It had been a few years since Seth & I had done a Chicago trip for Lollapalooza so we started to get the itch. Lolla, like Coachella, had started to go more toward pop acts, which wasn’t even a bad thing, just that the line-ups didn’t generally give us much reason to consider the trouble to do it. Those fests weren’t even for us anymore (since everyone gets older), but it didn’t mean there wasn’t a fest somewhere that could catch our attention and get us to go. It was Riot Fest that did the trick, and just as well that it was in Chicago, which had already proven a town we could get in and out of and around easily like we had times before. This wasn’t necessarily a festival for the older set, or all punk acts like it once was, but it was definitely more in the area of rock bands, which the other, bigger fests had mostly already moved on from, but certainly was up our alley. And this one having Queens Of The Stone Age was already half-way there (being usually our requisite to show up), not to mention the rest of a stellar bill, that went far further than it needed to. So we had the idea (originally including Bart but he had to bail) and made plans (all done over text messages, I realized later, evolving our means of communication to not even need a spoken conversation), and we were in. Planning such a trip these days isn’t too much an effort, and Seth came through on a deal for the hotel, as usual. There didn’t need to be a hitch at all, especially getting around. We even had the added bonus of a cadre of L.A. people making the trip, from which I got a great warm-up act the night before the festival started, and before Seth flew in, hitting bars and keeping up an ongoing conversation about past concerts with Tony Pony (a brand-new friend from my drinking club at home but we quickly realized our kindred spirits) and Lingo, the best concert pals you could have that you don’t have to actually go to the concert with, since we never did catch up to them while at the fest. But we met up after, along with others, and at least one solid night of drinking and cavorting in Chicago. It’s a great town. The thing turned out to be as good a festival, on the whole, as Lolla, just one tier down from half of the biggest acts, for the most part, slightly less packed with people (and kids), and a little closer to the ground. The line-ups after this year were just as good (though no more QOTSA for a while, as evidenced by our not being there), but we couldn’t make it happen again. Though Seth (who said a few Lollas ago that he was done with weekend music fests), floated the idea of getting together for a festival somewhere every two years, even the dream trip of one in England. But if we had to go out to any of them, it would be difficult to get better than this one.
It’s never a surprise that the first day of the fest is our earliest day in, to keep up with our excitement and before other mornings are dominated by hangovers. We didn't have any particular bands to see, but it was easy enough to get there -- as much as going to Lolla, all on the El, then walking through a neighborhood to get to the park -- and admission was the usual line which took the usual drag of time, but making it easier, as usual, by getting there early and being on a weekday. Also a good summer day to walk around drinking, with cheap beers that weren’t cheap in coozies (and no confinements to beer gardens, Seth’s festival poison), but also the crushing realization that I could not keep up with matching Seth beer-for-beer, but no judgment about going at my own pace (which hopefully was at least 1 of mine for 2 of his) and his stories about out-drinking leagues of people, sometimes hearing some of them only once. The first band of the fest for us were Liars, who were the usual racket but the sound not as unpleasant as the cliche of the front-man thinking he’s edgy by wearing a dress. They don’t love you like we do as much anymore, man. And if I haven’t caught up with them after this many festivals I probably won’t, but they (or as much as we saw) were a good warm-up for what was in store; Saul WIlliams could have been a contender, and maybe a secret NIN-related surprise because of their past connection, but what we saw was just the guy spouting off on stage, most charitably called spoken word, which might have been okay but we wanted some music. “A riot is not a festival” became our catch-phrase for the weekend and it was a chuckle at the time. It became prescient for our times later in seeking social justice but the man was too far ahead of his time at the time, man; X were the real spirit of the festival, not just a band aging beyond the