River Rave: Holding Water

It was hard not to compare this performance with the one Sonic Youth gave last August at Great Woods as the nominal headliners of a Lollapalooza tour whose star attraction was Courtney Love's dysfunctional personality. Last year the kids were leaving as Sonic Youth offered a noticeably subdued and sublime hour of soothing chaos. It was as if the weight of the tour and all that it was supposed to stand for had physically compressed the band's expansive sound into an oscillating hypnotic drone.

This time Sonic Youth played as if there were nothing to lose and people stayed in their seats. Sandwiched between the vacuous retro-rock of Lenny Kravitz and the promising return of Patti Smith, positioned in the eye of an alterna-rock storm hosted by modern-rock radio newcomer WBCN, the band casually assaulted the conventions of rock until the outer shell of riffs and melodies collapsed inward and the clouds of dissonance and distortion parted to reveal the music's elemental core.

It made sense that Sonic Youth were there, occupying a central position on a festival bill that also featured Everclear, Cracker, the Presidents of the United States of America, Lush, and Gin Blossoms. It was a loud reminder that alternative rock has a depth that's often obscured by the parade of novelty one-hitters. And even though Sonic Youth formed more than a decade ago, when a good portion of the River Rave audience were still in diapers, you could sense a connection being made when "The Diamond Sea" exploded into waves of deafening turbulence and Moore began punching and kicking his instrument in a violent dance that could have been choreographed by any teenage air-guitarist locked in a bedroom with his or her rock-and-roll dreams.

When the aggression subsided, Moore picked up his battered guitar, knelt down, and struck the remaining strings -- and damn if it didn't sound exactly like a giant bell in what Robert Palmer calls "the Church of the Sonic Guitar." It was hard to imagine anything topping that; still, I walked over to the second stage, past booths giving out free non-alcoholic Cuervo margaritas and Kahlua White Russians. The British group Pulp played in front of a couple thousand kids while skateboarders and mountain-bikers did their thing on an adjacent half-pipe. But flamboyant frontman Jarvis Cocker just seemed a pale imitation of the new romantic-era Bowie.

Back at the main stage Patti Smith and her band, with the dueling guitars of Lenny Kaye and Tom Verlaine, kicked off in front of an alarming number of empty seats. You couldn't blame the young crowd for not sticking around. Smith's "People Have the Power" poetry is an anachronism in the cynical '90s. But even if most of her newer material didn't seem to click, she did rescue "Dancing Barefoot" from the sexless void that U2 relegated it to a couple years ago. And when Patti's 13-year-old son came out and played guitar on an gritty cover of Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water," you could sense that, like Sonic Youth, she was passing on something of great value -- and that the 10 percent of rock that's not a mere illusion still resonates with a power that's impossible to control, define, or even harness for more than a fleeting instant.

The Rave grossed about $410,000, which -- minus expenses -- will go to the Shriners' Burn Institute and MASS MIC, an anti-censorship group that recently rallied to the defense of WFNX and the Boston Phoenix when their summer concert series at Boston's Hatch Shell was threatened with cancellation by the commonwealth.

-- Matt Ashare