I’m standing at Lollapalooza’s smallest venue, the BMI stage, waiting for local-boy-made-good and founder of Fall Out Boy, Patrick Stump, to take the stage. Alas, the keyboard player is committed to performing with his keyboard-cum-guitar gizmo, which isn’t working. Stump is now 15 minutes late, the first show yet to start late at Lollapalooza. But, the show won’t go on until the gizmo turns on.
Delay for some is opportunity for others. Just when it appears that the gizmo will work – it makes a zapping, popping noise, yet, dies again – a winded young man runs up to the trio next to me and exclaims, “Man, Death from Above 1979 was amazing. I got kicked in the head five times and lost my glasses three times. Some dude threw a can of coke, and it hit me and exploded all over my back. And this arm, it’s soaked. The dude next to sweated all over me. Fuck even my boxers are wet. It was fucking awesome, man.”
Different strokes, I guess. Anyway, the gizmo has come to life and Stump takes the stage to the loud cheers of the surprisingly large crowd for this small venue. The set is a delight and demonstrates that Stump has evolved dramatically from his pop days with Fall Out Boy. He’s now more Prince than Boy and his funk drummer provides a very welcome relief to the relentless pounding of a 4/4 beat throughout the Festival’s eight stages. Still, the bass drum is waaaaaaaaaaay too high in the mix, an apparent Lollapalooza party line that turns everything into dance music. But, the band is amazingly tight and adventuresome, something relatively rare at Lollapalooza.
As evening approaches and I walk toward one of the main stages to catch Cee Lo Green’s set, Stump’s performance still reverberates as a clear highlight of the day’s musical offerings. But, I’ve high hopes for Cee Lo and the other headliners, My Morning Jacket and Eminem, all performers with whose music I’ve not familiar but about whom there is a palpable buzz in the crowd.
That buzz fizzles quickly during what is supposed to be Cee Lo’s hour-long set. He performs mainly cover tunes – Violent Femmes, Billy Idol, and, as he left the stage, Journey (really!) – and, well, he seems bored. He is proud of his and the band’s Road Warrior-like costumes that sport shoulder pads with sharp, silver spikes and he urges the audience to show some energy and not “let these wonderful outfits go to waste.” Alas, they do as he saunters off stage 15 minutes early to the strains of “Don’t Stop Believing” (again, really!).
Dark approaches and it’s time for the two headliners. I hit My Morning Jacket first. They’ve drawn a big crowd seeking straight-ahead rock and roll, and the crowd isn’t disappointed. Though, maybe to make the leap to stadium headliners, the band has cushioned everything with a loud, synth backdrop and there’s that too-loud bass drum. Still, they do play their full allotted time, don’t talk about their outfits, and thrill the crowd by closing with “Holdin’ on to Black Metal” and “One Big Holiday.”
At the other end of the Grant Park, Eminem has drawn a huge crowd, probably two thirds of the 90,000 in attendance. From the first beat I hear, it’s clear that both performer and audience have brought some energy to the venue. Eminem stalks the stage, spitting out a mind-boggling number of rhyming words, accompanied by Royce da 5’9. Audience members are ecstatic. They’re hearing and seeing exactly what they’ve come for.
As for me, that relentless beat is beginning to grate. My aesthetic sensibilities are really betraying my age. So, after catching the end of Jacket’s set and the beginning of Eminem’s, I wander off looking for, well, some subtlety and nuance. And, do I get it. There on the mid-sized Google stage is a guy playing solo ukulele in waltz-time. As he begins to sing, a band of accordion, stand up bass, trumpet, and tuba launch into a lurching, syncopated beat. It’s the band Beirut, the brain-child of front man Zach Condon, who proceeds to sing and play trumpet, flugelhorn, and that uke. Perrin Cloutier plays accordion and cello, Nick Petree is on drums, Paul Collins plays electric bass and, more often, upright bass, and Kelly Pratt and Ben Lanz blow an array of horns. You’ll hear no 4/4 rock rhythms from these folks. We’re talking French chansons, Mexican funeral marches, waltzes, tangos, polkas, and Balkan dances. The group plays selections from their 2006 debut CD, Gulag Orkestra (that title tells you all that you need to know about this band), other CDs, and tracks off their forthcoming The Rip Tide, including the crowd pleasing single, “East Harlem.”
To paraphrase Tom Waits, these folks are big in Brazil, partly because Condon is fluent in and occasionally sings in Portuguese, but also, I suspect, because the music is so stellar. This stuff is a gumbo of just about everything… except rock. Yet, Beirut have become darlings of the indie rock scenes. Hey, this gives me hope: maybe others have tired of the predictability of rock. Moreover, it’s a tribute to the Lollapalooza organizers that they have the insight and temerity to sandwich a waltz-playing ukulelist between, uh, some rock and a hard place.
