Lollapalooza Day Two

I survived Lolla. Good times. One good thing I can say about Lolla, it helps you define what bands you really like from what bands are just ok. I guess this concept is kind of a no-brainer. Well let’s talk about the scam of Lolla first. The scam of Lolla is that they get a lot of decent acts and throw them together on one bill. When you see the names, you think “wow, that’s a lot of good bands.” You sorta get sucked into the idea of seeing a lot of bands, and you lose sight of the fact that not all the bands are bands you necessarily like, and not all of the bands are necessarily good. So the scam is that they sorta pack the thing with known quantities and try to suck in the widest variety of music aficionados and to do it as simply and cheaply as possible. When it comes to the headliner, they have to come strong, and I have to say that a good portion of your entertainment value from the event is derived from the headliner. If you don’t like the Strokes or Lady Gaga, but you do like Mavis Staples (theres’s gotta be somebody with that predilection out there right?) then you probably shouldn’t go to see Lolla on Friday cuz seeing Mavis Staples at 2pm on a Friday just isn’t that great, and then you gotta stick around or bail and at $90 a ticket, that’s not advisable. Enough about the philosophy of Lolla, discussing it is an exercise in futility. No need to overthink a musical event, at the end of the day, if they book enough bands you want to see, then maybe they’ll get you to pay $90, at the end of the day, that is their goal. Obviously they want to accomplish that goal as cheaply as possible, so that’s why they book a lot of mediocre bands to fill it up, and also why some bands probably have to pay to get on the bill. Dunno about that second one, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a band played for free just for the exposure. Anyhoo on to the review.

On Saturday, I was kinda amped for the Soft Pack. They were coming on at 1230. I met my homie and our other buddy over at homie’s place at like 1130. I wasn’t sure if they would be up for heading to the show early, but luckily they were and we rolled. A little precursor to day one, and a theme for me for the whole show, we might have done a bit too much traveling. Going from the two main stages on the south, to the two mainish stages on the north took about 10 minutes if you made good time. Traveling back and forth wasted a lot of listening time, but was good exercise. So we roll to the show and we are outside trying to scalp tix. I have to say, it was a pretty tough tick. I don’t think it was sold out, but I was hoping to get tix for like $50 each day, didn’t happen. We spent like a half hour peddling for tix and the only thing we got was people asking us if we were cops. Nice. Finally our buddy got a hold of some dude off of CL and he was like 10 feet away from where we were. We managed to get 3 tix for 200, $67 each. Not too bad. Face was $90, so a good savings from there. We get inside, get our bearings and go check The Morning Benders. TMB were on the Sony Bloggie stage, a minor stage just south of the two north main stages. TMB are very mellow, they aren’t offensive. Just nothing special. I will probably listen to their stuff again though, def don’t hate them. From the Morning Benders we went over to the Soft Pack on the Bud stage (north). I thought the soft pack was good, they brought their good shit, but they would’ve been better off doing a half hour set. Expanded into an hour they had to bring some weak sauce and that caused us to lose interest. Still like TSP, and will prolly still be geeked when they come up on the ipod. They are a once in a while, one tune on the ipod band, not a listen to the whole album band.

At this point our other buddy decided to go rogue, and go see Rogue Wave. He bailed, my buddy and I grabbed some food, then we went up and checked Harlem. Harlem was ok. Upbeat kinda punkish, didn’t make much of an impression one way or the other. We decided to try to reconvene with our bud at RW, so this was our first traverse from one end to the other. We caught some RW, didn’t find our bud, and bailed to get back to the other side to see Stars. On the way back, we hit a side stage (BMI) and caught a really good act, Dragonette. Supposedly these guys are the next Lady Gaga. They were good. The woman had an interesting voice and they had a live drummer which was good, the other person played synth. They were good, not necessarily my kind of music, but good. We cruised over and caught Stars. Stars is a band that sometimes when they come up on my ipod I’m like “who is this?” and other times I skip the song. Kind of hit and miss. The band was the same way live. Nothing special. We bailed on them and made the ¼ mile trek back across to catch Against Me. AM is good, a known quantity. They delivered even though they said they were only working on 2 hours of sleep. If that is true, they brought amazing energy. Good version of Thrash Unreal. I liked it. My tentative plan was to stick things out on the south side at this point. The only problem, Gogol Bordello was playing. GB is kind of sketchy. I don’t really like them, they are sort of a Russian version of Flogging Molly (who I also don’t like). They play a kind of unplugged Russian Gypsy Punk and it’s kind of a annoying. My buddies didn’t want to stick it out, so we cruised to catch Grizzly Bear. I don’t remember much about GB, but that pretty much illustrates that they were nothing special. I would say they sucked if I could remember anything about them. Ditto for a band called Dawes who we caught like 5 minutes of. At this point we started the cruise back to catch AFI. We stopped at the BMI stage cuz a band was playing with a singer that sounded like old Bono. They were pretty good. The Royal Bangs. Bad name, good tunes, I’m gonna prolly download their stuff.

