Vampire Weekend's MSG Matinee

With an electronic Montreal act and a Billy Joel Tribute Band

Sunday I walked into Madison Square Garden for a concert, as I had done so often during my concert reviewing years. At first there was a sense of dishabituation, a word around which the Harvard law professor Cass Sunsteen built his keynote address at the World of Bob Dylan Conference in Tulsa in 2023.

It was likely the hour that made me feel I was in a different time zone, about 11:45 AM, and the performance. My favorite 21st century rock band, Vampire Weekend, had played the Garden Saturday night, and they did so again for a matinee show Sunday, Oct. 6. I had seen matinee rock concerts before, but not since the 1960s. The Rolling Stones played a matinee at the old Academy of Music on 14th Street the first time I saw them in May 1965. They played for about half an hour. Vampire Weekend gave its full two and a half hour show, and from what I've read, the set lists have some overlap, but are often quite different.

A major headlining rock band matinee at Madison Square Garden? This is such a welcome twist especially for music biz veterans like me, and my sports-talk pal Mike Farley, who has his own music PR firm in Madison, Wisc. "I would go to way more shows if they weren't so late," Farley said, echoing the thoughts of perhaps millions of boogieing boomers and even tired Gen X-ers who find shows past our bedtimes. Vampire Weekend went on at 1:30 pm and played until 4 PM. There were two opening acts, and there was no set-up time between sets.

I am told by the Vampire Weekend archival team that the last daytime concert at the Garden was Aug. 30, 1972, starring John Lennon with the Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band. It was a benefit John and Yoko (and Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, and others) performed at the behest of then-respected New York TV journalist Geraldo Rivera on behalf of victims of the Willowbrook State School. Rivera’s investigative journalism exposed the abusive conditions children (the word “retarded” was used in those days) experienced at Willowbrook. A concert album, Live in New York City, was released in 1986, supervised by Yoko Ono.

But first, the dishabituation, which means sort of out of sorts because one's usual habits were not functioning in an orderly way. East coast intellectuals doing deep talk about Bob Dylan in Oklahoma for four sweltering June days was a kind of dishabituation, Sunsteen suggested. I fell in love with the word: I used it for the rest of the conference and the whole summer of 2023.If I didn't feel like going to an event, I'd just tell people I knew: "No, I'm dishabituated, I think I'm going to take a nap."

And it was weird, because I thought I was having a beer flashback, because the band on the stage was playing the music of Billy Joel, with credibility and sass. I thought, whoa! I didn't catch any of the 150 monthly concerts Joel had done at the Garden as an official "franchise" artist (a banner with his name hangs in the rafters along with numbers of Knicks and Rangers legends.) Creeping up on Joel's 150 banner: one for Harry Styles and his 15 Garden shows. I'd seen dozens of Joel concerts, including all of his regular touring shows at the Garden.

This band was called Turnstiles (after one of Joel's lesser known early albums), from Tampa, and they are known as one of our great nation's leading Billy Joel tribute bands. Totally fine versions of "We Didn't Start the Fire," and "It's Still Rock & Roll to Me," "Only the Good Die Young" and "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." The latter was part of the performance and staging of Vampire Weekend's Saturday night concert at which a bit of "My Life" graced the long encore covers medley, as well as fragments of tunes by Dylan, Springsteen, and Steely Dan.

It should be added that though the hall was about 10 per cent capacity when Turnstiles played, they received a warm, enthusiastic welcome from the general admission early arrivers, and everyone sang along to "My Life."

The second opening act was a DJ/mixing/EDM team from Montreal, the Brothers Macklovitch. Dave Macklovitch is also in the electro-funk duo Chromeo (founded 2002). Excellent sound blast and groove. After chanting and filtering the words "New York City," they hit the mixers hard for Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime." It was not the last time Talking Heads was heard, either: A verse and chorus of "Burning Down the House" was part of the matinee encore, dedicated to mostly songs by New York bands, with a bit of Las Vegas thrown in (The Killers' "Mr. Brightside").

Now: Draw a straight line. Put a dot for the Brothers Macklovitch at the left end, and Turnstiles, the Billy Joel tribute band, as a dot on the right. Where on this spectrum does Vampire Weekend go? I tried this in my notebook, and first placed a dot in the middle. Then I moved the dot around. And Vampire Weekend doesn't just fit in one spot, you can place them anywhere! They're the only band of this century that fits anywhere and everywhere, as you can tell from the variations of the covers on this Only God Was Above Us tour.

The album is only Vampire Weekend's fifth studio album, yet the repertory seems enormous. And they haven't even begun to keep up with the passions of guitarist, songwriter and singer Ezra Koenig, who wore a baseball shirt with the logo eMZet, which I believe to be a brand of anime and manga shirts made by TeePublic. But I could be wrong. In fact, I was wrong. I am told that it was “an Athens Kallithea soccer jersey. The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ) is the shirt sponsor.”

