Lollapalooza, 8/1 to 8/3

Before Friday's performances I obtained my press credentials for some special events at the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago, a few blocks north of Grant Park. Initially I was under the impression that they were a collection of R&R areas, performance spaces, and afterparties where media and performers could get away from the heat, sun, sweat, and monster PAs of the actual festival as well as plan interviews and photo ops. They were all of these things, but once I was there I also realized they were (a.) promotional vehicles for various companies to shill and get coverage of their products and (b.) primarily geared towards the performers and VIP attendees.

The event press releases devoted as many bullet points to the celebrities scheduled to show up (on the level of Lindsay Lohan/Sam Ronson and Ashlee Simpson/Pete Wentz) as the sponsors and site-specific entertainment. We're talking velvet ropes, sponsor boards with repeated logos, red carpets, private security thugs, and bitchy guestlist hostesses here, folks. If you ever see the phrase "media gifting" it doesn't mean "gifts for the media," it means "gifts for privileged people who could actually afford to pay for them on any other day, and the media can watch and report on these giveaways all TMZ-style." It was cool to have the access but I was a fish out of water, and after long days lugging camera equipment my sweaty shirts and dirty shorts probably looked the part too.

I did get their take on my third and final Famous Chicago Food, the Chicago hot dog; for those who don't know it's a weiner done up sorta like a burger, with tomato, onion, hot or sweet peppers, and mustard, and the bun is poppy-seeded. I kinda bastardized mine with ketchup instead of mustard and ditched the hot pepper, but not bad... maybe a bit too much going on, almost frou-frou for a hot dog. I'd say Chicago's Italian beef was the winner of my trip.

My camera apparently wasn't hip enough for pictures inside the events, and the Hard Rock's facade was nothing to look at, so here's a picture from outside the hotel looking through Chicago's canyons up Michigan Avenue.


Lollapalooza's media area, my home base for the weekend, was in a treed rectangle to the left of the southern main stage -- basically the southwest corner of Grant Park. In addition to a small riser for formal interviews and photo ops and a collection of lounge-y lawn chairs, a good portion of the long side closer to the stage was taken up by the "work tent" where media outlets could hook up laptops and web access, and get basic background info on all the artists.


Along the far edge were smaller tents where a number of local and national media outlets set up shop for broadcasts and interviews, among them MTV News, Fuse, XM Satellite Radio, Major League Baseball (?!), and some terrestrial and internet radio stations.


The big daddy of setups along that Murderers' Row was for Q101, Chicago's alternative rock station. Their coverage was anchored by their midday DJ Electra; if that name sounds familiar, it's because she used to work at the old Y100 radio station here in Philly before the format-flip that begat what is now Y-Rock. I got there early enough on Friday to say hi, bring her well wishes from some of her old crew, and watch her first interview of the weekend with some guy named Farrell-something-something who apparently works for the festival.


Ah, the joys and pitfalls of drinking at 10:30 in the morning. Perry comes into the Q101 booth with that little cup of punch on the table and asks if there's any alcohol around to jack it up. One of the other Q101 people hands him a whole bottle of Southern Comfort, and he spends the entire first interview segment trying and failing to unseal it. The staffer had to assist him with it once he and Electra were off mic. And just where did that SoCo come from, you may ask?


From the Spin-sponsored bar tent in our area, of course! All the free SoCo-and-teas and Budweiser-brand bottles we could stomach; Blackstone Winery also showed up and plied us with free samples. The strange thing was, for all of the alcohol at our disposal the media snack tent kept running out of water, and actual non-snack food was rare. (I saw a few pizzas and some catered trays of fried chicken.) Between these two pictures, however, you can estimate the rather appalling amount of [p]leather furniture that was laid out on grass for people in the festival's exclusive areas.

One other company supplying samples was Olade, a really quite good sugar-free lemonade -- and I'm not a big fan of lemonade. It's a product and operation rather quietly founded by a guy who's normally not quiet otherwise: Brad Wilk, bass player for Rage Against the Machine. And while Brad to my knowledge did not make it to the media area to shill his wares, plenty of other people showed up:


Nashville's De Novo Dahl apparently let Wilco borrow their Nudie suits and went for the early-1900s collegiate swim-team look.


Here are members of Brazilian dance-rock crew CSS doing the 90210 thing with their costume designer.


After a long interview, goth poster children Love and Rockets were asked by other outlets for a minute or two of quick candid photos. They obliged, but Daniel Ash (center) was a total douchebag about it. I kinda sensed that carried over to their Sunday performance. Just sayin'.

