two just try to sneak in?”
“Two white boys? Gray shirts? Nah, we got them. They said they were there to sell chicken,” says the other guard.
Incredible. Two other white boys got caught sneaking in the exact time we did. “I think I might have just like, popped it out,” says Bongo. “Do you know how to pop a shoulder back in?” he asks the new guard.
“Nah,” the guard says, as if he was asked if he knew how to get to Hyde’s Bar And Grille.
Pop. “Never mind, I think I got it,” says Bongo. I notice Bongo is also bleeding from both knees, and one elbow. All we had to do was lift up a fence and slide under, on soft dirt. I couldn’t have injured myself if I tried.
Bongo walks up to another golf cart to see if they have any kind of first-aid capabilities. They hand him a cold water bottle and some napkins. They direct us over to where we were seen sneaking in to see if we can use the medical tent inside the festival.
“Can’t go there,” I say to Bongo as we walk away. We can either walk all the way around to the other entrance, or lie on the grass by the stadium for a bit and then come up with a plan.
Lying on the grass, I see two people walk slowly, obviously unsure of themselves, across the empty soccer stadium, in full view of everyone. Are all the cops and security just not looking? No way it’s that easy. They get to the fence against where the festival is, and they pause and grip it and walk around for a bit. A minute later, they’re gone. “They’re gone!” Bongo and I look at each other in amazement. “They hopped the fence! That was the most half-assed thing I’ve ever seen.”
I climb through the large gap in the locked gate to the festival, walk about five feet, and see a man in black all the way against the other fence staring at me. He then pulls out a radio. I check out the bleachers for a bit, and then climb back over, doing my best not to appear spooked or like I had any real intention of sneaking into GovBall. I lie back down on the grass.
" Trump!" "Trump!"
Barreling and wobbling this way is the most pure and pristine exhibit of human trash I have ever laid my eyes on. Red-faced with big red shoes bigger than his head, he couldn't be much more than 15 years old.
"We gotta beat the shit out of him.” Bongo says. “I think we have to. Right?"
"Trump!"
"I think we have to beat this kid up," Bongo says again, watching in awe as the kid continues burping the name of his vulgar oafish reality television candidate of choice into people's faces after stumbling somewhat purposefully into their personal space. He maneuvers with the grace and demeanor of a man in the depths of an ether binge or the village drunkard of some old Irish novel, his body teetering and lurching dramatically in different directions with every step. He is so genuinely wasted and brutish that the overwhelmingly ridiculous nature of his actions and movements are impossible to exaggerate. Truly something that must be seen to be believed. A live action caricature, a frat boy played by a bad actor. An over-the-top performance leaving its rotten mark all over its unwitting audience.
He spontaneously attacks one of his friends walking with him. "Quit it! Knock it out! I mean it! Stop!" A large black man gives the kid a high five and the kid wipes his hand off with disgust in full view of the man. A person like that couldn't possibly be convinced to have any other political opinion unless he changed his personality entirely. This drunken heap of white trash convinced that his beliefs can win out in the American democratic arena by sheer force of arrogance and decibels, this kid has been waiting his whole life for Donald Trump to run for President of the United States of America, Bongo and I decide.
No less than twenty minutes after I was spotted climbing over and then almost immediately back over the fence by the black-clad walkie-talkie wielder, the man in black appears with a cop. “I saw you,” he says. “I saw you climb over, walk onto the field, turn back around, and climb back.” Yep. Ok.
The cop chimes in, “Locked gates are locked for a reason. That’s technically trespassing. Where are you from? You ever-
“Long Island.”
“You ever been in jail in New York City? You don’t-
“No.”
“Well you don’t get out ‘til Monday. You saw all these police officers when you were walking in, why did you think they were here? If you pull that again, you’re going to jail. You guys got wristbands?”
Are you kidding? Why would we be climbing fences if we had wristbands. I consider saying yes, just to see what would happen.
“No.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“We’re just here,” says Bongo.
“Ok, well, I’m not gonna kick you out right now, but if you do that again, you’re going to jail. I’m not kidding. The Killers are on at 9:15, enjoy the show!”
Brilliant policework. If we had made any effort to walk away in the past twenty minutes, they would have never found us.
Trump Kid comes back, head down, kicking rocks, totally alone, trying to make a call, but no one will answer him.
Allyson meets up with us, bringing along someone she met walking in, who also wants to sneak in.
