The third and final day of Boston Calling was cold, windy, rainy and raw but it didn’t stop the festival’s best incarnation yet from ending on a high note. Field Report opened the Blue Stage strong with a strong set consisting entirely of material from their recently released Summertime Songs. After their set, Glide caught up with frontman Chris Porterfield who described Boston Calling as, “Very well considered from the top down.” He said, “It doesn’t feel as bananas as some other big festivals and it’s nice that none of the stages are so massively sprawled out that it’s a huge deal going from one set to the next.”
Later in the afternoon, the Dirty Projectors had a highly anticipated Blue Stage set that was a disaster by no fault of their own. They took the stage late after techs spent over 20 minutes struggling to sound check a lead mic that kept ringing with feedback and when they decided to hedge their bets and take the stage, the bass didn’t work for the first fifteen minutes of their set. The bass channel chimed in every now and then but the entirety of the performance was essentially conducted without a key performer, who for his part seemed defeated by the end of their set. The displeasure of the musicians was obvious from their body language and frontman David Longstreth literally told the audience their set was akin to “resistance training.”
There’s a lot that is new and improved about Boston Calling in 2018 but the single coolest addition is the Ikea Music Lab, which was essentially a nightclub set up in the center of the grounds. The space had a covered area with a DJ at the center surrounded by dancers and multilevel platforms giving the audience the opportunity to swarm the source of the beats from 360 degrees. Outside of the covered area was a greater hang space strung up Swiss Family Robinson-style with an array of hammocks. The entire area had a lighting rig timed to the music so even from the outer edges of the space, you felt in-tune to the rhythm. The sale of pickled veggie dogs was ill-advised, but then again, Ikea gonna Ikea.
Around the time Thundercat took the Green Stage, the Arena was filling up with folks looking for a reprieve from the weather. What they got was a great lineup of standup comics headlined by David Cross. Cameron Esposito was exceptionally animated and talked at length about being a Lesbian in Trumps America. When a guy in the front yelled, “Where’s the comedy?” she reminded everyone in attendance why you never win when heckling a standup.
David Cross started out slow but his set picked up steam once it got into his twenty minute bit that went into great detail about his experience getting a colonic. The best line of the night was when he said, “I’m not comparing people who voted for Trump to Hitler… I’m comparing them to people who voted for Hitler.”
Fleet Foxes are critical darlings and have a good sized fanbase in their own right but their downtempo harmonies are a lot harder to enjoy in the cold rain which is why it made sense that the crowd Khalid had across the grounds during the same slot was so much larger. The 20 year-old R&B phenom had a three-person band bringing the beats to life and a four-woman dance troupe whose elaborate choreography was so much more than you’d expect from the Fly Girls of old. Khalid was clearly a much bigger hit with the younger folks in the crowd but even folks who’d never heard him were enjoying his set. He’s an R&B crooner belting his heart and soul out over modern hip-hop beats and although he has the stage presence much more mature than his actual age, his commentary on the songs he was about to perform revealed a star-struck innocence that’s equal parts adorable and charming.
Eminem closed the festival out Sunday night and as the single most iconic artist to ever grace the stage at Boston Calling, a great deal was at stake. The man born Marshall Mathers notoriously hates performing. His last two albums haven’t been well received and as a man recently celebrating ten years of sobriety, it’s hard to even think of him as the same generationally talented yet horrifically disturbed man whose hits included intimate fantasies about murdering the mother of his daughter. That said, Eminem is both the best selling rapper of all time, the best selling artist of the 21st century and hasn’t played in Boston in well over ten years. Read that last sentence again to make sure you fully understand the significance of his set. When push came to shove, Eminem crushed it. Sure, it was a cash grab and he was absolutely lip-synching a good amount of the time, but he had the biggest, most enthralled crowd of the weekend. His live band was tight. The crowd loved the pyrotechnics. Fans were singing along with every song and Mathers had the stage presence of a fire-breathing beast looking to burn down everything in its path.
