This year, I was looking for a reason to ride the roads I’d spent my childhood cruising with my dad, up until his death earlier this year. I’d always abstractly intended to get around to attending Solid Sound. The festival, “three days of art, music, and comedy,” founded by the alt-Americana, occasionally experimental folk rock band Wilco, takes place every other summer at MASS MoCA. In 2009, North Adams saw the inaugural Solid Sound Fest. There’s more jobs, more attention, more “culture” (whatever the hell that might mean), more tourism (at least to MASS MoCA itself), and a general sense of “Well, if the factories aren’t coming back, this’ll do in a pinch.” Since then, North Adams has seen reasonable benefits. In 1999, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) took over the Arnold Print Works/Sprague Electric factory complex. After Sprague Electrics closed, the population went down by 4,000 and unemployment was at 14 percent. When I lived in the Berkshires 30 years ago, North Adams, Mass.-all rolling foothills and repurposed industrial desolation-was known for cheap bars, cheap rent, bad acid, and.that’s pretty much it. In Western Massachusetts, Route 7 is miles and miles of agrarian-to-suburban economic disparity on one end, rural farming communities, and on the other, old money bastions, a wounded paper mill town, a college town, struggling and fancy. If one is not lulled into a shallow reverie by the pretty trees and colonial architecture, the 39 or so towns that make up the Berkshires can be bewildering.
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