BVaz Reporting From Chicago Part 1: Lollapalooza

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Last weekend, after moving all day Friday, I partook of a little bit of the greatness that was Lollapalooza 2007. This of course used to be a touring festival but has now become a weekend 3 day festival in Grant Park in Chicago on the lakefront a la ACL. We had some rain, had some laughs, but most of all, we rocked. Here is my mini-breakdown of the bands I saw.
Before I go into this though, let me first explain the extreme amounts of conflicts going on with this festival. First of all they basically had 4 stages set up, 2 north of the fountain and 2 south of the fountain. The 2 stages on each side were basically facing each other so right when one band would finish on the south side, another band would immediately start playing on the south side. And the start/finish times for the bands on the north were exactly the same as on the south SO……..essentially what this means is that if one band is playing until 6:30 on one of the south stages and you want to see someone who starts at 6:30 on the north stage, you are going to miss some of both or either set because you have to walk from the south part to the north part which took about 10~15 minutes. Anyway, with that said:

Hold Steady

I basically walked up to Clap Your Hands walking off the stage on the south end of the park, and next up on the south end was the Hold Steady. I wasn’t terribly familiar with their stuff, but they totally rocked. A lot of bands, even if “good” live can sound kind of so-so if you don’t know their material, but I had no idea what any of these songs were and I thought they were awesome. I would probably say they were the big winner on Saturday.

Snow Patrol

I briefly checked out the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who were on the big south stage after the Hold Steady played (see above breakdown of north/south stages), but when the guy started Sebastian Bach’ing to weird guitar riffs and ripped off his pants and basically had a Cher outfit on, I decided to forego the rest of their set to check out good ole Snow Patrol on the north end. I have seen Snow Patrol twice before, each time was good, not great, so I wasn’t expecting too much, but this was the best I had ever seen them for sure. They sounded great and had a good energy going with the crowd, partially helped by a guy in the front row wearing a spiderman outfit waving an Irish flag, who provided some good fodder (can be seen here smoking a cigarette). They also brought out Nikki something from the Silversun Pickups (seen in above photo) to sing with them on the ‘duet’ song that is on their Eyes Open album, which sounded awesome live. Anyway, they played their hits of course, but they sounded great, so I am back on board with them live.

Spoon

As Snow Patrol was finishing, I started heading for Spoon, who were up on the south end right when Snow Patrol finished and the crowd for Spoon was HUGE. Anyway, I heard about 4-5 of their songs, pretty good not great, and then I ventured back to the north end so I could get a spot where I could actually see Interpol.

Interpol

Interpol was the headliner on the north end of the park for day two of the festival, and I had never seen them before so I tried to get a good spot to see them. Their show was pretty awesome, and sounded pretty good. The songs just are really good songs so they get pretty rocking at times, but the one thing that detracted from the show a little was their NYC hipster attitude. I think they maybe said 2 words to the crowd during the entire 80 minutes of the show, which is not really a big deal, but they definitely had a too cool for school air about them that I think kind of kept it from getting to its highest rocking potential. But it was a great show nonetheless. Here endeth day two, and like I said before, I think Hold Steady was the best show I saw on day two.

Yo La Tengo

I arrived on a very sultry Sunday afternoon in time for a little Yo La Tengo, and as I walked up they were playing what I like to call the “weed out the hipsters” song, which is essentially a Sonic Youth-esque noise party for about 15 minutes that has exactly ONE bass line and involves a lot of feedback and guitar noise (actually the song is called “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind”). This song always succeeds in thinning out the crowd quite substantially so I always enjoy it. Anyway, they were playing on the north end in the music shell where they play the free Taste of Chicago concerts, and I watched about half of their set and then went across the lawn to the other north stage where Interpol and Snow Patrol were on Saturday to get in position for Modest Mouse.

Modest Mouse

One word: F’Awesome. These guys blew me away. I had heard conflicting reports about how they are live, but they were totally amazing. Every single song they played rocked, and the crowd was going fuck nuts over everything. I think there was more crowd surfing during this show than any other show I have ever seen. There were at least one and usually two people up in the air for pretty much the entire set. They of course had the legendary Johnny Marr of The Smiths playing with them, and he was spot on. At this point, these guys had won me over and I was prepared to bestow upon them a runaway best of festival award…….that was until….

Pearl Jam

Wow. Holy shit. Ok I was a huge Pearl Jam fan back when I was in middle school/high school, but kind of fell off from paying attention to them as of late, and hadn’t really ever been inclined to see them in concert, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to check them out since there were other bands at Lolla I wanted to see. But as the festival went on it became clearer and clearer that crowd-wise, Pearl Jam was going to be the biggest clusterfuck of all time. And it pretty much was. I was easily over a football field away from the stage. But you know what? It didn’t fucking matter. They had that shit so loud that it really didn’t matter. As they came on I was like “ok, I’m kind of tired, I will listen to a few songs then go get a beer or something” but they just kept progressively drawing me further and further into their web of rock. As they blew through each blazingly loud and fast solo they just kept winning me over, and by the end I was blown away. These guys were just awesome. There is a reason they are so huge. They were even rocking so loud that they didn’t notice there were fireworks going off behind them in the middle of the show:

Anyway, of course he did throw in a bunch of anti-George Bush/BP stuff into the show, but as a band they were rocking so much it didn’t matter. They played a few nice more obscure numbers that I don’t know how common they are at a typical Pearl Jam show but I was surprised to hear them (Victoria Williams’ “Crazy Mary” and “State of Love and Trust” from the Singles soundtrack). Then he brought out Ben Harper and some veteran of the war in Iraq and they sung an anti-war song, and then they played a few more songs, closing it down with “Rockin in the Free World”, which was awesome.

So, all in all, the last two shows of the fest, Pearl Jam and Modest Mouse, made it worth the price of admission alone and were two of the best shows I’ve seen, and getting to see the other bands was cool too. Great festival Lollapalooza, CUNY.