In modern music, genre names are tossed around so casually that they can pigeonhole any band, and the all-inclusive "indie rock" has become one of the most meaningless phrases in the industry. However, some bands have been able to avoid categorization. Les Savy Fav is a prime example.
Formed during the band's tenure at Rhode Island School of Design in the mid 1990s, the now New York-based quintet has spent the past 13 years performing and recording on its own terms. As a result, they are an enduring force in modern music known for their defiant originality.
Drummer Harrison Haynes, who grew up in Chapel Hill and now lives in Durham and, with his wife, operates Branch Gallery, joined the band a few years after its inception. He recalled going to the bands early shows at RISD.
"[Les Savy Fav was] set apart within the context of other RISD bands. Les Savy Fav seemed like a straight forward rock 'n' roll band in the context of lightning bolts and black dice, you know," Haynes said. "A lot of the RISD bands at that time were deconstructing rock and doing like feedback loops, which is awesome but I remember seeing Les Savy Fav and seeing two guitarists and vocals and drums and bass. It was weirdly revolutionary compared to the other bands."
In spite of this standard approach, Haynes quickly learned that the band's songwriting was rife with subtlety and inventiveness. "Meet Me in the Dollar Bin" of 2004's Inches, for example, is a four-minute percussion-driven track with only two notes and feedback.
This inventive spirit has in many ways defined the band. Billed as post-punk, Les Savy Fav's punk influences mostly stop at the surface level.
"I think we've managed to eschew a lot of categorization. We've been very stubborn about not being able to or not wanting to sum up what our band is," Haynes said. "It even goes down to what the name of our band is. It means nothing. We made it up. It's just self-referential."
As a result, the band has not found much fame in the mainstream, but consistently sells out their shows and, in 2008, performed at major festivals like Coachella and Norway's Hove Festival alongside Jay-Z. For Haynes, this place between extreme notoriety and niche appeal is just fine.
"We insist on doing things our own way. And in some ways I think it's really paid off. We have a cultish following that's pretty second to none," he said. "On the other hand, we haven't really gone down in the books. Most people don't know who our band is. Those are things that we are fine with. We started a band to be the underappreciated band. To be like in 20 years, 'oh you never checked this band out, oh they were really seminal.' We always sort of had that in mind, in a joking way."
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of their originality is their live show. Vocalist Tim Harrington brings a duffel bag full of costumes that he rotates throughout the show. His antics include kissing audience members and wandering around the stage in states of undress. The defining element of their shows, however, is the improvisational spirit.
"One thing we do is to never organize anything. We always ad lib everything," Haynes said. "Humor plays a big part of, but it's not like standup comedy. It's very stream of consciousness performance art type thing."
Although Harrington seems to be involved in his own performance, it is still very much a group show.
"Tim is sort of doing his thing, we're just sort of playing the music, but we're all talking about the performance and the ideas behind the costumes and all the live energy," Haynes said. "It might seem that Tim is doing his thing and we're doing our thing, to a certain degree that's true. But to another degree, we're all kind of vibing off the same energy."
Haynes added that the live show is firmly rooted in a post-modern art ethic.
"In the way we approach the live thing and the way we record, we're all sort of influenced by the paradigms we learned in art school for making things. You know, trying not to be too illustrative. Trying to present pieces of information and let people bridge the gap where they need to," Haynes said. "I think that we're also all conscious about this idea [that]... there's no art in being like the guy on the unicycle with the purple Mohawk. The art is in the subtlety-not that Tim is that subtle very often. I think even within Tim's complete reckless abandon there are some little nuanced weird things. Even when Tim is thought of as being sort of confrontational, it actually could also be seen as sort of weird and child-like. Even though we're very confrontational live, we're not macho. I think that's a subtle thing that's sometimes lost on people."
Coupled with Hayne's involvement in the Triangle art scene, it is this improvisational art ethic that drew Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of the Nasher Museum's Barkley Hendricks "Birth of the Cool" exhibition, to invite the band to play. Schoonmaker approached Duke Performances director Aaron Greenwald to help coordinate the event.
Haynes said that the band loves to play in non-traditional venues thus accounting for their previous gallery shows and their performance at the Museum of Modern Art. Playing at the Nasher was thus an easy choice.
"I joked about it once. Art museum tour. It started at the MoMA now it's here," Haynes said.
The show is one of firsts. In addition to being the band's first public concert in the area in five years, this is the first outdoor show for the Nasher.
"The Triangle has all these great indie rock bands and you can see them if you want to go to the Cradle but there's no good, mid-sized outdoor venue," Greenwald said. "There's a sense of intimacy that artist and audience can have. We sort of... create an environment that's different. Not to say it's better than the Cradle, it's just different."
Les Savy Fav will also open the museum to a younger, hipper audience.
"I think getting young energy in the museum is important," Schoonmaker said. "The trick will be to see how much they associate this with what the Nasher is trying to do. Just see if they can look beyond concert or exhibition and see interesting, non-commercial artistic production."
As for closing the Hendricks exhibition, both Haynes and Schoomaker said the band's connections to the artist are small but notable as both demonstrate a cross-section between visual and musical arts. Schoonmaker also said both have been overlooked in their careers and are only now breaking into the mainstream.
"There's a pretty big gap culturally between us. There could have been more specifically appropriate bands that could have played the closing of the Barkley show," Haynes said. "I like to have disparate things out there and have people make the connections. I think that's what contemporary art is all about."
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