“You don’t want to talk to us,” I tell the new guy. “We failed. They’re watching our every move. You don’t even wanna be seen with us.” He starts laughing. “No you don’t understand. Look the other way, don’t let them see that we’re talking.” I explain to him how to get in, and the errors we made. He thanks us and says if he’s not back here in 15 minutes, he got in and he could help us get in from the inside. “No, my days of fence-climbing are over. I can’t risk getting arrested and thrown in jail for the next two days when I have a ticket to Kanye tomorrow." Anyway, while it seems like you should be able to help people get inside once you’re already in, all you can really do is get caught helping people over the fence and implicate yourself as an accessory, after you were already free and clear. "Just go, forget about us. Fend for yourself. Take what you can, and give nothing back.”
“It’s clearly going to rain,” says Bongo. “I don’t understand how my phone is still saying it’s not going to rain.”
“Is this what Haim sounds like?” I ask. “I thought they were like, cool and Fleetwood Mac-y, not like, lame and synth-y.”
We decide to leave and find some other way to spend a Saturday night in New York City. As soon as we get up, it starts to rain. It’s hot enough that the rain is refreshing. The best type of weather. While my two companions are annoyed that their clothes are getting wet, the gods are blissfully washing away my sins.
We take shelter in dollar pizza, even though shelter is futile at this point; we’re already totally soaked. As soon as we get inside, the rain dies down.
Now, normally, 2Bros is the best restaurant in the world. Quick, cheap, streamlined, efficient. No unnecessary artificial ambiance, no surveys you can fill out, none of that waiting or tipping nonsense, no paying 37 cents more than the listed price. I order two slices and a vanilla coke. “Hot?” the smiling man behind the counter asks.
“Yes,” I say, automatically. I then process that he just asked me if I wanted my pizza hot. “Wait, what? As opposed to cold, or warm?” It’s too late, the pizza is already back in the oven. He grabs a regular coke. “No, vanilla, please” I tell him. He grabs a different coke. “No, man, vanilla coke.” He looks at me, utterly bewildered. I point to where the vanilla cokes are. The only other person in the restaurant that also works in the restaurant walks over and pulls out a vanilla coke for me and goes back to his break. Allyson asks if I can spot her a pizza, and I ask the permanently smiling confused little man behind the counter for “one more pizza, please.” I place a dollar on the counter. He puts a regular slice on the counter for Allyson, this time not offering to heat it up. Bongo asks for a pepperoni slice, and Smiley reacts by putting Allyson's regular slice back and replacing it with a pepperoni slice. I try to tell him that we still need the cheese slice, but he just looks at me. The other guy goes back around and puts the cheese slice into the oven. A couple minutes later, he takes out all three cheese slices, mine two burnt to a crisp. “No, vanilla!” says Bongo.
We end up at the Rockwood Music Hall, alternatively using the bathroom and stalling the nagging waitress until we can tell if the band is any good. We walk in and out of the two front rooms until Our Wild America takes one of the stages. They come on, beautiful wistful Americana, the best second-rate Wilco I’ve ever heard. I grab an empty glass of beer to bypass the spottily enforced 'One Drink Minimum' policy. The band has far too many friends here; they’re taking up about half the audience and skewing the social atmosphere so much that the band is comfortable making fart jokes. The banter is even worse than it was for The Strokes, and when the guitarist cranks the distortion, making the song suddenly heavy and intense, his friends laugh at how serious he’s taking himself. The at-least 30-year-old guitarist keeps making jokes about turning 21 and being stressed out. The singer does have one good moment of between-song commentary. “This song is about a bottle of perfume.” He defends the lukewarm reception of his statement, saying “well, you gotta write about something."
Bongo leaves and Allyson and I stick around to buy a CD. Even though CDs packaged in paper slits by unknown bands should be $5, and even though, because the merch girl is in the bathroom, stealing would be much easier than purchasing, we decide to give the full $10. The best local act I’ve seen since The Magic Fountain.
We get back to the apartment, and I start preparing for the next day. I am to arrive as soon as the gates open, with a bladder as empty as possible, and a bag with 5 plain bagels, 2 or 3 empty water bottles, and a portable phone charger. I will use the proper, sanctioned channels and present my legally purchased wristband. I will walk to the water hose station to fill my water bottles, and then I will walk straight to the main stage, avoiding all capitalist distractions. I will stand there against the barricade until Kanye comes on, at 9:15 PM, EST. This way, I can guarantee myself a front row experience of the second greatest artist of our time.(The first being Shia LaBeuof, of course.)