edge that punk rock once had, but still rocking out on stage with tight, hard songs not worn from doing this longer than most of the people in the audience had been alive (well, some of them, at least). Also great to see a band that means so much to our shared home environs get respect in another part of the world, though it surely wouldn’t have mattered because they would have put on a fierce show anyway; Action Bronson was just a dude and some canned music so we kept walking by; we got the Buzzcocks (possibly the most veteran band out there) and maybe they deserved more respect but we had to eat sometime; we usually have one band neither of us know so well that we take a chance on, since we’re generally already familiar with the rest of the bands we get around to out there, and maybe due to our modest expectations, if any at all, they turn out to be a high-light. Or we had a hole in the schedule that Death From Above fit into, and we only knew them from one album shorter than their time-slot, but we knew they would rock hard enough. And they did that, even with only two guys -- and the drummer singing, no less -- and made the best and funnest noise of probably the whole weekend. This was a pair going for broke, just putting it all out there and playing as fast and loud as they could and barely concerned about keeping it under control. I hadn’t bothered with the second album and almost not with them, but there was something there, even if it was only so they could transform their newer material into something live incendiary enough to fit with their older, now-classic stuff. If it wasn’t the spirit of punk it was at least rock as blistering as it gets, going like it was going to burn itself from the inside out. Then they left the stage a smoldering ruin and the rest of us wondering what the hell just happened, and if anyone else could dare come close to what and how they blasted through; Ministry could do well to get out to play festivals to hold on to any relevance they could claim, especially since they made a habit of disregarding any former selves as soon as they assumed every new identity, but it made it hard to expect that they were going to play anything we knew and, failing that, playing anything worth hearing. They even pulled off the look -- dirty gutter-punks with a polish between bone and techy -- but accepting that that was the concession of respecting their legend. As it was, their show was just a blast of noise and some presence but easy enough to disregard. We were glad we didn’t have to spend a whole evening to check it out; I would have never thought I would have seen New Order alongside Seth, who wouldn’t normally cotton to such throw-back European techno (as it might seem to him), but a festival offering was made clearly just to put us in the same place, hopefully with some appreciation. This might have been more out of respect of the punk or post-punk cred they had as Joy Division, but they were also a known and liked band enough to pull a crowd for the second-down headliner of the day (and maybe getting along with the main headliner, if they hadn’t already in the decades before). Yet it was expected to be the same set they’d rolled out lately, being predictable enough that each tour is roughly the same and I’d already seen the show from a few angles already. But their rendering of “Subculture” was singular enough to make the set stand out (or would have if I hadn’t taken the time to go find a toilet), and if it wasn’t just a run-through that was too similar to what we already knew. Lots of synths and sequencing, not quite enough punk, but surely they saved it for everybody by taking the Joy Division guise for the end, which got them the proper cred one way or another from the crowd, if they needed it or if they even cared; there could have been some excitement for Nine Inch Nails, especially after the stellar semi-reinvigoration at the FYF Fest, but we’d already seen a limp NIN show together, and it was pretty much that FYF Fest set-list again (which could only pull of being surprising and explosive the first time), and it was late and we just felt like getting out of there for the day, and we had already probably drank plenty because I don’t remember much of the set.
missed: the Cribs (another miss (even if I only went as far as their first album), but given to the wrong side in a conflict with Ministry), INVSN (a suggestion by our L.A. group, but we weren’t going to risk getting there too early), Tobacco (a track randomly heard might have been interesting), Skating Polly (their only cred being that they were good enough to open for L7 in L.A., but also too early).
