Running The Gamut

But it never happened. Other plans got in the way some years, while other years the ticket price didn’t seem worth it. But this year, my first as City Pulse arts and culture editor, seemed like the year to make it happen. I decided to take the plunge and attend all six nights of Common Ground.

In all, I saw 52 of the 60 bands/artists that performed at this year’s festival, missing only a few of the early afternoon sets, and spent about 30 hours at Adado Riverfront Park.

As I type this on Monday morning, I’m definitely feeling the hurt. All of my thoughts are a little hazy and everything sounds a little duller. My feet are sore — I averaged over five miles of walking per day trucking between the festivals three stages. So what did I learn? Rather than give a play-by-play review of the festival, here are a few themes that emerged as I immersed myself in the Common Ground experience.

Cultural whiplash

In recent years, Common Ground has moved into very genre-specific scheduling, placing bands and artists of similar styles together each evening. This creates a certain cultural whiplash for multi-night attenders. Thursday night I stood in the photo pit in front of the main stage, waiting for country stars the Band Perry to take the stage. I looked out over the crowd, which was decked out in cowboy hats and t-shirts emblazoned with American flags and pro-gun slogans. Just 24 hours later, an entirely different crowd eagerly awaited a performance by hard rockers Three Days Grace. This night’s heavily tattooed audience preferred the simplicity of black t-shirts. The next evening featured the most racially diverse audience, as hundreds of people clamored to the front of the stage to get a good look at rap icon Snoop Dogg.

While this scheduling is probably good for ticket sales, it creates a strange sort of segregation. Thursday’s country music night, unsurprisingly, was the whitest evening of the festival. The festival said that over 9,000 people attended that evening, and while there’s no way to know the actual breakdown, I don’t think I saw more than 10 black festival attendees the entire night.

On the other hand, it felt like Lansing’s entire black population showed up — either on the festival grounds or listening from the opposite shore of the Grand River — to hear Snoop Dogg and Wale Saturday. (The evening was also the best-attended night, drawing 11,000 paid attendees.)

The two nights even had their own preferred contraband. The country music crowd passed around smuggled-in flasks of whiskey, while the air on rap night was heavy with the smell of marijuana — or in Snoop Dogg parlance, “that sticky-icky-icky.”

Where my ladies at?

As I was putting this article together in my head, I had planned for this section to be about the prominence of female performers in this year’s festival. “There seem to be more female-fronted bands than usual,” I thought to myself.

But when I looked back on the schedule, the numbers didn’t support the narrative I had built in my head. Each night featured somewhere between nine to 11 performances, and only two or three per night featured a female musician.

The worst offender was Saturday night’s rap-heavy lineup. Back-up dancers aside, Yellokake of the BLAT Pack was the only lady I saw performing on a Common Ground stage Saturday.

Even without Meghan Trainor, the scheduled opening-night headliner who canceled for health reasons, the most female-loaded lineup was July 7’s pop flavored slate of performers. The evening featured female-fronted bands Misterwives and Flint Eastwood, the half-female duo Less is More, pop artist Bea Miller and an appearance by Lansing’s own Jen Sygit performing on the main stage with Joshua Davis.

Of course, it says something about the state of the music industry when I see a handful of female-fronted groups and think, “There seem to be more female fronted bands than usual.”

The year of the F-bomb

The F-word was the unofficial curse word of the festival, with everyone from Misterwives’ Mandy Lee to Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Ferrell hurling the obscenity from the Common Ground main stage. The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne took things a step further, bringing out a giant silver “Fuck yeah Lansing” balloon that was probably 20 feet tall.

I’m no prude, but I was surprised at how casually the word was tossed around at an open-air festival.

While Saturday’s hip-hop lineup takes the award for lyrical vulgarity, special mention must be made for Perry Farrell’s multiple oral sex jokes and for Alien Ant Farm’s Dryden Mitchell, who invented a fictional MTV show title so crass that it could make a sailor blush.

The cleanest night, in terms of profanity, was Thursday’s country music night. Of course, there were plenty of references to all- American vices like beer and girls and fast cars, but no one had to explain a blow job to their 7-year-old. While Common Ground has never marketed itself as a family friendly festival, it does offer free admission for children under 6 and offers reduced ticket prices for children age 6 to 10.

Standout performances

For my money, the best performance of the week was Sunday’s performance by the Flaming Lips. I’ve never seen so many adults become absolutely giddy as when the band released dozens of balloons and fired cannon-loads of confetti into the audience. The band was joined on stage by people dressed as giant mushrooms, oversized butterflies and a rainbow (requiring two people, one at each end of the rainbow). Musically, the band didn’t disappoint either, performing hits like “She Don’t Use Jelly” and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1” to an elated audience.

The crowd favorite of the festival, however, was probably Snoop Dogg. Thousands of attendees waved their arms and rapped along to classics like “Gin & Juice.” The standing-room-only sections in front of the main stage were so crowded that security started turning people away. (Snoop seems to have enjoyed himself as well. He’s posted several pictures and a video from the festival on his Instagram page.)

If I had to choose a standout performance in terms of sheer disappointment, I would have to give it to Wednesday’s headliners, Jane’s Addiction. Farrell, the 56-year-old singer of the group, no longer seems to have the vocal control he once had. The signature tone is still there, but Farrell struggled to hit the notes in classic Jane’s Addiction tunes like “Been Caught Stealing.” Add to that some rambling, incoherent stage banter about how he and his lady enjoy watching “Maury,” you have a recipe for some uncomfortable concert watching.

The rest of the band seemed up to the task. Guitarist Dave Navarro, who took all of one song before removing his shirt and revealing his tattooed torso, unleashed his usual pyrotechnics, and the rhythm section kept everything moving along. The sound quality was surprisingly bad, however, with Navarro’s guitar work often fighting to be heard in the soupy, bass-heavy mix. In the end, however, the musicians’ efforts weren’t enough to compensate for Farrell’s lackluster vocal work.