I did get a photo with Saul Williams after I interviewed him Sunday morning; it's up on my Facebook and MySpace pages. The guy is a class act, plain and simple, in addition to being an unorthodox triple threat of actor, poet, and musician courted by Nike. I also got to meet his daughter Saturn, who danced on stage with him during his Lolla set.

Other people I ran into while I was there included members of The Black Lips and MGMT, Tiny Masters of Today, The Ting Tings, and Duffy. I also danced alongside Kid Sister at a Hard Rock Hotel afterparty with Chromeo, Phantom Planet, and Mark Ronson on Sunday. Yet the winner of the weekend was Ira, the bass player from Yeasayer. We're floating around among the tents when he spots my "Illadelph" t-shirt, points and says, "Hey!" It turns out he grew up in Mt. Airy! Trust me, being in Yeasayer = look how far he's come. All in all, the media area was an awesome refuge, especially with all the people (75,000 each of 3 days) making every trek across the park an arduous one for camera jockeys like myself.


This sign shown here shows how the weekend generally went for the photographers' pool when it came to headliners. On Friday, Radiohead went all snobby-rock-star and handpicked the photographers who could shoot during their set, leaving a good half of the pool to either resort to mad zoom-lens skills or flip off Thom Yorke and Friends completely. Sunday, Kanye West went them one better and closed his photo pit altogether, pretty dense for a guy who thinks his stage show is the best thing since air; meanwhile, Nine Inch Nails ' reps had the pool jumping through hoops like email confirmations, special photo passes, color-coded groups, single-file lines and so on. Here, Wilco had standard three songs/no flash stuff and Rage's conditions were understandable considering the crowd. Then, festival security did indeed lower the boom and while we were at the stage said only the first 25 people in line could be in the photo pit... and with everything going on, that only lasted two songs instead of the standard three. Fuck you very much, Rage fans.

One other thing about taking pictures at this festival: In addition to any monitors at the front, many of the stages were obnoxiously high and/or buttressed by extra stands for lights and video. If my concert shots look like they're being taken uphill, with the exception of pictures from the Playstation stage (with the flowers in front of it) you're not far off. To wit, let me go meta on you and show you my photograph of photographers taking photographs:


I've always managed to grab a few candids of interesting characters watching these shows and not just playing in them. I got lucky with lighting in these two shots from Saturday's downtown afterparty with Moby...


...then there was one girl playing with fire during the Rage set, and another from Canada being kinder and gentler Sunday afternoon...


...plus my fellow Y-Rock DJ Adrienne (with boyfriend Daniel at the Does It Offend You, Yeah? set) and the festival's constant guardian: Buckingham Fountain.



Monday 8/4

I really only ended up doing more touristy stuff in Chicago for a little bit before going home, mostly with the mighty mighty 1jodie. Another Frank Lloyd Wright site in the Hyde Park neighborhood, the Robie House, is in the middle of renovations until 2010 so my tour through it was unfulfilling and, per my long-ass weekend, exhausting. We stopped at a nearby restaurant for the best burger I've had in some time (chili-topped!), and Jodie pointed out the non-zero chance that we were sitting in a booth local resident Barack Obama may have occupied for dinner himself. After a stop to take in Jodie's favorite view of the Chicago skyline from the Soldier Field/science museum area, I dragged my one-wheeled bag up to O'Hare for the flight home about 2 hours ahead of that flight. (KTHX TSA!)

I'd been sneezing and drippy since sometime around the Battles set on Sunday so while waiting for my delayed flight I bought some Claritin -- which did nothing. By the time I realized it might not be an allergy attack, the airport general stores were closed so I was SOL for anything related to sinus relief. And then came the main factor in my flight delay: a brutal storm front that generated tornado warnings at the airport and throughout Chicagoland. The most disconcerting thing about it besides, you know, the tornadoes was the shockingly disorganized and half-hearted effort on the part of airline and airport staff to follow up on piped-in instructions to have us evacuate the terminals. God forbid if a twister actually had made contact with a terminal; for lack of a better term it would have been a disaster. As it was, the biggest disaster was my six-hours-delayed flight home: Flying within visual range of the lightning-filled front to our south (beautiful, petrifying), somewhere over Ohio I felt everything that was in my nose flow up into my inner ears, the pressure sizzling my brain and cutting about 70% of my hearing. Let's just say I'm still coughing, but...