Hayden Homes Amphitheater, Bend, OR
6/19/2024
Central Oregon’s Hayden Homes Amphitheater got lucky: on the eve of the summer solstice, it wasn’t a given that it would be a beautiful 80-degree day. According to one member of security, Old Crow Medicine Show’s set that took place at the venue (elevation: 3,625’) just three days before was cold enough that there was snow falling as the band played. Had things lined up just a little bit differently, that could have been the weather for Vampire Weekend’s visit, the audience in parkas and feeling miserable rather than joyously serving looks and soaking up the High Desert sunshine. Could Portlanders wanting to celebrate the release of the band’s fantastic fifth LP, Only God Was Above Us, have just waited a day to drive an hour less to see them at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena? Sure, but CPA holds 10,000 more people, is made of sound-destroying concrete and doesn’t sit directly next to the Deschutes River. The extra hour is a pittance for such a beautiful venue.
Vampire Weekend’s show wasn’t perfect, but the flaws were few and far between. One of the most glaring, though, is that their choice of opener felt … ill-fitting. They’re not becoming a jam band by any means (even as they become the kind of band who joins Goose onstage to stretch “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” out to a brisk 30 minutes), which makes the presence of Phish bassist/founding member Mike Gordon a little perplexing. There was no shortage of clear and present Phishheads in the audience, the most obvious ones bedecked in the expected permutations of the classic Phish fish shirt, excitedly bobbing along as Gordon performed a song about the Las Vegas Sphere and a cover of “Louisiana Sun” by jam band godfathers Max Creek, before ending on Phish’s exceedingly beloved “Carini” (though they didn’t stretch it out to 20+ minutes). From the barricades, it was hard to tell if Gordon’s performance moved the needle for the rest of the audience beyond people gently grooving in the Bend sunshine. It was great that Vampire Weekend did something more interesting and intentional with their tour support choices, but this tour feels like such a blowout, which makes it hard to remember when it was that easy to forget that we weren’t about to see the String Cheese Incident or Disco Biscuits.
The other major complaint to be had about the show borders on a humblebrag: it was just too bright and sunny of a day for this concert. As with any respectable big-stage performance, Vampire Weekend had a lot of different lighting elements surrounding the band and their massive, inflated depiction of a subway tunnel (or, perhaps, the fascinating Water Tunnel 3, referenced by name in “The Surfer”), including some very iconic yellow-and-black work lights, seemingly straight out of an actual construction site. We didn’t really get to see those elements for a while, though, because the sun was a full hour away from setting as the six members of the band took the stage to play their first few songs. As the set went on, though, those lighting elements became visible, a cool effect born out of the unpredictability of sunshine. (Also, it seems there may have been a planned “curtain drop” moment, but the stage crew accidentally pulled the whole curtain down during setup).
These complaints are trifles. If you were a Vampire Weekend fan at Hayden Homes Amphitheater, you were probably in heaven. The main trio of singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig, drummer Chris Tomson and bassist Chris Baio were joined by a killer quartet of multi-instrumentalists who helped render even the most stripped-back songs in macro-scale. Guitarist/sax monster Colin Killalea and violinist/pedal steel player Ray Suen were just as visible and engaging as the trio, but drummer/percussionist Garrett Ray and keyboardist Will Canzoneri were no slouches, either, the former elevating the hell out of every song’s rhythm section to fit the venue and area’s scale. On a stage this big, you don’t typically get the joy of watching two musicians making magic directly next to each other for songs on end, but the tightness of this unit was tough to miss.
The band’s five albums were each represented across the set’s 23 songs, not including the encore’s cover medley. Though Contra’s only appearance was the bombastic banger “Cousins,” fans of their self-titled album were eatin’ good, the obvious “A-Punk” and “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (stretched out to a respectable seven minutes) were joined by others that weren’t quite a given, like “Campus,” “M79” and “I Stand Corrected,” each one more of a treat than the last. They played “Hannah Hunt,” brought Mike Gordon back out to play bass during the onstage jam session of “Cape Cod” (in which Koenig and Tomson swapped places to honor the fact that Tomson gave him his guitar at Vampire Weekend’s first band practice) and they played all but three songs from Only God Was Above Us. Should they have just played all 10 tracks? Sure, but that desire is also very greedy.
The finest moments were the ones where things got weird and chaotic. It started simple—Father of the Bride’s “Sunflower” found itself mutated into a straight-up banger that saw the band ramping up the intensity as the song stretched on, and of course there was that seven-minute “Cape Cod”—but the band have begun to embrace the joys of getting weird. We didn’t get their gloriously funky cover of SBTRKT’s “New Dorp. New York.,” but they did give us the 10+ minute, multi-part “Cocaine Cowboys” suite that takes fragments of songs and transforms them into something goofier and more audacious than the band typically get with their music. That goofiness carried all the way to the end of the show, where the band embraced their inner Yo La Tengo and took live song requests from other bands’ catalogs and played messy fragments of each. Other dates got songs by Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen and the song “Dangerous Night” from the show I Think You Should Leave with a guest appearance by Tim Robinson himself. In Bend, Koenig’s paternal urges kicked in and he mostly entertained the requests of children who needed to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which, honestly, just kicked ass) and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It sure beats the person who wanted “Ophelia” by the Lumineers!
All of this might sound messy, but it’s really something else when mixed with the more transcendent moments like watching them perform “Mary Boone” and “Hannah Hunt” back-to-back while surrounded by the orange glow of the final sunset of spring (which was legitimately tear-inducing) or scream-singing “Cousins” and “A-Punk” with 7,500 other dorks in the High Desert. It felt like watching a band at the height of their power, showcasing the fact that the sonic, juicy magic they’re able to deploy onstage gives them the freedom to get silly without losing out on the more subtle moments of indie-rock catharsis. Before Only God Was Above Us, it seemed possible that Vampire Weekend just didn’t have the juice anymore, but there in the heart of Oregon, it was clear their tank is nowhere near empty—and the chance to get to watch that was more than worth the cost of gas.
