Lollapalooza Day 1 - Daytime Sets

Lollapalooza Day 1 Part 1 (This is starting to get really drawn out)

Walking into a festival is like a boy going into an arcade with money for the first time. Lights are flashing, sounds are blaring, and he is so excited he doesn’t know what to do first. Then he plays some race car games, some fighting games, some crazy sports games, and a few hours later you’re out of change, it’s time to either a) beg for more money from your mom or b) go home and recover from the exhaustion. Yet, if you keep playing, you might be worn out from too much video gaming. That’s a long way of saying that day one of three day music festival is when you decide to pace yourself smartly or blow your wad early and try to see every band, disregarding your health or your earlobes.

The Main Centralpoint of Lollapalooza - The Fountain with a Skyline View in Grant Park, Chicago

So after going through the front gate search teams, which were pretty laid back, the first land mark in Grant Park is a fountain. Take another look at it if you’re a real early 90’s TV fan. Don’t worry if you don’t see it. It took my girlfriend’s post trip immediate reaction to the picture to receive the “a-hah” moment. It’s the fountain form the opening credits of “Married with Children. “ It must have been a subconscious thing that made me take at least twenty pictures of it. The surprising thing is that one of two young men that attended Lollapalooza with me claims to be “a huge ‘Married with Children’ fan”.

The second thing you get is the full schedule. You look at the schedule and is seems like a mall filled with bands. Stages are sponsored and named after recognizable things which you constantly heard around the grounds. I’m heading over the Myspace stage to see band x. Stages like Adidas, Bud Light, Playstation and the main stage AT&T.

So after that long introduction that you didn’t need, here’s some short thoughts on the bands that I actually did see.

On the Citi Stage, Chicago’s own Chin Up Chin Up put on quite a show. Usually the early bands of the day are the bands that no one has really heard and people that go are mostly dedicated music fans or ones who feel the need to get the most for the money. I guess I fall into the first category and highly enjoy Chin Up’s latest album This Harness Can't Ride Anything. Lead Singer Jeremy Bolen looks kind of like Beck with a fro. Here’s some pics along with a video I shot.

While walking to the adjacent stage AT&T to see first main stage type crowd for Ted Leo as I tried familiarize with the grounds somewhat. I listened to a few songs of Ted Leo, then I checked out the big A/C and Internet tent to experience the comfort that would by the end of the day be impossible to get into if the awful humidity kept up. Ted Leo was good but I’ve seen him before and this specific performance wasn’t too impressive. It was more enjoyable to watch him in HD in the air conditioning tent. 2 hours into Lollapalooza and I already took my first break.

I passed by the Playstation stage and saw a few minutes of Bang Bang Bang who were decent. But it was time for me to arrive a few minutes early in eager anticipation for one of the performances I was coming to Chicago for, Polyphonic Spree.

For those unfamiliar, Polyphonic Spree is a 20 plus member rock orchestra known for their enthusiastic, all out performances as well as leading the world in singing songs directed at the Sun in one album. Led by ex-Tripping Daisy frontman Tim Delaughter, this band of merry men in women dance, sing and play instruments ranging from the guitar and drums to a harp. The Spree came out in their newish Black Military outfits and made the sun shine all over the crowd even more than it already was. The crowd was excited and ready to start enjoying the benefits of a festival where artists pull out all the stops to impress in front of megacrowds in a shortened set.



40 minutes of pure enjoyment later, the Spree walked off stage but Tim let the crowd know that the show wasn't over they just needed to change costumes. Soon enough the band was running through the crowd in their trademark colorful robes lead by the sight of one the band's brass holding up a trombone player. Their encore upped the enrgy to another level as Tim really incited the crowd for the first time by imploring them to sing along to a cover of Nirvana's "Lithium." (Sidenote: Patti Smith also covered Nirvana later on at the fest, playing her version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit.")

I just so happen to have a video of the Spree featuring 98% video of the band and 2 percent of one of the guys who took the trip with me, Andy Candy. He gave the Polyphonic Spree set a big thumbs up.

Polyphonic Spree covers "Lithium"

After Polyphonic Spree, almost anything would be a letdown but we went over to see Sparklehorse (led by a former Flaming Lip Mark Linkus) for a few songs and they were average. Sparklehorse has some excellent songs but I didn't seem to catch many of them in half the set and if a band doesn't grab your attention quick enough, their are seven other stages that you can try out. I flowed from Electric Six to a quick bite to eat as MIA blared from an adjacent stage. Then I saw THe Rapture play 3-4 songs, primarily off Pieces of the People We Love which had a decent crowd for a side street stage. I'd seen MIA about two weeks before and was not really thirsting for more. The Rapture are a fun band but being from NYC-area, I can see them like 4 times a year.