Getting in Saturday a little later than the day before was no surprise. It probably would have been a good idea to see Bad Brains, but we might not have been able to grasp the scope of their legend, and the fact that they were on so early didn’t put them in the highest echelon of consideration. We didn’t know the whole story of the band, so this might not have even been the real version of them, or maybe just another act that had a name enough to be there because they had stuck around for so long or had the luck to survive. As it was, we got the last few songs and they were legit, as far as punk bands go, fast and loud, maybe too much for so early in the day; Danzig might have the same listing as Ministry the day before, an easy festival get and a minor obligation to see, but he did nothing for us. I didn’t care even when he somehow got on the radio back in the '90s, and the devil thing -- fabrication or not -- never moved me. I’ve respected him (he was even a nice guy when I met him at the comics store once) but his art doesn't take me anywhere. What we saw, just the first half, wasn’t great, and we didn’t stick around for anything we might recognize; Mike D might have been a high-point for the day, just for what he could have done. He could have gone anywhere. We wouldn’t have guessed he would get too deep in anything Beastie Boys-related, as that was a finished project the minute that MCA passed, but to make an appearance with something, presumably music-related, was worth checking out (to maybe check our heads). He didn’t come with a band prepared for an hour of music, just one DJ (and not Mixmaster Mike or Hurricane), and kept stalking the stage, with less energy than back in the day but he could still command a presence, for whatever he was going to do. He and the DJ led a light tour through hip-hop, playing out some familiar tracks from throughout the years, some recognizable, some surely his favorite cuts, and he jumped around a bit, throwing out rhymes and some stream-of-consciousness rattling-off of facts, and even a run through of a lot of “So Whatcha Want”. The energy came from the spontaneity of it, barely a performance in the traditional sense but something loose and off-the-cuff, since he knew he’d have enough of a crowd to get something going, and just running through what he liked and throwing it out to the audience. The DJ even had a sound-bite -- maybe activated by a button -- that he could cut off a track as soon as Mike D threw a signal (or just said to stop), which was a clever, if subtle, if necessary, technique. There wouldn’t be any reason to make a routine show out of it, but for one of the legendary Beastie Boys to show up, it was worth it to see what he felt like doing for an hour; Seth and I might have parted ways for a bit and I wandered over to At The Drive-In, who might have been a more exciting act if I hadn’t seen them before and been mildly let down when the art overcame the rock (which is always a tenuous balance for them). But this time rock took over, tearing into it as soon as they exploded on to the stage, and keeping it going for the couple songs I could stick around for, before meeting up with Seth again. It might have been a shame, not seeing the rest of the set, since it could have finally been what I liked most about the band. I even went back for more later but I couldn’t claim the continuity over the set and just assumed that I’d missed out this time; we wandered over to see Wu-Tang Clan, maybe just to say we’d seen them even if playing on the side-stage inferred that it might not have been the whole thing, but that stage was more crowded than it had been all weekend, making it baffling how they were booked over there, somehow not earning the main stage (but possibly speaking to how big all the acts they got were). As it was, it was a glimpse, from a distance across a huge crowd they pulled, possibly so far away that we didn’t get the music. From that maybe we could say we saw them, but it’s probably the farthest both of us can say we’ve gotten from a band while attempting to pass off that it was anything at all; finally it was QOTSA, the center of our weekend. This was the tour for Villains, which I had only heard once, in the hotel as we were getting ready for the fest, and it sounded fine to me, even with their shift to something dancey (and maybe, maybe-not so accessible). They’re a band that has always shifted their approaches around, if not their styles, and making something in a genre so unlike them is just the kind of unpredictability that could be expected of them, if never knowing where they would land. This show was fitting the new pieces with the old, rolling out some familiar stuff along with the new. Seth might have been a bit non-plussed, as he wasn’t as open to the new sound as I might have been, and by now we’ve both seen the band enough to know the show well. The songs we knew might not have had the same energy, with the band rolling them out for the umpteenth time, yet we’d probably see another festival where they’re playing because even when the soda isn’t as fizzy as it used to be -- or was now sometimes too fizzy -- we still can’t get enough. Of course, respect to stay to the end, then no reason to stick around after that.
