Lollapalooza 2005: Day One

Day One | Day Two When Killers frontman Brandon Flowers was born, J Mascis and Lou Barlow of Dinosaur Jr. were already in a band together. While meaningless on its face, this pretty factoid sums up this year’s reincarnated Lollapalooza festival to a T. It’s nigh-on 15 years (that ought to make anyone feel old) since former Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell founded the traveling music festival known as Lollapalooza. After poor ticket sales last year forced an embarrassing cancellation the marquee was again disinterred, dusted off, and propped up in Chicago’s Grant Park as a one-off, two-day event in the mold of Coachella and Austin City Limits. Were I as sharply cynical as the rest of the Indie Rock/Internet Complex I would tell you that this year’s festival featured a lineup of golden-era college radio has-beens and new-era never-shoulda-beens. Indeed, on paper, this seemed true, with a big WTF by the name of Billy Idol thrown in for good measure. In the ’90s, Lollapalooza was known for its mishmash lineup, for bringing radio alt-rock, hip-hop, and even a touch of metal before one audience. In an age when even your little sister can ‘holla back now, it’s easy to forget how pivotal it was — in ’92 for example Ice Cube, Ministry, Soundgarden, and the Jesus and Mary Chain all shared a bill. Having successfully traversed the urban/suburban divide, Farrell used this year’s lineup to map out even darker territory: the generation gap.

It all started out innocently enough. Grant Park, with Lake Michigan on one side and the Chicago skyline on the other, was outfitted with four main stages, a “Planet” stage, and a “Kidz” stage. This meant that two or even three bands were playing at once. The guinea pigs on Saturday were Chicago’s own The Redwalls (who just got a major-label deal and are being accordingly hard-sold) and Swedish radicals The (International) Noise Conspiracy who said it best: “No, we’re not the MC5, but sometimes we wish we were.” Still, though, with matching red t-shirts and righteous fury at the “capitalist power structure”, what more could you ask from a garage rock band? After lamenting the fact that “this was the most radical festival we could come up with,” Conspiracy singer Lars Strömberg gave the band’s blessing to Soulseek their new album before launching into the always-entertaining “Capitalism Stole My Virginity”. It would be easy to dissect the band’s politics, or criticize their over-reliance on Detroit tropes, but it’s refreshing to see a group be earnest and excited rather than affectedly disaffected. In this way the (International) Noise Conspiracy are quite disarming.

After watching the teenyboppers flee in horror from the beautiful eurotrash-electronica-filtered-through-indie-rock of M83, who, if you’ll forgive me, are almost too French to function, I witnessed the first truly killer set of the day. Instead of running, the kids were passing out during …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s set. “Hot and muggy, just like Texas,” they said, fulfilling their obligation as Texans to mention their Texan-status every chance they got. With two drum kits, four black t-shirts, a lot of beer, and their unique brand of prog-emo-metal, Trail of Dead turned in the most aggro set of the weekend, dutifully smashing a guitar and throwing their drums. Of the festivals many nostalgia acts, Liz Phair was the saddest to behold. Dressed in your grandmother’s gardening outfit and deluded enough to believe that she could be the next Avril (or perhaps more aptly, the next Kylie), Phair sounded like one of those American Idol hopefuls who you can’t help but pity. “Does she really think she sounds good?” Across the park, Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson had suddenly lost his voice and was bringing up a girl from the front row to sing. Was Lollapalooza already beginning to collapse under the weight of its high production values?

No, because nothing encapsulated Lollapalooza 2005 like the hilarious, sad, and stirring battle between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Dashboard Confessional, as they played across the park from one another. BJM leader Anton Newcombe has already cemented his status as neo-psychedelia’s resident mad-genius, just as Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba has secured his place as the emotive bogeyman that music-loving parents will use to scare their children into behaving. There could hardly be a starker contrast between the oblique, weatherworn Newcombe, who spent ten years paying his dues with no rebate, and Carrabba, who gained success by wearing his heart, and a bunch of dreamy tattoos, openly on his sleeve. Dashboard Confessional must have been turned up to 11, because between Brian Jonestown’s songs, you could hear Carrabba and his audience screeching along. Newcombe, not a man known for discretion, immediately yelled, “Fuck you over there! Party over here!” He also came out with the classic lines “I’ll hunt you till the end of your days” and “Don’t give up your fucking day jobs.” By now, these profanity-laced insults are as much the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s hits as the granddaddy-of-freak-folk songs they bookend. Newcombe’s annoyance grew as the set wore on, culminating when he made the rest of the band wait for silence before playing the last song. After being asked by the bassist if they were going to play another one, Newcombe replied, “Yeah, we’re going to play a great song for you. As soon as Jon Bon Jovi over there shuts the fuck up.” When the silence came, Newcombe gave Carrabba a typically cryptic parting shot: “If I ever needed birth control, I’d just put a picture of your band over my bed. But as it is, I’ll fucking raise your wolf cubs.”

If only the Pixies were as willing as to fight their relegation to the Geezer Stage. Sure, Frank Black’s still got plenty of hyena yelps left in him, and even in her soccer mom sweater-and-slacks Kim Deal still looks cooler than any of you twenty-year urban boutique shoppers. What’s more, the inner fanboy in all of us squeals majestically just to hear the old favorites like “Tame”, “Cactus”, and “U-Mass”. But in a crowd this big, where everyone knows all the words to every song, what good is the type of set that the Pixies play? It’s nostalgia not from concentrate; it’s the equivalent of a Google image search for “kitten”. You are powerless to hate it once it’s there, but it doesn’t give you any lasting pleasure. I wouldn’t even bring this up, if it was any other band than the formerly challenging and rough-around-the-edges Pixies. The band that screamed in Spanish and wrote songs about incest has become Dad-rock. Still in fine form, but Dad-rock all the same. Tune in tomorrow for part two of PopMatters‘ Lollapalooza coverage.