I've been to Frankenmuth, MI exactly once. I was there for a Thanksgiving weekend vacation in 2012 with family. We shopped at Bronner's where we purchased ornaments that still go on our tree every year. They're beautiful....a guitar for me (just a pipe dream), a flute for my wife who plays one at church, a drum for my oldest daughter who played drums in the marching band, a piano for my second daughter, and a clarinet for my third daughter. We took in all of the other sites Frankenmuth had to offer, a picturesque downtown with Bavarian architecture, and had a chicken dinner at the Bavarian Inn. On Saturday, we found a downtown bar to watch Ohio State whoop on a team that won't be named here (this is not a rivalry post). There were more fans of the home team in this establishment than there were of us. On Sunday, we left feeling like we'd seen the best of what the place had to offer and entertained the thought of coming back sometime. Unbeknownst to us, we missed something in the same zip code that would become Frankenmuth's biggest claim to international fame....a collection of musicians aged 13-15 holding impromptu jam sessions in their garage. Fast forward to September 27, 2022 and I'm in section 117 at the Huntington Center in Toledo to see what became of Frankenmuth’s wunderkinds 10 years later. This is my view while I chill to the calm vibe in the arena ushered in by “Reasons for Waiting” by Jethro Tull on the sound system.
I don't need to answer any questions when I decide if I like a band. It's a short and simple process. I do ask a few hard questions when I decide if I respect them as artists. You can have a lot of fun listening to good music. But great music, like all great art will dominate your imagination and take you on a journey. You may partake in a vision the artist shares with you, or create one of your own inspired by the art.
I’ve spent 20+ years sharing music with my kids that they might not otherwise have heard through the normal channels available to them in their lifetime, and I’m blessed to have them appreciate what shaped my generation and prior generations. For my part, I haven’t done much to reciprocate in my appreciation for their generation's music, and I need to do better.
But the bridge that crosses the generation gap in my family isn’t entirely one way. One of my daughters told me about some new bands that showed appreciation for classic rock and it registered enough that I remember the conversation. But it was an afternoon that I spent with another daughter in Kent in December 2021 that punched it in. Playing in the Twisted Meltz sandwich shop where we were having lunch was music that sounded like classic rock but I didn’t recognize it. So I Shazammed it and only had more questions when the app identified that I was listening to something called Safari Song by a band called Greta Van Fleet. That sounds like a female individual's name (spoiler alert, it is, but in a way that only invites more questions), but the vocalist sounded male and the accompanying video loop that on the Shazam app showed it was clearly a male band, not a female solo artist. Then the confusion only deepened when I also registered that these guys looked like kids who may not be old enough to drive, not aged rockers donning a vintage seventies look that was modern in their own time. And they were wearing vintage uhm I dunno, outfits? costumes? something that they made themselves out of things they found around the house? They sounded really good. How have I not heard more about this until now?
Were these the guys my daughter told me about in the car several months ago? This sparked a conversation with her sister whom I was with that day, and with the beauty of the iTunes Store at my fingertips, I instantly added two Greta Van Fleet studio albums to my digital collection. I haven’t stopped listening to them since then. But I still have more questions than answers. Is this a tribute, a parody, something more? Do I like their music? It’s very entertaining and fun. Hell yes I do. I also respect them all as very talented musicians who are far better at what they do than many long tenured pop or rock artists. Do I respect them as creators of art? I’m starting to, but this is where I’ve struggled the most. I couldn’t decide for a long time if I was getting played by a cynical attempt to mimic what sells to a certain audience, or if this is a sincere effort to expand the artistic palate of the current generation? Another question: if the intent is to expand it, is the goal to get younger audiences to look backward for new perspective or something more? So many questions.
What would you call a painter who can duplicate Van Gough’s Starry Night or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa down to the most minute detail, or at least duplicate the method used to create these works? A really good painter perhaps, no an excellent painter. Is this person creating art though?
Every Greta Van Fleet track is fun to listen to. Some because they remind me of legends from previous generations. It would be easy to get caught up in that and almost everybody who talks about Greta Van Fleet does that to a fault. It’s been discussed so much that I won’t dissect it much here other than to say that my hope is that by the conclusion of this post, you’ll be willing to consider that looking at this band through the lens of Led Zeppelin, whether you think of that as a positive or a negative, is limiting your imagination and does you a disservice.
While it didn't take long for me to conclude that Greta Van Fleet is wildly entertaining to listen to, your mileage may vary. These are subjective and personal decisions, but I'm clearly not alone. Where those of us in that camp start to diverge is what we're looking for the band to provide. My tastes on that have evolved at a pretty fast pace. Some come to hear what music would sound like if Led Zeppelin were still making music. Some like the fantasy prog rock sounds and moods that are featured more on their second album. Rock n roll fans from my generation may appreciate that they are bringing a style of music back to a new generation that may never have decided to explore it. Critics will call them a knock-off act this is algorithmically designed to show up on our Spotify playlists in a blatant corporately engineered cash grab. And it's hard to refute that if you listen to tracks like "Highway Tune" what with the Plant like wailing, to JPJ bass lines, and guitar riffs clearly echoing sounds that were a staple of Page's career:
Exhibit A: The 2nd coming to led heads?
