Incomplete, sloppy, with no mention of the best acts I've seen so far and no consistent verb tense...who gives a fuck? More later.The boy in the hot dog suit—it looked like a mangy hot dog, perhaps one that had been kept as a pet by a lunatic in solitary confinement—practiced his pogo dance and waited for The International Noise Conspiracy to take the stage at the beginning of Lollapalooza 2005 in Grant Park.
The first thing to do when you arrive at a large rock festival is to start embarrassing yourself and get used to it. I had already started when hot-dog boy and a horde of other sweaty morphodites poured in at 11:16 A.M., July 23, 2005. Minutes earlier I’d crossed paths with a man wearing a Replacements t-shirt and eagerly shouted "REPLACEMENTS!" to him as a greeting. He glanced at me with no expression and went on his way.
The usual bunch of dopey girls was already leaning on the guardrails at the southeast stage, one of four stages at each corner of the field. Noise Conspiracy came on five minutes EARLY, looking like five Swedish fashion scenesters trying to dress up like Mick Jones for Halloween. Of all the bands I have recently seen trying to imitate punk rock, INC are the most fun. They are totally derivative, but it never sounds stupid or boring. They were so good that they should not have been playing: 1) At the start of the festival or 2) In the heat of the day. No one was riled enough yet to get into them. Lollapalooza should have started with someone atrocious, like Dashboard Confessional (who played four hours later; more on that below), which would have pissed everyone off and got them in the mood to hear some competent rockers.
The only thing they do wrong is to try and foment Marxist rebellion among the audience members. According to allmusic.com, that’s what they formed the band for in the first place, but even the stupidest actions can have good by-products. Lead singer Dennis Lyxzen yaps between songs about overthrowing the "capitalist power structure," which is a pretty useless thing to say when everyone in your audience has bought a $115 ticket.
During this whole set, no one is moving, except when the band leads the audience in a handclap, after which everyone is perfectly still again.
I then find the children’s stage because the schedule says Perry Farrell is participating in a show for children with singer/guitarist Peter DiStefano. I wonder what Farrell would have to say to kids…I figure it must be something like "how to conceal needle tracks using mommy’s makeup!" But by the time he joins DiStefano and starts singing, there are maybe 10 damn kids in the audience, and the other 200 people there don’t even seem to be parents. So off I fucked, disappointed by the sheer lack of perversity in the execution of a truly perverse idea.
Back at the other end of the park, ..And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead is thundering through a drunken and chaotic set, which is great because Liz Phair is about to get on and bore the piss out of us all.
After milling around the press tent for no reason at all, I head back to see Brian Jonestown Massacre. But first I mistakenly approach the stage where Dashboard Confessional is playing (and ask myself why a band called "Brian Jonestown Massacre" sounds so wimpy and humorless), but I correct myself and veer north. The field is small enough that the two performances going on at any one time tend to bleed into each other, except for those less than 100 feet from the stage, so between BJM songs we all hear Dashboard’s nauseating, earnest jangle. Anton Newcombe mock-dances to it and says: "You guys on the other stage over there! You can go FUCK yourselves!" He also advocates Dashboard Confessional as a form of birth control: "I'd put a picture of your band above my bed if I didn’t want to have children!" Newcombe shouts. BJM rocks without trying too hard to convince you they’re sincere; when Dashboard interrupts, you can hear them squeezing their throats and wanking their guitars for every last ounce of meaning. The result is a sound like the tortured yelps of some creature too cruelly misbegotten to live but unwilling to give up hope. BJM is sloppy and full of beer. I prefer that to the sober polish of Dashboard. May they be mowed down by a freight truck full of non-alcoholic beer.
(Sadly, Googling "Dashboard Confessional blows" turns up only two results.)