missed: Peaches (too early for us; too hard to tell if we missed out when she got naked, since we haven’t bothered to see her enough to know if that’s a regular thing), Dead Cross (this might have been the band I most wanted to see, just to see what Patton was doing with his newest super-group, but again too early), the Regrettes (but a conflict with Mike D)
It’s no surprise that Sunday can be a challenge, so we got in late, despite whatever intentions. We might not even have been hung over, but we didn’t make it much of a priority to hurry in, and we knew we’d catch up on the bands. Sundays are often a bummer even in the best weeks, and it was the last full day of our trip and time together, and there might have been a grimy cloud of Midwestern humidity settled over the place that made it uncomfortable. So we wandered in a bit of a daze, maybe even slowing down on the drinking since we didn’t need to party as hard mid-way through the Lord’s day. We heard some of Pennywise, a staple of SoCal alt festivals, including a great set at the Inland Invasion, but here it was sounded like standard-issue old-school punk rock while we wandered; Dinosaur Jr. were Seth’s must-see for the day but they were a disappointment. They’re capable of a sharp, full-force set but here it was mushy and a lot of obscurities that made it seem like they were trying to challenge anyone who wasn’t already a fan. Not that we needed the relative hits (that hadn’t included Lou), but it was a messy set of just a bunch of sound, which included a lot of J. scorching on a guitar but not offering much in the way of songs to pull us through the dismal afternoon; that left a stretch of time which we might say was just drinking and wandering until the headliners. For all the concerts you've seen I've been to, I’ve never been one for mosh pits. I’ve never participated in one (at least willingly) and for the times when I had to get close to one, sometimes just on the edge and obligated to shove people back in when they pass, to get closer to the stage in the early years when there was value in that, even when I was young enough to handle it and eventually choosing just to stay out, even if that meant hanging at the very back of the venue (which was better than essentially being in a fight), and haven't gotten much more physically capable of being able to withstand one as I got older. And yet we were there and it was a punk rock festival and with a rowdy crowd for Prophets of Rage, being in the pit just seemed the thing to do. So we positioned early, dismissing whatever band was on before but getting up as close to the rail as we could. Predictably it was a lot of Rage Against The Machine fans, who would have played just as well there (though a little more inciteful to action, which might have been taken to mean beating your mosh-pit neighbor in the face). Luckily it was mostly a lot of over-aged lugs like us, no one who wanted to get rough or get roughed-up, just a lot of sweaty bodies pressing against each other and jumping around, so it was ideal company for being a hard rock pit that also didn’t need to move. We got separated but that's a given being mixed in with so many bodies, and it was just as enjoyable. I never cared for Cypress Hill for B-Real, but I could be down with Chuck D, and blended with 3/4 of Rage, it was a rah-rah-rock show that moved and rocked hard, and not too dangerous for only getting an hour (not long enough to do any lasting damage or too short to leave too much leftover energy), into which they also packed some of their previous bands’ hits. The new stuff was still too new, being before their album was out, but it was the familiar rap-rock shtick they'd already pioneered and with the people on the stage it wasn’t hard to figure out or get into, if you wanted to get sweaty and jump around a lot; apparently it was a big deal that Jawbreaker were there, after having broken up years before. I only knew them from a scant few tracks on samplers from the ‘90s, though I asked around and got astonished reactions that they were back together and doing the show and that I was going. That was even in California, before getting to Chicago and finding out that they could pull a headline slot at a big festival because that’s their hometown. Still, there had to have been some value for them to pull that kind of crowd anywhere so I wanted to give them a chance, but what was surely beyond caffeinated punk rock from a couple decades before, it didn’t sound like much to me. There was something to dig into when getting some familiarity, and I eventually got marginally into them when I continued to explore the stuff I picked up later (which, as far as I could tell, was all of it, even though it all stood up as one mass of music rather than particular albums), but at the time, after a long day capping a long weekend away, I was good to leave them. There’s also something to be said for moving out before the headliner is done, to beat the traffic and bottlenecks (having no luck with those the previous nights, if not at all festivals); so we ended with Andrew W.K., dialed down in stature on the smallest, furthest stage, but ready to party hard, as if he was made for anything else. We couldn’t get it together to party on the level that he was (and always is) ready for, but we could take it in with some easy head-bobblng across the clearing. He seems to pop up wherever he's needed, maybe even beyond festivals, so we didn’t put too much into getting a lot out of him. We didn’t see anything wrong with catching that latter half of his set then taking off. Overall we could finally say we partied and got our fill from the weekend (though we didn’t go directly back to the hotel. We wandered downtown looking for a 24-hour place to get a bite to eat and ended up in a high-end all-night eatery with a great bar and a rough-looking guy who turned out to be an airplane steward who wanted to buy us dinner for hanging out with him. There might have been more to that story but we were good to be done there).
