In Chicago, there is a wintertime tradition known as dibs. If you shovel out a parking space, you can lay claim to it for the season by blocking it off with a lawn chair or a lamp or some other household loot. Move the snow, own the spot.
Can’t do that here, bub. Still, East Coast summertime has its own dibs situations: the territorial beach umbrella, the Great Lawn Philharmonic blanket grab, the incumbent at the top of the national ticket who won’t cede his perch. In these parts, unlike in Chicago, the prerogative is often disputed.
A weekend in the Berkshires, on the grounds of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams: the biennial Solid Sound arts-and-music festival, convened and headlined by the band Wilco. MASS MoCA occupies a former printworks and electrical plant, so most of the festivities take place in renovated factory buildings and brick courtyards, but the main stage is in a vast field. The attendees line up early. Many of them—of a demographic susceptible to mid-tempos and achy joints—carry portable chairs. Once inside, they fan out into the field and set up miniature encampments, asserting dominion over patches of grass, in anticipation of the bands coming onstage later in the afternoon. Then they leave their stuff and wander the rest of the festival—other, smaller acts, art exhibits, pop-up performances, interactive expos, food trucks, record store, beer. Civilized.
Day two, rainy at noon: the chairs holding their ground in the field are covered in tarps or garbage bags, or turned upside down. A gimpy man—bulging disk, according to the doc—enters the field carrying a Walmart backpacking chair. The chairs already in place are amply spaced apart. People seem to have overestimated the room they need or deserve. The man decides to revise these estimations, to shrink the distance between a few of them and open a gap for his own chair. He does some rearranging. Do the work, claim the space.
An hour later, looking from a window on the second floor of the museum, he spots the Walmart chair out in the rain. Either the chairs have been scrambling around on their own or more new chairs have made space for themselves by taking space from others. Dibs? Or a breach of it?
Down in the bowels of the museum, in Wilco’s backstage suite, Jeff Tweedy, the band’s front man, was lying in an empty claw-footed bathtub, posing for photographs. “It’s just going to be hard to get me out,” he said. He’d got a new hip in February and was getting another in a couple of weeks.
A moment later, he was on a couch. He wore black leather shoes, black jeans, a blue gas-station jacket, clear-frame specs. As a new-hip guy, he noted his visitor’s limp. “This is a better festival than almost any other festival for someone with mobility issues,” he said. “I’m generally not a big fan of festivals. But this is just a fuller expression of what Wilco is to us. What Wilco is to us isn’t just our records or just our live performances. It’s our friends, our families, our other bands, the bands that we love, our record collections, our belief in art, our belief in community. It’s a rare opportunity for a band to be able to present just, like, a world view.”
Community-wise, the visitor felt bad about the chair in the field. Tweedy, being a Chicagoan and Solid Sound’s Grand Pooh-Bah, was asked to make a ruling. “You’ve never spent an hour and a half shovelling a parking spot,” he said. “Dibs. That’s when you throw one of your old vacuum cleaners in the street. It’s not great, but it’s not born out of pure greed. It’s born out of a feeling that you earned a spot because you did the work. It’s an injustice that someone pulls into a spot you’ve just shovelled. But here? As far as I’m concerned, if there’s room and you get here early, I don’t think you should throw a blanket down and say, ‘That’s mine,’ and then go do whatever you want. But if you’re holding the territory, and you’re leaving room for other people, and then you cede territory when it’s necessary, that’s all within the Geneva Convention.”
After some talk of hips, backs, surgeries, and painkillers, Tweedy went to get ready to play. The visitor returned to the field to claim his chair, from which he held the territory, until Tweedy and the band came onstage and opened with a song called “Via Chicago.” ♦