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that I like Kanye West. My friends, especially the ones who have known me for a long time, and therefore remember a Kevin that wrote off all pop music as a moneymaking scheme by soulless hacks entirely devoid of any artistic merit, a lot of those friends think that I’m joking. And I am joking, in the sense that life is a joke. In the way Kanye was joking when he made that ridiculous music video for “Bound 2,” with CGI horses and Kim Kardashian’s hair blowing the wrong way. Totally, laughably ridiculous, and so, so gloriously beautiful.
One night in college, Bongo was blasting “Runaway” by Kanye off of his laptop on the big table in the lounge of our dorm. At the time, I knew Runaway as the song where Kanye says “do**hebag” a lot to seem cool and edgy, a song that has a one-note piano part that I could play in my sleep, and I don’t even play piano. Bongo was leaning against the table, gesticulating and genuflecting in the fluorescent light, totally and passionately lost in in the wonder of the tinny pop song that he was playing for an unimpressed but appeasing girl who we both had a thing for. I made some dumb, snide remark about how the guitar during the outro is way too distorted to sound any good. Bongo looked at me in the eyes and said, “No, that's not guitar. He’s singing.”
That’s more or less when it hit me. This famously unapologetic guy made this simple, beautiful, raw song as an apology for being a do**hebag, accepting and admitting to everything he’s done and who he is as a person, and urging his girlfriend to leave him in a flurry of self-loathing catharsis and brutal lucidity, but he’s still a do**hebag. It doesn’t even matter what he says, there’s nothing he can say. He is who he is. So he just blasts the auto-tune all the way up; if the words won’t change anything, might as well make them sound pretty. It’s a devastating admission. It’s the most devastatingly beautiful song to come out from any artist since maybe “Nude” by Radiohead, or maybe even since “Something In The Way” by Nirvana.
“I guess you have an advantage / you can blame me for everything / And I don’t know how I’ma manage / If one day you just up and leave / And I always find something wrong / You’ve been putting up with my shit just way too long”
Kanye West is an awkward, overenthusiastic geek who fights his self-doubt with a larger-than-life arrogance that makes a lot of people hate him, because if you’re great, you’re not allowed to say that you’re great. But, the only person who got Kanye West where he is today is Kanye West, and he’s in complete control of everything with his name on it, for good or ill. You can’t really say that for any other pop star. He dropped out of college against the advice of probably everybody, and became a successful producer. Then, again against the advice of everybody, he started rapping. Now, he has single-handedly changed not only the rap game and the idea of a rap album, but he’s also challenging the idea of an album in general. He’s also doing the whole fashion thing and is in a lot of debt for investing in his own ideas, but, like I said: for good or ill, it’s all him. And since he can attribute all his success to his believing in himself to the point of arrogance beyond reason, he probably isn’t going to stop or change any time soon.
I had an appreciation for Kanye West for a while. “Gold Digger” was far and away the best song played at frat parties, “Runaway” is perfect, and Kanye is the most interesting modern celebrity: He’s truly going all the way with it. People tell him he’s great and he spits it right back in their faces. “As soon as they like you, make them un-like you.” He got arrested for smashing a paparazzi’s camera, and used his one phone call in jail to order Chinese food. He constantly refers to himself as the new Steve Jobs, the new Kurt Cobain, the new Disney, the new Google. In my personal favorite celebrity moment of all time, he went on television in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and declared, “George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Bush cites this as the worst moment of his presidency. Not the decimating hurricane or his administration’s lazy and half-assed disaster relief efforts towards the largely African-American populated hurricane-ravaged city of New Orleans, mind you, but a celebrity accusing him of racism because of that response. That was Bush’s worst moment.
