While there were two individuals on the main stage on Friday, the opening night of Lollapalooza 2007, whether or not they were actually Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manueal de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk is up for debate. Maybe the helmeted, bodysuited figures were that goof Perry Farrell and Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. Maybe they were robots after all. And maybe it doesn’t it matter, because after an introductory vamp lifted from Close Encounters of the Third Kind caught the attention of 40,000 people, the two figures re-purposed the Daft Punk songbook as the marching music for their return from the antediluvian era, where they had apparently ruled time and space from atop their evil, dystopian pyramid. “HUMAN!” “ROBOT!” squawked at ear-splitting volume from the monitors as words and phrases (propaganda?) appeared on an enormous LED screen in the background. The pyramid didn’t glow, fire lasers, or singe the hair of the fans in the front row. But it did eventually light up, and when the actual music dropped – from “Robot Rock” to “Human After All,” “Around the World” to “One More Time” – Daft Punk was loud enough to make the moms in the crowd make their own discovery: their inner robot. The dancing was awkward, but joyous.
Daft Punk’s pyramid didn’t lift off and fly away after the humanoids controlling it were finished performing. But if it had, it probably would have landed in front of a jazz club located a few minutes northwest of the Loop called Green Dolphin Street. That’s where DP’s pals at Ed Banger Records and The Rapture, the polite New York City dance-punk crew who’d blown Detour’s mind on a Lolla side stage earlier, were throwing a festival afterparty. And that’s where Anthony Morrow, Detour’s El Jefe, decided he hated afterparties.
“Fuck this man, I’m out,” he said over the phone from the twisting, unmoving line of hipsters and hopefuls outside the club, and Detour instead wound its way through a mix of low-class and high-class drinking in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, surrounded everywhere by Lollapaloza-related chatter. In the third year of its current incarnation, the festival has finally become a destination event.
Quiet down, need to make a sound
The rabid reaction to Daft Punk’s set and the Ed Banger afterparty – the Paris label is home to JUSTICE and DJ Medhi, among others – proves that, besides Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” it’s the French house-electro axis Daft Punk spearheaded that’s kept the indie dancefloors alive this summer. The Rapture’s been doing their part since at least 2003 and “House of Jealous Lovers,” but the combo didn’t dwell on that track during their Lolla set Friday. Instead they made the cowbell seem like a new entity, and single-handedly made the saxophone solo cool again.
MIA wouldn’t be denied, either. Despite a few faulty backing tracks and occasionally weak vocals, she and her hype woman – it’s the same rubber-limbed, sass-mouthed dynamo who’s been with MIA all along, but Detour still can’t figure out the poor girl’s name – brought pounds of pain down onto the crowd Friday afternoon, with the bass blasts and catchphrases of “Bucky Done Gun” and “Galang” bursting out over Butler Field as well as the bits and pieces of new, soon-to-own jams such as “Boyz” and the Pixies-aping “20 Dolla.” Detour urges you to teach yourself some sort of pointy-elbowed, hip-swiveling dance to these tracks now, as they will blow up dancefloors all the way into next year once Kala, MIA’s anticipated and already Internet-spazzing new album, is officially released later this month. And we’re not even getting into her gig opening for Bjork, which this fall will quite possibly make the readers of Allure and In Style go crazy for purple spandex and rainbow leopard skin tutus.
Soundsystem gonna bring us back up
Daft Punk, MIA, and the Rapture did the boogy-down heavy lifting on Lollapalooza’s Friday. But leave it to a cagey, so-jaded-he’s-somehow-fresh-and-cool guy like LCD Soundystem’s James Murphy to bring some real emotion into the everyday mechanics of dance/punk/whatever. If the band has a greatest hits set, this was it. “North American Scum,” “All My Friends,” even “Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” which was the most gloriously self-referential moment of the festival, since DP themselves (and their scary pyramid) were set to follow LCD’s set from a stage across the field – each track nailed its groove, but also its emotion, that grime of the soul that makes Murphy’s songs perfect remixes for the last 30-plus years of downtown-centric pop music (from the Talking Heads to the latest in electro-rock genre experimentation) but also true songs, dispatches from his weary heart.
And if the emotion didn’t get you, LCD’s set-closing pummel of rhythm, rock, and electronics all set to “face-melt” was the appropriate primer for the isosceles DJs’ set.
