Wooden Shjips are about to go on, and I can’t miss that, so this is going to be woefully brief, I’m afraid. Meat Puppets doing Meat Puppets II was utterly enchanting; I saw them at SXSW a couple of years ago and they sound about 20 times better now. I was talking with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch after the MP set and he agreed that they seem to be getting sharper all the time. “We’ve been touring with them for a little while, and they’ve gotten better just in the last couple of weeks,” he said. The venue they played in was called the Stardust Ballroom, and it’s essentially a miniature version of the Showbox. Great sight lines, killer sound. Thank god for that, because this is the same space where My Bloody Valentine will be playing tomorrow:The festival grounds in general are just plain bizarre. We’re in the Catskills of upstate New York, at a run-down country club that was purportedly the inspiration for the set of Dirty Dancing. Shit is frozen in time here, I swear. One of the bars is called “The Deep End” and is located at the end of the club’s indoor swimming pool:There’s also a piano room, and a card room where supposedly Steve Albini will be holding poker games after hours.The retro-chic charm is great and all, but the scalding/freezing showers leave something to be desired and rumors of a bed bug epidemic are running rampant, causing a fair amount of paranoia, particularly among those concert-goers in altered states. Still, this is a blast and not an experience I would trade for the world. Les Savy Fav’s Tim Harrington just walked by en route to a row boat in the lake. Something good is going to come out of that, I’m sure.

Tonight’s agenda after Wooden Shjips: Polvo, Om, Les Savy Fav, Shellac and Lightning Bolt. All photos by JJ Wandler