missed: Beach Slang (from Matt's T-shirt, which could have been enough to check them out), That Dog (but I'd already seen them recently), the Orwells (I discovered I had a random track by them that sounded pretty good on the sampler iPod, something not too far form Local H (a high compliment from us (though an album I got from them later didn’t hold up as well)); we got to talking to some older folks going in early in the day who turned out to be their parents, but we’d already missed them); the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (one of the acts we would have seen since we never had and it had been a while since they had been gone, but it would have been an effort to get in that early), Cap'n Jazz (who were pretty good at FYF), Built To Spill (a band everyone seems to go nuts about but have never had reason to get into my orbit), TV on the Radio (conflict with Dinosaur but I’d seen them enough to be good with missing them), Gwar (near-miss, but conflict with Prophets, which could have been the wrong decision, since it’s hard to say when we would have had any other opportunity to see them (when we’d already seen Rage plenty)), M.I.A. (same conflict but I knew her well enough and her newer stuff was still a little obtuse to me), Paramore (I gave them a chance years before but I left them as a wanna-be punk band with a cute but standard singer and too safe to be moving. Though they were touring for After Laughter, which turned out to be a pretty good album, so this was a bit of a regret (especially since I never would bother to attempt to see them anywhere else, and since it would have been an easy option to pop over. But oh well. Sometimes you miss things at festivals. There will be others).
"You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire"
"Feel Good Hit of the Summer"
"Feet Don't Fail Me"
"The Way You Used to Do"
"My God Is the Sun"
"Smooth Sailing"
"The Evil Has Landed"
"No One Knows"
"Make It Wit Chu"
"Domesticated Animals"
"If I Had a Tail"
"Little Sister"
"Go With the Flow"
"A Song for the Dead"
"Singularity"
"Disorder" (Joy Division)
"Ultraviolence" (stopped and restarted)
"Your Silent Face"
"Sub-Culture"
"Bizarre Love Triangle"
"Plastic"
"True Faith"
"Blue Monday"
"Temptation"
"Love Will Tear Us Apart" (Joy Division)
"Prophets of Rage" (Public Enemy)
"Testify" (Rage Against the Machine)
"Take the Power Back" (Rage Against the Machine)
"Living on the 110"
"Hail to the Chief"
"Bullet in the Head" (Rage Against the Machine)
"Hand on the Pump"/"Can't Truss It"/"Insane in the Brain"/"Bring the Noise"/"Jump Around"
"Sleep Now in the Fire" (Rage Against the Machine)
"Cochise" (Audioslave) (snippet)
"Like a Stone" (Audioslave) (instrumental with crowd singing)
"How I Could Just Kill a Man" (Cypress Hill)
"Bulls on Parade" (Rage Against the Machine)
"Killing in the Name" (Rage Against the Machine)
"Godless"
"Anything"
"Left Hand Black"
"How the Gods Kill"
"Dirty Black Summer"
"Heart of the Devil"
"Do You Wear the Mark"
"Bodies"
"When the Dying Calls"
"Twist of Cain"
"Devil on Hwy 9"
"Her Black Wings"
"Mother"
"Psalm 69"
"Punch in the Face"
"Antifa"
"Rio Grande Blood"
"Señor Peligro"
"LiesLiesLies"
"Waiting"
"Bad Blood"
"N.W.O."
"Just One Fix"
"Thieves"
"So What"
"Just Like Heaven" (The Cure cover)
"Training Ground" (Deep Wound cover)
"Little Fury Things"
"Kracked"
"Sludgefeast"
"The Lung"
"Raisans"
"Tarpit"
"In a Jar"
"Lose"
"Poledo"
"The Wagon"
"Goin Down"
"Feel the Pain"
"Freak Scene"
"Chunks" (Last Rights cover)
"Right On, Frankenstein!"
"Always On"
"Turn It Out"
"Holy Books"
"Virgins"
"Freeze Me"
"You're a Woman, I'm a Machine"
"Going Steady"
"Black History Month"
"Trainwreck 1979"
"Little Girl"
"White Is Red"
"Romantic Rights"
"Caught Up"
"Government Trash"
"The Physical World
"Beyond and Back"
"In This House That I Call Home"
"We're Desperate"
"It's Who You Know"
"Because I Do"
"The New World"
"True Love""
"Dancing With Tears in My Eyes" (Regent Club Orchestra cover)
"The World's a Mess, It's in My Kiss"
"The Hungry Wolf"
"Year 1"
"Los Angeles"
"Your Phone's Off the Hook, But You're Not"
"Johny Hit and Run Paulene"
"Motel Room in My Bed"
"Soul Kitchen (The Doors cover)"