When you’re the most well received artist on an incredible lineup, the skepticism of music critics means very little.
With Boston Calling 2018 in the rearview, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than this was the most successful version of the festival yet. They were able to book a headliner shared by both Bonnaroo and Coachella, arguably the two most prestigious festivals around, and while incorporating big acts that sell tickets, the event was able to curate a tasty lineup that expanded its offerings to appeal to an even greater array of palates. This year Boston Calling became a film festival that had Natalie Portman as the face of the event. The Arena became a space for standup, acoustic sets, play readings, Podcast recordings and silent film presentations. The Arena also hosted Headcount, which registered over 100 people to vote over the course of the weekend. The art displayed on the grounds were much more prominent, unique and laser-focused on drawing a parallel between sculptures and the event. Having a faux-Green Monster set up between the Red and Green Stages with the schedule on the scoreboard was an absolutely outstanding touch.
Last year two of the biggest criticisms were the long lines to get in and for food. On a culinary level, while they may not be on the same level as Outside Lands in San Francisco, Boston Calling is closing the gap as a food festival in its own right. Boston Calling had food from the finest BBQ, Mexican, vegan and seafood joints in town. Even Ruth’s Chris had a booth. Prominent food trucks had booths set up and the end result was not just shorter lines, but far more eclectic offerings.
The lines to get in were shorter, which is astonishing given that the event still has a single entrance/exit point. The logistics regarding crowd movement are an unsung hero when it comes to Boston Calling. There were more lanes for security and ticket scanning, but that was after everyone entered the gated grounds of the Harvard Athletic Complex. Unless you’re familiar with the area, it’s hard to truly articulate how much of an unmitigated disaster this could have been. The grounds themselves are within the city limits of Boston, so Boston Police Officers were on detail on the grounds, which also fall under Harvard PD jurisdiction. Both the entrance and the perimeter of the event are on a major traffic artery for city access that is under the jurisdiction of State Police.
Additionally, the overwhelming majority of ticket holders used the MBTA as their primary form of transportation and getting to the nearest subway stop meant crossing a bridge immediately outside the grounds’ exit, that immediately place you in the City of Cambridge. BPD had to keep the festival safe while the Staties both blocked off and rerouted traffic and CPD had to block off and reroute traffic on their side of the Charles River while ensuring tens of thousands of people arrived at and utilized a single public transit stop. The success of this event relied upon effective interagency communication between public transportation services, multiple law enforcement agencies as well as private security contractors. You’d think having a single entrance/exit would be a cause for madness, but lines flowed smoothly and security resources were utilized incredibly effectively which is no small win when we’ve seen multiple concerts and festivals becomes scenes of mass carnage in less than a year.
So to summarize: Food was better and more bountiful. The artwork was cooler. The lineup was diverse and elite. Lines were shorter. New performances spaces added greater bang for the buck and a national scale event still felt as manageable for festivalgoers as a local event. Boston Calling has grown a great deal in the six years and nine events they’ve hosted since they first called City Hall Plaza home. It used to be a story about “The Little Festival That Could” but at this point, painting them as underdogs does a disservice to the people at Crash Line Productions who have built this event from the ground up. Boston has been living in the shadow of New York City for hundreds of years and for the second summer in a row, Boston’s premier music festival hosted a better lineup, logistics and location than New York City’s Governors Ball. Arguments can be made that the lineups each had their merits, but comparing the grounds of a private college with a $68b endowment to a landfill off the coast of Manhattan that is more or less abandoned is no fair comparison. Comparing the grounds of these two events is like comparing prime rib to spam.
Having completed their second year on the grounds of the Harvard Athletic Complex, Boston Calling has defended their title as the best music festival in the greater Northeast. Coachella’s Beyoncé coup is unlikely to be matched any time soon but as Bonnaroo’s prestige continues to decline in the years since Live Nation has taken ownership, it’s time for us to debate Boston Calling’s place among the best festivals in the country, not just region.
Photos by Marc Lacatell
