Thoughts on Biscoland

It is 2024, and I am checking into my hotel for my first Biscoland…

The Downtown Syracuse Marriott, about 20 miles from the festival grounds, has a cavernous and turn-of-the-century-opulent lobby that belies its relatively low price point. The scenic lobby is a sight for sore eyes, but nothing compared to the (relatively standard, but spacious) hotel room. My travel day has been long (flights into Syracuse are difficult to come by, and so I've flown into New York, rented a car, and driven four hours to the hotel), I've been awake since about 4 AM, and I have to fight the impulse to climb into bed and nap when I enter the room. But I manage to resist the urge—Biscoland is calling.

NOTE: If you came here looking for a straightforward recap of Biscoland—a methodical breakdown and scoring of the sets, analysis of the jams, maybe even a review of the experience—you will likely want to look somewhere else. I toyed with the idea, but there was more that I wanted to say, more about the experience than could be conveyed in a traditional recap. I will speak briefly on the experience of the festival, and even more briefly on the music, but there is enough of a style to what I usually post that I felt a disclaimer was necessary.

I am, by nature, a worrier. The whole day before, I worry that I will miss my flight, and then once in the air worry that I will be unable to get my rental for whatever reason, and then the whole drive I worry that I will hit massive, unavoidable traffic and be late for or miss Tractorbeam. It should not be surprising, then, that my first thought as I pull into the festival grounds is, hilariously, "what if I have the wrong Wonderland Forest?" The approach to the festival, and the festival grounds, are everything that Camp Bisco at Montage was not. It is not until I am essentially on the grounds that I see any signs and good-natured volunteers/employees who direct me to check-in and the parking area. There are no signs posted, no one directing you where to go, and—my personal favorite difference from the Montage days, at least at this point—no lines, anywhere.

Walking into a Biscuits show anywhere is a powerful feeling, and walking into a Biscuits festival even more so. Biscoland offers a unique twist on that feeling compared to Camp Bisco: for one thing, everyone is there for the same reason. There is no guesswork involved—we are all rabid, ravenous fans of The Disco Biscuits. For another, the Wonderland Forest is the perfect location for all of us. It is small, secluded, and it is just ours. This feels, to me, like the closest I will come to experiencing the magic of the first few Camps Bisco—where all of the band's most dedicated fans converge on a small venue in the middle of nowhere and turn it into our circus in a bubble for a long weekend. More on that later.

It is not long after walking into the venue that I begin to encounter familiar faces, friends I haven't seen since the last show. With most of these friends, general pleasantries are exchanged, budding excitement is expressed, and ways are parted. The first day of a run is so many of these exchanges, non-stop hellos and goodbyes and how've-you-beens.

Over the weekend, I am struck numerous times by how long I have known most of these people, some of them still passing acquaintances, and some of them among the closest friends I have: nearly a decade in some cases. Throughout the weekend, I find myself reminiscing on important steps in my journey…

It is 2015, and I am staking out my campsite for my first Camp Bisco…

I am two months out of graduating college. I have scraped together enough funds from my busboy job for a weekend pass, a handle of Heaven Hill whiskey, and twelve granola bars (I would cave and purchase a breakfast buffet on Saturday morning, but otherwise this is my sustenance for the weekend). For accommodations, I have a tent, borrowed from my parents, and a sleeping bag and camping mattress from when I attended camp eight years ago.

In contrast to the complaints about Live Nation, the festival is a fairly well-oiled machine. I have no trouble getting in, finding a plot, and setting up my tent. The schedule tells me that I have some time to kill before the Biscuits, so I head down to explore the grounds and casually catch music.

I am free to move at my own pace, for I have come alone and know no one here. I frequently attended concerts alone throughout college—I wasn't going to let a lack of friends, or the bad taste of the friends I did have, make me miss out on quality live music—but this is my first solo festival. I finally bit the bullet in 2013 and made the effort to see my first Biscuits show. They had played about 40 shows that year and the previous year combined, or about the same number that they played just in the previous year, which was down 30 shows from the year before, down about 30 shows from the year before that. How much longer was this incredibly special band going to last, realistically?

