Lollapalooza

Remember last week, when I said I would resume posting on a regular schedule, and then took over ten days off? Yeah, what a liar. My apologies.

Anyhow, I'm back, and I do have an excuse -- a good one, I think -- for my inactivity.

Last week, you see, I traveled to Chicago for a bar trip with a handful of friends in order to attend Lollapalooza, drink in Grant Park in broad daylight, and try to remain sober enough so as not to forget the concerts we paid to see.

As the old hand said, two out of three ain't bad.

Some highlights:

Chicago. Everyone I speak to gushes about the Windy City and with good reason. I would tend to agree with them, based solely on my glimpses of the city (which is gorgeous) through dirty cab windows to and from our base camp near Wrigley and Grant Park. I look very much forward to returning to Chicago on a less eventful weekend where I will get to see the city, for all accounts and purposes, for the first time.

The Music. My musical tastes, as some of you may have gleaned from this blog, are devoted almost exclusively to artists who debuted either in the 60s or 70s. Exceptions are made once or twice a decade -- U2 in the 80s, Pearl Jam and Green Day in the 90s, and Gaslight Anthem and Arcade Fire in the 00s.

This show, I'm happy to say, featured two such exceptions. We saw Green Day on Saturday night, and they put on a show. They spent two-and-a-half hours rocking out, in a set that can only be described as Springsteen-esque. Those who know me are probably aware that this is not an adjective I throw around lightly. Green Day put on one of the best shows I have ever seen, trotting out "Longview," "When I Come Around," "21 Guns," a spectacular "Jesus of Suburbia," and briefly covered everything from "Iron Man" to "Shout" and "Hey Jude." Green Day aimed to please longtime fans with this show, trotting out almost every single hit they've ever had and going 20 minutes over their allotted time. I thought I remembered everything about this show, but from looking at the setlist it is painfully clear that I do not. Thank God for the Youtubes.

And then Sunday night featured Arcade Fire, who also put on an excellent show. Although not as long as Green Day's show, their set was still terrific. Their music is very well suited to the live stage -- crowds amplifying their 62-instrument, 35-man band make the songs sound amazing. Witness:



Their setlist was excellent -- as a young band, they run through about half their catalogue during a 90-minute show. But the songs they picked were great, from the tremendous "No Cars Go" to "Keep the Car Running" to "Intervention" to "Rebellion" to the aforementioned closer, "Wake Up." They essentially picked out every song I would picked if I got to choose what they would play in a concert, which was just terrific luck.

Other bands came and went, including The Strokes, MGMT, The National, Spoon, and some phenomenally strange Japanese death metal band performing in black leather and furs in the 3 p.m. sun. They were worse than they sound. Overall, however, the music was very, very good. Especially my first exception of the '10s, Mumford and Sons.

Base Camp. Someday, I'll imagine, we'll be too old to have weekends where we all crash at someone's house and fight each other like animals for a piece of deep carpet to collapse on, or, at best, a section of the couch. That a friend of a friend was generous enough to house five complete strangers who quartered themselves in his house for three days is astounding. Finding my way to the bathroom was like navigating through that scene in Gone With the Wind where the wounded are arranged as far as the eye can see wherever there is space to minister to them -- everyone sprawled haphazardly from wall to wall, reeking of whiskey, mud, sweat, and the smell acquired by osmosis from jumping up and down in a park with 90,000 strangers. I thanked God every night for the narcotizing effects of drinking Jim Beam in the sun all day. Like I said, someday we'll be too old for that s#%$, but that was pretty damn fun for now.

Strategery. Of course, the most pressing concern regarding the weekend was sneaking booze into the park so that we would be able to "hydrate" properly during the festival. This was much easier than expected, seeing as security, for the most part, was pretty disinterested in checking people's bags, even though that's kind of what they were there for. They would glance at the bag's insides, nod, and let you go in. It was pretty easy. Except for that one time where it was not. On Saturday, we were doing our usual move, hiding five huge flasks of whiskey below a rain jacket in a backpack, when the security guard, much to everyone's surprise, decided to check under the jacket. Of course he found the gallons of booze. And of course he turned us away. Our master plan had failed. What were we to do? After maybe two seconds' thought, we decided to just try again, but with another guard. And of course, this second security guard looked at the jacket for maybe half a second and let us in. Here's to trying the same thing and having it work the second time!

Finding People. It's a well known fact that AT&T's network is physically incapable of handling the surge in data that occurs when two or more iPhones are within one mile of each other. So of course, when you cram 95,000 people into Grant Park, everyone's iPhone is rendered useless. Since half the people in our party had iPhones, we had to stay together, or else we'd never find each other. Lollapalooza, in fact, was like a giant version of Where's Waldo -- incidentally, we actually did spot Waldo at the Deer Tick show -- where if you became separated, you would never see your friends again. In fact, the iPhone had a wholly useless "Find your Drunk Friends" app, which did not work. Thank God for meeting spots. If not for them, I might still be wandering around downtown Chicago looking for everyone after I took a bathroom break during the Green Day show. The fact that my friends, who were in a cab, spotted me randomly twenty minutes after the show and yelled at me to get in the cab is a small miracle in and of itself.

Getting out of the Show. As you might imagine, the exodus following the shows was massive. After the Arcade Fire show on Sunday, we walked towards the exit only to find that the crowd suddenly stopped moving. After noticing that the crowd showed no signs of moving again, we glanced to our right and saw that a small trickle of people was heading off to the right. Assuming they must have spotted an exit, we followed them. There was no exit, just a twelve foot tall fence standing between us and freedom. Now, you all know what I say when I am asked to climb a fence (NEVER AGAIN!), but I resigned myself and hitched up my pants, ready to do this. At that exact moment, a girl tumbled from the very top of the fence onto the ground in one of the worst falls I have ever seen. This fall was enough to actually stop a huge crowd of people hell-bent on getting outside dead in their tracks. In my experience, crowds of drunk people hell bent on doing something never stop for anything. Anyway, the girl turned out to be OK. And then we noticed that, not five yards away, there was a much smaller, five-foot fence. I briefly thought of pointing this out to the fallen girl, but she was being led away, hopefully to never climb anything ever again.

The Verdict. A solid, awesome weekend, precisely the thing to do after being locked in a room studying for two months. It's taken me a week to recover completely -- the hangover lasted something like three days, the sunburn is just beginning to fade, the gauge on my liver is slowly coming down from overload to load, and my voice is the only actual casualty, as it seems this rasp will never quite go away. But you know what? If sounding like Batman is the worst thing that happened to me after a weekend in Chicago, I'll happily take it.