North Adams, Mass., is in better shape than most hosts of weekend-long music festivals when Wilco and its Solid Sound Festival come to town next month. With the opening of Mass MOCA in 1999, North Adams, once a remarkably downtrodden former outpost of industry, has slowly grown into a hub of contemporary art, with several converted mills used as live-work artists' studios, intriguing events, some retail that has sprouted to serve it and a good but scruffy, New-England-Main-Street look. (Mass MOCA is the largest conversion project and one of the world's largest contemporary art museums in terms of its square feet, allowing it to host some gigantic exhibits.) As a small example of this, the Books, an indie-rock duo and one of the Solid Sound Festival's performers, calls North Adams its home.
Most towns that host these events -- such as Manchester, Tenn., for Bonnaroo and Indio, Calif., for Coachella -- are nothing more than one-weekend hosts. They're chosen because they have a willing owner of hundreds of acres removed enough so that 65,000 people younger than 30 can go and party and listen to good music (and sit in traffic) without bothering the neighbors. There's no spillover to anything else locally and there isn't meant to be. This is the danger of hosting such events: Everyone comes for the affair and scoffs at the rest.
The Berkshires walk the fine line when it comes to this. After about 50 years of industrial decline, accelerated by GE's and Sprague Electric's departures, its only export is tourism. That tourism is driven by some of the country's greatest cultural institutions and scenery, though, giving the region a better shot than most tourism-driven ones. Most of the visitors are from greater Boston and greater New York, two of the country's wealthiest metro areas, meaning they spend money when they come, sometimes on second homes. Nonetheless, this is not a foolproof long-term strategy. Many jobs are seasonal and the places that don't have these destinations within their town lines suffer substantially.
Considering North Adams' artist scene is still fledgling, for the city to place its bets on this one path of urban planning is risky. If the artists follow Sprague Electric out of town, what's next? Festivals like Wilco's, as respected as the band is and as moneyed as its fans are, mean a lot of planning and money are spent on traffic cops waving drivers through, when they might be better spent on a new park that makes year-round residents stay. Overall, though, North Adams is probably making the right choice with this festival. It's not too wild to describe it as a very young, much, much cooler version of the Southern Berkshire County towns with all of those cultural destinations, so North Adams probably should focus on redirecting that momentum to its corner of the state however it can get it.
Really, the big loser in this is Califone, the avant-country band that is performing its most recent album, "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers," to the movie it soundtracks, only two weeks after Wilco comes to town. When events like this happen so close to each other, the latter loses customers. That's a shame considering Wilco hasn't made a good record in eight years (and generally hasn't been likable in about five years), while Califone is still one of indie rock's most inventive bands, more than 10 years into its career. To boost my case further, here's Califone's video for the title track to the new record:
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