Koenig has embraced  the jam band esthetic in collaborations with the band Goose, known even in this musical region for its very long songs. On April 10, 2024, Vampire Weekend, the core trio: Koenig, Chris Tomson (drums) and Chris Baio (bass), joined Goose (click for the Relix article) on the stage of the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, NY at the end of a four night stand for versions of VW's "Gen-X Cops" (new) and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" (a signature tune from their self-named debut album in 2008) that went for more than a half hour.

After the Koenig/Tomson/Baio trio opened in front of a facade with just the band's name, the curtain rose to reveal a much larger band, including a second drummer, adding to that jam band polyrhythmia. The songs stretched some, but not a lot. Vampire Weekend, smart band that it is, wants to stay in front of their audience, while carrying it with them.

"Ice Cream Piano" and "Classical" were highlights from the new album. About six weeks ago I started taking piano lessons for the first time, hoping to expand my writing vocabulary. I played "Classical" at the beginning of my first lesson with the revered classical pianist and teacher Edmund Arkus. He said it was Mozartian in a general way, but made him think about the earliest days of musical nomenclature, from the Roman Empire until the present moment. I said: "I think that's what this song is about."

I used to be so sure that I understood Vampire Weekend that I wrote about 4,000 words for the Jewish magazine Tablet about the 2013 VW album Modern Vampires of the City. I was about three years sober and as part of my higher power endeavors, I had begun to study the Talmud with my Chabad rabbi. I saw signs everywhere. Now I'm not sure what I could tell you what "Capricorn" is about. It was on "Capricorn" that informal Vampire Weekend player and co-producer/engineer Ariel Rechtshaid emerged and elevated the already triumphal energy to a next level.

But I still believe "Everlasting Arms," from Modern Vampires and played for the first time this tour, is about the Jewish inmate orchestra at Theresienstadt, in the Czech Republic, which the Nazis used to bamboozle Red Cross inspectors into thinking the camps were humane artistic endeavors.

But I don't try to break down Vampire Weekend's lyrics too deeply anymore, because I hear their songs as part of the ongoing evolution of Koenig, a restlessly creative person with none of the navel gazing tendencies of the classic singer-songwriter. And some have achieved real clarity: the new song "Prep-School Gangsters" is about the famous Dalton gang. Or people like them. That is, the wannabe's who might attend Manhattan’s private Dalton school, where tuition is more than $64,000 for the current academic year. At first I thought "Mary Boone" was about an unrequited passion for an older woman. Instead, I guess, she's a cautionary tale for those who fly too high: the once-prominent gallery owner Mary Boone, a major player in the downtown art scene, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for tax evasion and served 13 months before being released to a halfway house during Covid.

The main thing for Koenig is to reconcile his sensitivity and awareness and literary skill (the most obvious generational comparison is to Paul Simon) to his music that bounces and bops, offers unmitigated pleasure, Afro-pop meets "Blitzkrieg Bop" meets classic pop. Before the two hits from MVotC, "Worship You" and "Ya Hey" (a turn around of OutKast's "Hey Ya" with some Old Testament significance), was what was called the "Cocaine Cowobys" medley, starting with their own "Married in a Gold Rush"; "All the Gold in California," by Larry Gatlin & the Gatlin Brothers; the Grateful Dead's "Cumberland Blues," and more. I would have liked them to have stretched out a little here, and on the encores, which were a giddy delight.

They included "Monster Mash" (by Bobby "Boris" Pickett); Sublime's "Santeria"; the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" and Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House"; the Surfaris "Wipe Out," the Kate Bush song "Wuthering Heights" and Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town."

Koenig has made great leaps in his understanding of stage craft since I saw Vampire Weekend at Radio City Music in 2010, an early Sweet 16 present for my daughter Jackie. There was also the moment, when Koenig took his hands off his guitar and pointed while the band played the first verse and chorus from "New York, New York." It was just a gesture, but a powerful one, not unlike what Frank Sinatra may have done on the stage in this arena many times. It was like practicing the power he might have been warned about at Hogwarts, as David Wojahn wrote about in his poem "Elvis Moving a Small Cloud: The Desert Near Las Vegas, 1976." In it, Elvis points a finger at "Nevada's only cloud" and endeavors to make it move. Koenig could learn to do that, if he wanted to. Or he might want to do a new season of Neo Yokio, the anime series he created that ran 2017-2018 for Netflix. My sense of Koenig, though, is that he'll look back, but not for long.

Special thanks to Founding subscribers Peter Himmelman and Jamie Nicholson.