So I ran off mid-set to catch one of the most intriguing bands at Lollapalooza, Blonde Redhead. I'd been meaning to cross them off my list of concerts to go to but it never quite happened until this point. Musically, they have a very Air-like sound with dueling vocals of a more high pitched male/ lead guitarist Amedeo Pace with the primary vocalist, the enchanting Asian woman Kazu Makino. Amedeo's twin brother Simone excels in atmospheric drumming of an excellence.



Blonde Redhead’s set was heavy on their latest, as with most artists on the festival circuit, but unlike most artists that didn’t bother me a bit. 23 is an early contender for album of the year and even more majestic in live performance. They also threw in my favorite song in their catalog "In Particular" off another great album of theirs named Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons Every piece of the show mesmerized me and for the hour long set I was squarely focused on the essence of this show that pervaded. It was one of the most awe inspiring and consistent one hour sets I'd seen in a long time. The shy band didn't take time to make jokes are played around, they just conquered the crowd with music. When Kazu is not dancing or playing guitar, she sits on her black do/horseseat and plays a lovely melodic piano.




Here's a video of "In Particular."


Hope you enjoyed my overly verbose rundown. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Chicago Trip Day 1 - Pre-Lollapalooza Getting Lost Festivities

Joe's Chicago Log: Stardate Supplemental

I intended to blog day by day for a first time during my recent trip to Chicago. I had brought all the "blogger tools" for a trip/ music festival trip. My laptop, a digital camera, and booked a hotel a poor yet usable Wi-Fi Connection. I even bought a notebook to jot down some notes to make sure a useful amount of my thoughts didn't get lost.

I like getting fresh notebook each new place I go allowing for a new start. Yet I forgot the most important device. The laptop charger. After a bit of camera unloading the first night, I frantically searched, screamed, and then remembered disassembling the imperative laptop components piece by piece to fit perfectly in my bag and leaving the charge plugged in right above my refrigerator. JOE YOU FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE!!!

But anyway, the trip did happen and I'll attempt to give some nice sense of it and felt it fitting to begin with the non-musical part that opened the trip so the rest was basically music and sweat for 12 hours a day.

So we (myself and Herb) took at 6:30 AM out of the world's most miserable place, Newark airport. It was a pretty clean run besides the fact that we both got a combined 4 hours of sleep the night before because of our inability to pack ahead of time. My inability to plan this out was not as bad as Herb's but my packing did include quantity of electronic gear I was prepping.

After our arrival at O'Hare Airport around 8:00 AM local time, we got our experience of the slow as shit Chicago Transit Authority subways which made at least 500 stops from O'Hare into Chicago's main downtown hub, The Loop. Of course, we had figured out at the airport that we had booked a hotel that was basically unmapped from O'Hare so we were on our own attempting to find this seemingly G-d forsaken area.

After asking the transit info guy at the loop about how to get to the hotel, the sir told us to just make sure "and hold onto our wallets tightly in that part of town." Quite the ringing endorsement. After tiring of the subways, we refueled at one of the Loop's 45 Dunkin' Donuts locations in 3 city block radius and decided to use our 3 Day Unlimited Travel passes on a bus so we could see some of the city.

The first picture I took in Chicago might still be my favorite. It was a liquor store/ convenience store aptly named Stop Everyday, complete with our first encounter with the homeless:



I phoned a local Chicagoan about which bus to take. He told us to take a bus that was passing by us as we were talking. He said it would stop running in about five minutes. So we hopped on a secondary choice. This bus did not lead anywhere helpful. It dropped us off in the Middle of Michigan Ave, on what must have been the humid day in human history at about 11:30 AM. As we arrived at a bus' last stop, we asked the Bus Driver where to go. He told us, "You need to go south." Very helpful.



At the bus stop two African American women, a middle aged and a 20-something fresh out of Georgia gave us about 15 routes that could possibly get us near where we wanted to go. But eventually they settled on the 6, which didn't run often at this time of day. Excellent. As this was going on, time was running out. We needed to unload our baggage five miles south then take a bus back to where we were on the subway and take that subway for 6 stops within about an hour and a half in order to make the Bubs-Phillies tickets we had at Wrigley for a leisurely 1:20 start.