Although I had seen almost all of my whopping seven Biscuits shows solo up to this point, that would all change after my eighth, Thursday night at Camp Bisco 2015. There, I would meet some people who recognized me from my internet presence, who introduced themselves, and who would in time become very close friends. I would attend many of my next 90+ shows, including my first Biscoland nine years later, with these same friends…

A lot has changed in nine years. I was fired from the busboy job that I used to pay for Camp Bisco in 2015 (about a week after the festival, no relation) and I have held over a dozen jobs since then. I can no longer wander through a festival of exclusively Biscuits fans and expect to not run into anyone I know. I no longer am able to attend a long weekend of shows on minimal food and less sleep (couldn't even do it then, as it turns out; I actually passed out from exhaustion during Bassnectar's set and could barely keep my eyes open for the final Biscuits set on Saturday). If I pop a pill at a show these days, it's either an Advil or a Pepcid, and the most hardcore drink I will consume is a sugar-free Redbull. For most of my friends, even those who don't abstain as completely as I do, there is definitely a much more responsible attitude towards partying these days.

But time's arrow marches on for all of us, and a lot has changed for the band too. For the next couple of years, the aging process played out about as we all expected. It's not exactly a straight line, but on the whole the music got slower and the band's apathy increased. But then, as the familiar story goes, a switch flipped and the band decided to refocus themselves on the music. And fast forward to the present day…

I am not by any means trying to say that everyone is 100% satisfied, or that there are no complaints. There may come a time when the band manages to satisfy every single one of its fans while still managing to draw in new fans, but I seriously doubt it. I've been an avid listener of The Disco Biscuits for over a decade, and one thing I've come to notice is that all avid listeners have a fully formed ideal version of the band in their minds, and no two of these are alike. We experience dissonance and frustration whenever the band doesn't live up to that ideal, and I am by no means exempt from this. But I really do believe that the band has achieved, to quote Jeremy Bentham, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."

It is 2019, and Setbreak is Over…

It is mid-December, but I am sitting poolside and enjoying the South Florida weather. It is my first run of shows since taking the pledge. For not the first time in my life, I am thinking "it is a good time to be a Biscuits fan."

I am discussing the recent tour with a friend. He is, overall, very happy with the state of the band, except for one thing, one inconvenient detail: the Tractorbeam segments. Because the band is now playing a Tractorbeam segment in the second set of every show, the surprise is gone, and the setlists are predictable.

It's not the first time I've heard this statement, and it's not the first time I react with perplexion that, I assume, reads as condescension. There are, at this point, six different Tractorbeam segments (and the band would add two more by the end of the year). Therefore, it's not the same song every single time, even though they are all referred to as "Tractorbeam" by the fans and on setlists. If the band went to the trouble of naming the segments, or, even better, if they were playing new original songs, no one would be saying that the setlists were "predictable…"

How naïve I was! For now, in 2024, the band has debuted 28 new original songs over two and a half years, and a perhaps surprisingly large number of fans have stated exactly that: that these modern setlists are too predictable because of how many of these 28 completely different songs the band plays in any given show.

We shouldn't find this surprising. As Karl Marx said, "nostalgia is among the most powerful forces known to man." And while not every one of the 28 songs debuted since 2022 is perfect, and while legitimate criticisms do exist, a lot of them simply boil down to "how can this song that I am hearing for the first time at the age of 35 compete with a song I first heard when I was 18, when my back didn't hurt and I could party all night and my brain was flooded with endorphins, both natural and artificial."

My point in raising these criticisms is not to debate them point by point (I think I've made it clear enough how I feel), but to show that, when stacked up against what the band has given us in these years, they don't seem terribly significant. The writing output of the past two and a half years is on par with the band's most creative periods (and the individual year of 2022, with 17 original debuts, is only topped by 1998 (20) and 2000 (22)). The band is playing roughly twice as many shows per year as they played from 2012-2019. And, even more importantly, they care about the output. They are practicing, they are incorporating new material creatively into the setlists on debut, and they are playing with polish and finesse.

And all of this from a band that I first saw over a decade ago because I didn't believe they had many more shows left in them! It was hard to avoid this doom and gloom mentality in my first five or six years of seeing the band, and it was hard not to think back on that mentality with a sense of bewilderment (a feeling akin to waking up from a nightmare and remembering only the sensation of fear, but not what had so deeply terrified you) while at Biscoland: an intimate festival thrown in a special location with only diehard fans of the band in attendance.

I am by no means exempt from the forces of nostalgia. But I do think that, having only ever seen the band in their "twilight years" before their current renaissance, I am less likely to pine for a past that I never got to experience. And the overwhelming feeling of gratitude, that I get to experience this renaissance in the middle of nowhere with a few thousand other like-minded souls, is at the forefront of my mind all weekend. To quote myself, at several points over the past decade, but never more true than now, "it is a good time to be a Biscuits fan."