Its important to be important at a concert?

For the second year in a row, I somehow managed to glom onto VIP tickets for Lollapalooza. This year it was Kyle who scored the VIP tix and let me tag along on Sunday.

Frankly, I remain uncomfortable with the luxury concert concept…

...but, my goodness it’s nice to see a show in a fenced off area with ice-cold free beer and air conditioned bathrooms on a 100 degree day when you would otherwise be surrounded by 30,000 smelly, sweaty people. Instead, it’s a hundred or so well-behaved d-bags who are largely just there to talk business and swill the comped liquor. Still...that's a pretty easy choice. Keeping it real...less so these days I guess.

So, whilst braving the heat and corporate onslaught, we managed to see:

• Kaiser Chiefs (I am not a big fan, but they are the perfect band for a festival setting)
  
• Part of Dan Deacon's set (Great fun. Hard to imagine that just two years ago he was on his own with a laptop and how he's on stage with a 20 piece band that included three tuba players!)
  
• Neko Case (undoubtedly the most mellow set of the weekend)
  
• Part of the Deerhunter set (I continue to be enamored and awestruck by what they do. This was very, very good)
  
• Part of Snoop Dogg's set (this was very, very not good---I basically got disinterested and went off to hang out with my cousin. Really, how much waving my hands in the air can I be asked to do? How much east side vs. west side silliness must I deal with---particularly when the folks on the ground that Snoop deemed as west siders were on the east side of the field? I know that's reading a bit too much into it, but whatever. In Chris Anderson's photo over there, Snoop was pretending to hide from the police...the act is getting old)
  
• Band of Horses (Pretty good. And, ballsy---something got messed up with the schedule and they were playing head to head against Jane’s Addiction---both at the same time, and clearly Band of Horses chose to play an extra pair of songs to extend the conflict---they sorta yelled at Perry from across the field)
  
• Jane’s Addiction (You forget how amazingly great they were…when you get past how annoying they become…once they started playing, they were shockingly good!)

But the two most memorable things were not really music related.

First of all, the entire southern section of the Fest (the sunken ball diamond area) smelled like and ugly and acrid combo of vomit and boiling porta-potties. The whole area seemed to have been strewn with Tidy-kat to soak up some sort of nastiness, but it needed more odor absorbtion---honest to goodness, I gagged a couple times from the stink… And as a Chicagoan I find it utterly embarrassing.

And on the way home, Kyle and I saw an extremely tall guy who may or may not have been Joakim Noah . Someone with his inimitable height, frame, and bad hair seemed to be dancing shirtless in a (maybe) intoxicated state...in a parking garage... Props, the guy can party. Still, his moves don't compare to these guys at Pitchfork, which I still believe is the vastly superior festival atmosphere to Lolla...even if I did have to pay for beer...



Snoop .. Creeping image by Higher Speed Dub via Flickr