By Saturday afternoon, the Lollapalooza trudge had set in with a vengeance. The condition is typified by a profound sense of exhaustion first noticed in the feet but quickly charging up the legs to inhabit the groin and joints northward that seem to get sore simply to show solidarity for their mates below. The eager and fun Flaming Lips and Polyphonic Spree-isms of Swedish collective I’m From Barcelona couldn’t make us forget that we were hurting; neither could the placeholding hippy-tronica of Sound Tribe Sector 9, the worst-named band in the history of music. Roots MC Black Thought and Questlove, the Philly group’s renowned drummer and bandleader, combined for some of the most riveting live hip-hop we’ve seen in awhile, riffing on each other and somehow layering shifts in tempo and near-bass lines into a voice-and-drum setup that would’ve been a mess in lesser humans’ hands. (The rest of the Roots’ full-band set wasn’t too shabby, either.) However, not even Black Thought’s boundless stores of energy were enough to offset our Lollapalooza trudge. We just wanted to sit on a blanket.
And that’s when the Hold Steady killed us. Again.
Nowadays everything is played by the time it hits the streets or the stage, or at least we pretend it is. It’s like we don’t want to be rewarded for loving something, like we have to smirk, or draw the line at “like,” or hem and haw and say, “Yeah, they’re great, but only in a club.” But why can’t we just love something unconditionally? Why can’t we all react to a band with the fervor and beads of blood sweat devotion like the kids in the front row for the Hold Steady? And when we realize that we are reacting that way – that the Brooklyn-via-Minneapolis band has succeeded in re-energizing our aching bodies, made us realize again the genius of Craig Finn’s lyrics, and made us wonder if Steady guitarist Tad Kubler’s cell phone is shaped like a Gibson Flying V – why can’t we just embrace it, instead of being distracted from the set by our own sense of joy at loving the set? Why is that? Wait, what? That’s just us, the elitist losers, and not everyone else? Oh. That makes sense.
Undeady Vedder?
By Sunday, the trudge had torn ligaments and made minced meat of our resolve. We stuck it out, though. We had to – when overserved teen-agers were vomiting all the colors of the American Apparel rainbow that hot afternoon (really; we saw that happen), Iggy Pop was hopping and strutting around the stage like a hyper toddler with Mick Jagger disease. He didn’t re-energize us; he just made us laugh.
The reunited Stooges deliver conventional dad rock sparked by Iggy’s twitchy, veiny, impatient and attention-starved spunk. Yes, they’re stalking through classics like “TV Eye” and “1969.” We get it, these songs are important, and the issues of class, political rage, and disenchantment they raise are still relevant today. But the feral rage the Stooges’ best material once embodied is long, long, LONG gone, and the material from their 2007 Iggy and the Ashetons comeback record sounds forced, flat, and yeah, pretty laughable, like on Sunday when Iggy repeatedly slurred the hoary chorus phrase of “My Idea of Fun.” Killing everyone, Iggy? Really? That’s your idea of fun? Hey, we thought it was yoga and competing with Anthony Kiedis to see who can be the richer shirtless old guy. But you know, whatever you say.
My Morning Jacket couldn’t have been better in the slot before headliners Pearl Jam; the band’s silky mix of styles – Jim James and his band can shift from something that moves with the fluid darkness of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” into the joyous and funky realm of Curtis Mayfied with incredible ease – was on display during a lengthy set that also featured members of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. They were forgiven for their too-cool-for-school sunglasses, because when you’re a teen-ager and performing onstage with one of America’s best bands, you really are too cool for school.
As Jim James’ gleeful wails faded, the Pearl Jam nation swelled around us. Detour hadn’t given the band a second thought in recent years; actually, we hadn’t really thought about them since 1996 and No Code. But we changed our tune when they opened with “Why Go,” and by the time “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” came along, we were swaying and locking arms with the rabid and competing-for-loudest-shout PJ fan crews around us. “My god it’s been so long! Never dreamed you’d return” – maybe it was deliriousness from three days of Vitamin Water, Italian beefs, and forced marches, but it felt great to sing those words, as well as the parts of “Better Man,” “Crazy Mary,” and “Even Flow” we remembered.
Was it nostalgia? Maybe. Yeah, probably, particularly with the material from Ten. As the legacy of Nirvana continues to be overturned, twisted, and revised by everyone including Courtney Love, we forget that Pearl Jam were just as important to us back then, if not more – face it, you understood the classic rock tropes and bald emotions of Pearl Jam more than you did Nirvana, which was thrilling at first mostly because it was scary and vicious.
But here’s the thing: is Eddie Vedder undead? Because while all of Pearl Jam’s other original members have turned into Steve Albini in their old age, Vedder looks and sounds exactly like he did in 1991. It’s a mystery, but at least it’s one that sounds great. Who knows, maybe Daft Punk has the 2007 Vedder locked up in the jailhouse base of their evil pyramid, having repaced him with a longhaired grunge Roboto of their own design.
Or maybe we’re just tired.
words: Johnny Loftus
pics: Harry Caul
Leave a Reply
