Stages
Don’t hate on someone’s groove. Sitting against an elm trunk enveloping the stage, I overhear a college student offering advice to a friend critiquing BADBADNOTGOOD. There’s three hundred thousand people and one hundred and thirty bands spread across three days and three hundred and nineteen acres of Grant Park. There’s bound to be some mismatches, but Daniel Burham’s urban planning declaration which created Chicago's open, public lakefront holds true; “Make no little plans, for they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Is this the biggest music festival? I’m sure someone knows, but I don’t really care. It is bigger than any other I’ve been too, and much too big to take in even a sizeable percentage of. There’s been a hundred bands in the first two days and I’ve only seen thirteen. More than a mile separates the most distant stages bookending the park, and there are east-west herds flowing between six smaller stages separating the two most distant (and largest) north-south stages. The migration is Serengeti scale, except the wildebeests are suburban girls, and the lions are frat boys.
The watering holes are plentiful, but appallingly turbid. Coconut-rita lite beer isn’t yet a choice, but all its component parts are. I wonder if Lollapalooza was created solely to unload the stuff that collects dust on shelves elsewhere. Box people in, make sure they can’t smuggle in something better, crank up the sun, and they’ll happily pay to drink anything. There is a craft beer stand, but the line ends somewhere east of Goshen, Indiana. Water is mercifully available. At two bucks a can, it’s a bargain for the soul.
The food is better, with choices along the entire continuum from carnivore to free range, no cage herbivore. The food choice mirrors the music choice, and that’s the calling card of the festival. Want to hear a duo who left their parent’s garage just last year? Ok. Want to hear one of the two remaining Beatles? We got that too. The good one, in fact.
That Paul McCartney is seventy-three provides comfort. I’m not the oldest person here. I’m certainly not the youngest, but there are others who had to make the punk or disco choice when that was the choice, or the folk or rock choice before that. Rolling Stones or Beatles? Blondie or Talking Heads? Clash or Ramones? Taylor Swift or Katy Perry? So the sorting has been, and so it will continue. Musical independence comes to us about the same time we are bolting together our adult personality, so it’s pretty important. I packed my Replacements t-shirt just to school the youngsters, but its dark blue color is a solar heat-sink so I leave it at the hotel and go with a white button down shirt. Cripes, I’m old.
But still adventurous. I’m here with Colin, who’s farther out on the musical ledge than I ever was. He doesn’t just consume music, he produces it too. Digital or analog, the basement is a music factory these days. So I take some solace when I ask him about a band to maybe see, and he has to consult an app. It doesn’t happen often, but that Lala can stump an eighteen year-old musician a few times is high praise. We share a preference for the new bands, on the small stages. To be an early adopter is to catch the wave at the perfect time; when you can connect your friends to something they’ve never experienced before. That is the essence of music, and friendship. Listen to this. Isn’t that interesting / great / cool ? Amalgamating it all, broadening horizons, shaping perspectives; that’s the power of art and music.
So we leave Sir Paul and Metallica to the hundred thousand who pack the biggest stage. Are they going to do anything really new tonight? Not to hate on your groove if they are your thing, but bold experimentation is highly doubtful on life’s biggest stages, Lollapalooza included.
No, we’ll go to the small stages, where you can watch and listen to them making it up right in front of you. That’s the place to be; on the leading edge of discovery.
