ATH Home Game for of Montreal
~Han Vance, with additional reporting by Heather C
Venerable 40 Watt on a lovely first autumnal evening of the year. So happy to see such a sad summer slip away. On with fall. Seeing of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes dance on stage always feels like seeing an old friend to me. And I can rest assured it will be weird.
Can nighttime Rockville reboots compare favorably to a blip on the radar foregone college football conquest, ultimately just a would-be 15th of a longer quest for glory, glory, glory? I’d queried myself thusly in Atlanta-proper, plotting the timeline of a fantastically full Saturday at/near the Birthplace of American Public Higher Education. Founded in 1785, UGA and the Classic City built around it, have long been associated with winning alternative music acts and became associated with routinely winning American college football national championships in the finally roaring 2020s.
First, we’d need Taco Stand I figured. Because two cheese slices on a first-for-me-of-the-silly-season Georgia football gameday the week prior simply hadn’t soaked up enough of my myriad margaritas. And here I had a few wee nips of Grand Marnier for breakfast in front of the Atlanta mural at my alumni buddy Arman’s law office and had a whole bottle of Redemption Rye to distribute and help polish off. I didn’t want to be toast when the sun set.
We decided a Hi-Lo [cool bar] hello to my first Athens neighborhood was a good idea, where I met affable haberdasher proprietor Ed Ferguson of male clothier institution Dick Ferguson’s. He bought a copy of my new book “Georgia’s Long Road to Glory” and we conspired an author appearance at the boutique. Normaltown always had the bones to be an alternate entertainment and dining district to downtown and Five Points and has finally fully come into its own in modern day Athens. CBDX at T-Stand. That’s burrito. I should have maybe had two…but my singular focus suddenly shifted to seeing my sweet friends.
An inner-city tailgate at Indigo Inn didn’t have the hot heartbeat it had a game prior, with yet a third cupcake on the Dawgs 2023 schedule…so we quickly scooted to campus and Old College and Merv. Merv Waldrop hosts the friendliest tailgate tradition on the UGA campus, at the President’s Garden, in the shadow of the very first building. The Rye drained, we hit downtown as many fans headed toward Sanford Stadium. Few bars, few beers, few barks…
Kevin Barnes fronts of Montreal – previously stylized with a capital “O” as Of Montreal and fabled to have been named after a doomed romance with a girl he fancied from the largest Quebec metro. Talented band members have come and gone over later period iterations of of Montreal, as I found the stellar keyboard contributions of friend Dottie Alexander an especially tough act to follow.
I’ve written straight articles on of Montreal for multiple media outlets, while my accompaniment Heather C was seeing them for the first time. “I was immediately overwhelmed – not in a bad way – by the visual aspects of the whole thing,” she said. “I couldn’t pinpoint any one style of music. Even within a single song it changed. You could definitely feel an all-encompassing energy from Kevin. I keep picturing him in my head, dancing. It’s not like he was just standing up there singing. He had some serious crazyass creativity going on.”
“Party people dancing for the indie star,” Kevin sang. And in Paranoic Intervals he proclaimed, “You should be fucking fuck fuck fucking with no one else.” Going full nonbinary alt-cult leader: “Anyone but me is an antipathy. Anyone but me is your En-E-Me.”
Well after my Dawgs had put the little UAB Blazers to bed…our less than youthful bodies yearned for sleep. Kevin had sent us sailing into the crowded college town city sidewalks in summation, singing, “The party’s crashing us now.”