Tame Impala Are Very, Very Famous

Tame Impala Are Very, Very Famous

Despite sound problems early on in the set (rectified by the band’s team, who all wear funny white lab coats in the wings), Tame Impala carried out the rest of the set like the meticulous perfectionists that they are. Kevin Parker called for a sing-along during “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” and played a significant number of tracks off of their recent release, Currents (“The Less I Know The Better” was a high moment). Stereogum contributor Ryan Leas and I have spoken before about how unusual it is that Tame Impala — a jammy, psychedelic, straight-up rock band — have become one of the biggest in the world. They’re immensely talented, sure, but their songs aren’t hook-heavy bits of pop. They’re unconventional stars who packed the Polo Fields with more bodies than the certifiable pop-star Sam Smith was able to the next day. Back when I lived in San Francisco, I had a group of friends who I guess could be classified as trippy-stoner-types; they hung around the Haight, they loved psychedelics, and they listened almost exclusively to Summer Of Love-type bands and Tame Impala. This was years before Lonerism, when Innerspeaker had just been released on Modular and not a lot of people knew what an “impala” even was, let alone a “tame” one. I was introduced to the band by way of this crew, who once went to a Tame Impala show at San Francisco’s revered Fillmore Auditorium, and then hung out afterward in the hopes of meeting Kevin Parker. Supposedly, their dream came true, and these friends ended up doing just that — it was a scrapbook moment that would collect significance like dust in the years to follow. Just seeing how many people showed up to the band’s set on Saturday makes that easy meet-and-greet seem like an impossibility now, and the memory of hearing that story made watching the Australian band command a crowd of tens of thousands of people in the late afternoon really special, because it made me feel kind of old (and I’m not). I have a band that I get to tell “before they were famous” stories about, which is pretty fucking cool, and I wonder if any of those people who worshipped them so early on were buried someplace in the massive crowd, thinking the same thing.