"When the Curtain Falls" is another great rocker, with an incredible climactic finish immediately following the bridge section at about the 2:56 mark in the video below.
And this is where I started asking myself if there was anything more to GVF than a fun band to rock out to. When the Curtain Falls is a song about the inevitable downfall of the latest Hollywood "It Girl", and for the song to have such an upbeat sound and a ragingly triumphant finale begs criticism that it is musically and lyrically disparate. I don't think this is supposed to be a celebration of the trappings of Hollywood, or a dose of schadenfreude. The song is a warning, but it sounds like it revels in the suffering of someone else though.....and musically invites you to delight in it as well. That’s fine, it’s a great rock song that I’ll continue to enjoy for a long time. But it’s not artistically significant, at least not to me. And a lot of classic rock songs aren’t and that doesn’t stop me or zillions of others from loving them for the rest of our lives.
To their credit, Greta Van Fleet members handle the criticism with grace and maturity. The band was lampooned for a Saturday Night Live performance in 2019 that fans will admit was not their best moment. Nerves and the unusual setting of a tiny stage in a cramped studio playing before a nationally televised audience was not in their comfort zone at that point in their lives and young yet skyrocketing career. But the criticism has actually led to a reverse Streisand effect, calling attention of non-fans and turning them into superfans. This is more accidental than intentional on Greta’s part, but it’s what Bob Ross would once refer to as a “happy accident.”
Pitchfork was more blatantly scathing, and when I read that column, I thought that would leave a mark. Quite the contrary. Josh Kiszka was thoughtful and measured when he heard about it, as though he took time to consider the criticism and didn’t consider it to be written by someone who understood what they were doing. “It’s unfortunate they’d be putting that energy out into the world but that’s their prerogative. I’d like to think there’s some substance to what we’re doing.” Younger brother Sam was flat out unperturbed, demonstrating the kind of wisdom that many never achieve in an entire lifetime when he said “I don’t know the intent behind the piece. I’m not sure if it’s a publication trying to get attention or if it’s someone who genuinely doesn’t like us and what we’re doing. If you can’t do it, I guess you just write about it. I feel like this man has had a troubled past. Prayers up for him.” Touché Sam As someone who can’t do it and only writes about it, I could feel like collateral damage was inflicted on me, but I don’t at all. I only admire the anti-fragile approach that is potentially an unexplored yet critical ingredient that has led Greta Van Fleet to success where others have failed whether they deserved to or not.
Greta has yet another side. In person they can range from quiet, humble, and sincere to downright zany caricatures of rock icons (and for reasons unknown to me, Oliver Reed, but seriously, take a few minutes to click the link and determine what the hell you just watched, I'll wait). Their first album called "Anthem of the Peaceful Army" was more an ode to their Frankenmuth garage beginnings… a collection of songs inspired by spending countless hours in the basement listening to their father's cavernous record collection. The songs are well written and very well performed, though the album is more a testament to musical competence than artistic significance. So when they followed up with their sophomore album, "The Battle at Garden's Gate", those who want more than Zeppelinesque retro rock appreciated a more mature band offering a humanistic vision of collectively becoming something greater through mass consciousness. I still had questions. My cynical side had to wonder if this is the silly side of Greta Van Fleet, composing the love child of Andy Kaufman, and Spinal Tap, with a little bit of Tenacious D thrown in for musical authenticity.
To find out I went to see them in person and here is how they opened the show:
Philosophy, collective consciousness, inner peace, love not just as a truth but a yearning human need, kickass guitar licks, progressive and thundering drums, and inhuman sounding vocals that are as advertised without the polishing effects of the studio made for the kind of evening that I don't think any other musician or group can provide right now.
Yes, Greta Van Fleet sound like Led Zeppelin if you hear them on the radio in the background while you're paying attention to something else. But they are their own eclectic collection of unique artists who want you to envision the album "The Battle at Garden's Gate" as the soundtrack to a story about the difficulty of finding peace, whether it is within ourselves or in the external world. The "garden" is this place of peace, on the other side of a locked gate, and the battle is our own struggle to find our way in. While "When the Curtain Falls" demonstrates musical talent, "Trip the Light Fantastic," the penultimate song on Garden's Gate (with a name I'll confess I first thought was absurd until I really listened to the song) puts an exclamation point on the spiritual turn this album has taken, invoking the Ram Mantra in a triumphant chorus sung by a choir at the 2:57 mark, hinting that the long sought but elusive victory to achieve peace is finally being won.
To comet across the blistering hue
Beyond the spaces of false and true
Away from a world
We have riddled with scars
To be wholly free and
Amongst the stars
The poetry in these lyrics invites the listener to envision being elevated to a higher level of consciousness where earthly troubles no longer matter in the grand scheme of things. It's an artistic vision that I'm happy to get on board with. Count me as a member of the peaceful army, and I'm thrilled that these "kids" decided to share their vision. It's been in my orbit since my Thanksgiving vacation 10 years ago, yet I may never have known except for a random decision to get lunch in Kent last December, when I decided to pay attention for a minute. So in the spirit of the Big Empty blog and the whole reason that it exists, what you're looking for is all around you if you take the time to notice.