So I had an appreciation for Kanye, but what really made me a ticket-buying fan was listening to Yeezus. I knew Yeezus as the only pop album in memory that the general public reacted to with a pronounced “what is this shit?” I knew some of my friends with respectable music opinions, including Bongo, touted it as clearly the best album of the year, and that The Critics thought it was brilliant. I had already listened to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which is more or less unanimously declared by both fans and critics to be his masterpiece, and was disappointed. Kanye spent the whole album being an unapologetic douchebag who kept trying and failing to stay on message or at least have a message, and kept getting distracted by making puns about pussy and falling into other cheesy and generic trappings of rap, with the one and only shining pure moment of genius being “Runaway.” I finally got around to playing Yeezus, and I was in total disbelief. I couldn’t believe it was that good. I couldn’t believe his fans hated it. Do Kanye fans hate Kanye? Yeezus is pure Kanye, no holds-barred. No distractions, no cheesy puns, no poppy commercially oriented production, not really any choruses. Sparse, minimalistic, to the point, ferocious. Makes the sacred seem profane and the profane seem sacred. There’s a pervasive, almost classical musicality to it that betrays both the accepted idea of a pop album of thin and homogenous 1-5-6-4 four chord songs and the accepted idea of a rap album of amusical rap beats with three minor key piano notes repeating for the whole song. Yeezus is engaging front to back. Weird-ass samples, jarring changes, tribal rhythms. Perfect juxtapositions. Abrasive, yet serene. I hadn’t been that excited about an album since discovering Violent Femmes’ self titled debut in my senior year of high school.
In general, when Kanye is ridiculous I find it hilarious, and when he’s serious I find it beautiful. A lot of people say they like his music but don’t listen to it because they hate him, and those people will probably die prematurely of a stroke or a heart attack. When the first ten songs of Life Of Pablo were almost as good as the first ten songs of Yeezus, I decided I would see him on this tour, to make up for missing the Yeezus tour.
I check my phone and Prophets Of Rage have just been added to the GovBall lineup for tomorrow. I’m freaking out. This changes everything.
Prophets of Rage is essentially a Rage Against The Machine reunion, fronted by Chuck D of Public Enemy and B-Real of Cyprus Hill. The original rapper is busy making low-key art-rock or something, but the band decided that these times are so politically dire that they have to play with or without him. Chuck D of “Fight The Power” fame is obviously the perfect choice. So far, they have only played two shows, both small secretive Los Angeles club gigs. I just had three conversations in the past week about how cool it would be to see them. I’ve headbanged to Rage since I was 15, and it’s hard to imagine a more intense live-band experience than an entire crowd moshing and screaming “F**k you, I won’t do what you tell me!”
The dilemma I’m now facing is this: Rage is playing a different stage than Kanye. The entire reason I bought a ticket was to see Kanye front row. But I have to see Rage, especially at their last-minute-announced third show with Chuck D. Right? This is a once in a lifetime thing. I haven’t listened to them in years, but Tom Morello is a guitar effects-box wizard and their lyrics are seething and indignant and perfect and always on message and to the point. They are the only political band I know of that never wavers in message or intensity or subject matter. And they rock so hard. Or maybe I was just a fifteen-year-old anarchist who liked anything angry and anti-establishment. No, that can’t be it, can it?
To make matters worse, Fidlar and Courtney Barnett are playing a third stage. I was previously totally willing to skip their sets, as I had seen Fidlar before and I figure I’ll see Courtney some other time. But if I’m not going to be waiting for Kanye the whole time, I might as well see them too. But Rage’s set begins immediately after Courtney’s finishes, so if I watch her I’ll be all the way in the back for Rage. And pushing to the front of Kanye doesn’t seem to be a feasible option. First of all, he has way too many fans that will also be trying to push towards the front, and second, I don’t like pushing people. If you’ve been standing there all day you deserve your spot. I’m not a barbarian.
I’m standing in the corner of the apartment where the outlet is, frantically texting my friends for help. Allyson thought I was joking when I appeared distressed by this newfound dilemma. She quickly realized I was serious, and was in turn dumbfounded and annoyed. "Just come to bed. Turn the lights off."
"No, you don't understand. I don't know what to do.”
“Come to bed,” she says.
“I can’t.”
"I don't think I've ever met anyone who cares about anything as much as you care about bands.”
Ok, ok. I got it. Screw Courtney Barnett, she’s no better a songwriter than I am. I’ll show up just in time to catch Fidlar, walk over to Rage, and then immediately run from Rage to Kanye and use the two hours between their sets to get as close to the stage as possible. Hopefully I’ll be within the first twenty rows. Can’t miss Rage.
Stay tuned for:
DAY 3: SUNDAY
I wake up to my phone buzzing and beeping at me. It’s an email.
From: The Governors Ball Music…
Subject: Sunday Cancellation