So we were destined to wait for quite a while for the 6 until miraculously an x28 passed by, the bus we had missed at the original stop. We waved it down in the middle of the street, and ran through traffic with our bags in hand. We were finally on our way somewhere.

We got to the hotel. It was not the nicest hotel, or in the nicest part of Chicago but it served its purpose. They did let us check in early, being understanding to our Cubs game plight. So we checked in, dropped the bags, used the restroom (which are not available anywhere in the streets of Chicago, you'd think there was a plague being spread) and heading right back to our stop praying for a swift return visit from our bus. It came almost immediately which led to the subway etc. We made it to Wrigley in the bottom of the first.

Here's a couple of pics and then I'll give some of my quick Wrigley impressions.

And here's famous scoreboard Wrigley Scoreboard:


Seating that overlooks from outside of the field. Pretty awesome.

A Nice View from the 400s.

The Wrigley Marquee

The Skyline View past the Ivy

Joe's Wrigley Observations:

• Even though we were in the upper deck, the view was perfect and as I walked around every level of the stadium unbothered by ushers (unthinkable in the two NY Baseball Shitholes... I mean palaces) I can see from everywhere. It had the old school charm of a baseball park without the obstructed views of Fenway.
• The fans know and love their baseball. Most fans stuck it out for just about the entire game even the cubs went down to an early 7-1 defect.
• There is no giant Jumbotron eyesore to give you every baseball stat known to man and the cheesy action picture of each player as they approach the batters box. The only addition is a small electronic board below the classic center field scoreboard that gives essential stats.
• The park is practically ad free unlike most stadiums that look like a hodgepodge of advertising supersize size filling everywhere the eye can see. You can watch some baseball without the intrusions. There is the same ads on two pieces of outfield wall for Under Armor, two small scoreboards on the upper decks with CareerBuilder, the Van Kampen Tarp Cover, and the underpart of the old scoreboard that roates every inning.
• Each player doesn't have ridiculous entrance music. Just a nice organ ditty here and there.
• The 7th Inning Take Me Out to the Ballgame is fun. I was right underneath the press box as one of the Cubs' fans saints Ron Santo led the singing. And there was no fucking G-d bless America.
• When the Ivy comes into play it's just great to watch, it truly seems to befuddle the players every time like each party of the wall has a completely different bounce.
  
• The food at the park was somewhat affordable.
• The part of the scoreboard that kept the balls and strikes did not put up zeros but when a walk happened put up 4 balls. I had never seen that before. It was a neat little quirk.
  
• Wrigley made going to the game fun again and would easily be in the top 5 of the 15 or so parks I've been to.

So after the game, we walked around as Phillie Fans celebrated their win by buying bottles of wine from 7-11, and forgetting they needed a corkscrew to open it and chug it in parking lot.

Myself (in the Padres hat) in front of the Harry Carey Statue (Thanks Herb for cutting off Harry's head)


Even after the exhaustion had set in hours ago, we persisted to make the most of our one full free day in Chicago. We took the subway back to the loop and took a long walk to Gino's East of Chicago Pizza.



Gino's, sadly for a short time, had a location in Northern Jersey, and makes possibly the best and most unique Deep Dish Pizza around. Prep time for a Gino's pie is about 40 minutes but is well worth the wait as your mouth waters watching Pizzas being delivered to tables around you. The crust is interesting yellowish color that is so flaky and airy that you probably just eat the crust. But then there is the giant layers of cheese that just can't be stopped when you are trying to take the slice out of the pan. And if that isn't enough they pour the most delicious sauce in the tomato history. Our pie had onions as well chopped into the sauce. I'm hungry.

Our Delicious Dinner at Gino's East


Then we did a bit more walking. We saw the Hard Rock and Rock 'n Roll McDonald's and explored the night time activities in the Loop. We did the touristy stuff. We took pictures of the skyline and the skyscrapers. Blah blah. But then we headed back on our day's original route to return back in the hotel and prep for the beginning of Lollapalooza.

Herb walking by the Rock N' Roll Mcdonald's


Here's just a taste of Lollapalooza 2007 highlights.

I'm From Barcelona - "(I Have Built a) Treehouse"




A few prepubescent tweens covering a Bloc Party, Smoosh's "This Modern Love"


To Be Continued...