It was Friday, July 12th , the first night of the 2024 Northside Music Festival—the scaled-down iteration of the now-defunct Deutschtown Music Festival—and I was teetering on the edge of a black pit. Fridays have that effect on me, because on Fridays I spend hours generating spreadsheets and emailing them to people who don’t want them. The best kind of Friday is a Friday on which I feel merely useless, as opposed to actively detrimental to other people’s Fridays.
I’d managed to end this Friday at a teeter—much better than a plunge—by playing my favorite songs very loudly and singing along to them while I generated my spreadsheets. By the time five o’clock rolled around, though, I felt like all I wanted was to sit on the couch with the television and air-conditioner blasting, my hand submerged in a bag of Trader Joes street corn dippers. I did not feel like I wanted to catch a bus downtown, walk a mile in ninety degree heat, or stand in crowds of people while loud noises occurred. But, thankfully, some recess of my brain knew that what I felt like I wanted was not actually what I wanted, and I boarded the 61 with minimal reluctance.
I missed the beginning of Animal Scream’s 8pm set at Allegheny Elk’s Lodge #339. The tail end of the synth-rock trio’s new single, a sparkling, lovestruck collaboration with Ames Harding & The Mirage called “Sandinista Smile,” came to me through the glass doors that separate the Lodge’s hallway from its main area, which contained a mix of festival attendees seeking a danceable good time and Lodge regulars—“Elkoholics,” a term I learned from a t-shirt—who had a danceable good time foisted upon them while they watched the Pirates-White Sox game at the bar. The atmosphere was convivial. The band was tight. People bopped up in front of the stage and nodded along in the back of the room, their bodies moved involuntarily by the thrumming bass and propulsive drums. I sipped a beer and felt the sense memory of computer keys fade from my fingertips. After the show, frontman Chad Monticue was kind enough to trade me some Animal Scream vinyl for a Bored In Pittsburgh sticker–a lopsided deal in my favor.
Vinyl in hand, I walked over to Allegheny City Brewing for a set by Natural Rat, a Pittsburgh-by-way-of-Morgantown “doom-pop” trio whose hulking, filthy 2022 track, “Cowboy Underwater,” is one of my favorites to play at earsplitting volume in the car. I stood on a balcony overlooking the tent under which the band played. I noticed the paper setlist resting on the ground between two pedalboards, but my eyesight was not good enough to make out the words “Cowboy” or “Underwater.” From my vantage point I could see frontwoman Kelsie Cannon’s Danelectro guitar (but not really her head), a pair of staggeringly dexterous drum sticks clattering around a kit, and bassist Ivy Marie. Luckily, I could hear all three Natural Rats just fine. They kick up a ruckus when they play, cranking the distortion to the maximum, thundering away on the double bass pedal, and swamping listeners with waves of sludge. When the devilish riff to “Cowboy Underwater” slithered into being from Cannon’s guitar, I’m pretty sure let out a yeehaw.
The final act I caught on Friday night was Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs!, a Pittsburgh music festival mainstay. I first heard the band’s prehistoric, booze-fueled brand of punk rock within the sweaty confines of St. Mary’s Lyceum, five years earlier to the day, at the 2019 Deutschtown Music Festival. This time around, they set up shop outdoors at Foreland St, one of the festival’s main stages. When the group’s frontman exclaimed something along the lines of, “We started at the Lyceum and now we’re here,” I had one of those “I must be cool because I remember that!” moments. I’m not actually cool, but drunk dinosaurs are, and it’s comforting to know that, despite the many things that have changed over the past five years, there’s a triceratops somewhere cracking an IC Light while skateboarding. “Primordial Ooze” sounded great as usual, but the anthemic “Tar Pit”—a tale of woe in which too many dinos find themselves swallowed by goo—ripped especially hard. It seemed appropriate that the Foreland St. stage was located adjacent to the beer tents and the port-a-johns.
A moment of sublimity occurred when I exited one of those port-a-johns after the Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs! set and saw my girlfriend making a beeline for a man in a kilt. Had he shouted a sexist remark? Was she leaving me on impulse? I was confused until I saw the man’s shirt, which read, “Coffin Flop.” Anyone who’s seen I Think You Should Leave will understand what follows. Anyone who hasn’t should skip this paragraph and watch the show immediately. The following interaction occurred between the three of us (slightly paraphrased):
GF: “Did you know that Spectrum is going to drop Corncob TV?”
Kilt: “We’re just shooting funerals and showing the ones where the bodies fly out.”
Me: “Just body after body bustin’ out of shit wood and hitting pavement.”
Kilt: “Spectrum thinks I’m just some dumb hick. They said that to me at a dinner.”
GF: “I didn’t do fuckin’ shit. I didn’t rig shit.”
We bid each other goodnight without a normal word having been exchanged. Only today did I learn that the kilt guy was one of the members of Bearded Bastard Irishmen, who performed on the Foreland stage right before Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs!.
That night, when I fell at long last into the embrace of my couch, I marveled at how much better I felt than I had only hours earlier. The existential chasm wedged open by spreadsheets can sometimes blind me to the fact that not everything done on the computer is done in vain. I discover most of my favorite Pittsburgh artists from Bandcamp, an online platform that allows artists to upload directly to their audiences, no gatekeeper approval necessary. I write about these artists’ music on a blog and shoot the posts into what can seem like the digital ether, but—as my experience at the Northside Music Festival reminded me—is actually an entire community full of talented artists and passionate listeners, a community in which I’m lucky to exist as even a small part.