We finished the trek across and AFI had already started. I don’t know about AFI. They play the kind of music that I like, but I don’t like them that much. Davey Havok brings great energy and their tunes are good, they just don’t really do it for me. They rock though, and one thing we learned is to err on the side of catching a band that rocks over a band that doesn’t. At an outdoor festival, loud and fast is good. AFI play loud and fast, so it was entertaining. I would def lump AFI into that category I mentioned earlier, sort of a filler band that might get people to cross the line and come to the show. I mean Against Me, AFI, Gogol Bordello, Social Distortion. They are all sort of good but not great and appeal to a similar demographic. Social D was next. Our one buddy ditched us to go catch Metric, he said they were really good. This bud ended up bailing on the festival due to gastro-intestinal issues. I was def more into Social D when I caught them at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor (1991). Mike Ness didn’t look like a 50 yr old balding fat dude that looked more at home on a couch with a stained white tank top than on a stage in front of 30k people. What can you do? You can’t stop time. I’m sure I looked better back then too. Social D brought it. They played their tunes. They were tight. They ended with Ring of Fire, and I used to just love that song, now, it’s sorta played out. Slightly Stoopid (horrible name) were playing on the south side after Social D. They are some kind of Sublime-ish reggae, punk, funk, thing. Not a fan. We bailed to go catch Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Dunno what to say about ESATMZ, I think they were ok. We couldn’t really get close enough to hear well. I have to listen to their mp3s. They are one of those bands with like 50 people on stage and I usually don’t care for that much.

At this point, it was getting late and the day had been grinding us down. We powerchugged water, and tried to soldier on, but my buddy was toast. He decided to hang it up. This led me to believe that he would also be out for Sunday as well. We shall see. He bailed. I was gonna stick it out. I wanted to see Green Day. I grabbed a bite to eat. Chilled and just decided to make my way over to get a spot for Green Day. Slightly Stoopid was still playing and they did play a cover of Nirvana’s Lithium which was pretty cool. I decided to go over and get some water before Green Day, on my way, a woman stopped me and said “can I take a picture of your shirt?” I was like “sure.” I was wearing a yellow Mad Dog 20/20 shirt. I was getting comments on it all day, I didn’t realize it was that big of a deal. I guess it had to be memorialized in film. Good shirt. My comment earlier about the headliner being most of the value of the ticket mainly came from Green Day. You gotta give them credit, they have come a long way since I saw them in 1994. They have a full on rockin stage show. They had fireworks which were cool. They have a bunch of crazy antics like bringing people up on stage, having a fan sing longview, doing some kind of weird ska revival. They also play their songs and they play them really well. I’m glad I stuck around. They brought it. They were only slotted for 2 hours and 15 minutes, they went over by 15 minutes. Billy Joe was like “They said they were gonna shut us down at 10 o’clock, but we’ll have to see cuz I’m not gonna be fucking done by then.” They took no breaks. Straight through 2.5 hours. They are showmen, they started as punkers and now they are something else. It was good though.

So that was Saturday. A hot day. I was re-upping on the sunscreen every few hours and managed to get no sun, just how I like it. Drank a lot of water. Didn’t have a beer til I got back to my buddy’s place. Good day. If you are curious how many times we crossed from the North stages to the south, it was 7 times. I’m guessing that’s at least 2 miles of walking. Prolly not a good idea. I like it that way though. I would rather catch a half hour of a bunch of bands than see a band’s whole set.

I wasn’t sure if I was gonna be back for Sunday cuz I didn’t know who I was gonna go with, I didn’t think my buddy would be up. Will I go? Will my buddy go? If I go, who will I go with? Will it suck? Will it rain? You’ll have to wait for the exciting answers to these questions in the next episode.