40 years of the Pitchfork Music Festival: A fictional retrospective
Pitchfork: Love it or hate it, there's no denying its influence. Since 2006, the website has annually stepped out of its silicon tower and made its presence known in meatspace with its Pitchfork Music Festival. Year by year, Pitchfork lineups have begun to develop certain patterns and trends that could almost be described as formulaic. That's not necessarily a bad thing. If it takes the form of respected elders (Sonic Youth) playing their masterpieces song by song, while a who's who of up-and-coming acts (Grizzly Bear) separate themselves from bands on the way to becoming next year's "who were they?" (Spank Rock), who are we to argue? With that in mind, we've been giving some thought to what the Pitchfork Music Festival might have looked like in previous decades. Hop aboard the WABAC machine and take a journey through summers past and nostalgia present....
1969
Pitchfork, a broadsheet music magazine based out of the local Polish enclave of Wicker Park, made its debut to little fanfare in the months preceding the "Summer Of Love." Noted for taking a more elitist tone than hippie rags like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork quickly earned the label "Creem for snobs." That editorial approach bled into its inaugural music festival, held on the shores of Lake Michigan a year after the mayhem of the Democratic National Convention. The fest featured commercial failure—but Pitchfork favorite—The Velvet Underground as a headliner, after its eponymous album received a 9.9 rating in the broadsheet's debut issue. Sensitive to the accusations that it picked up acts like the Velvets and Detroit's MC5 because it wasn't invited to Woodstock, Pitchfork focused on booking a number of unestablished acts, some of whom—much like Dan Deacon in 2007—went on to enjoy highly successful careers: Genesis, The Stooges, and Little Feat all cemented their legacies in the years to follow. Others, like NYC avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman (who insisted on performing her entire set topless), and proto-prog rockers Touch, join contemporary Pitchfork acts like Priestbird in the "where are they now?" bin.
1979
In 1975, Pitchfork released the first issue of their new alt-press monthly, Forked. The zine had been covering the American punk scene since it emerged from the slums of the Lower East Side, so by the time 1979 rolled around, they were ready to book the festival with a discerning eye. Red hot off the landmark London Calling, The Clash headlined the first night, followed by austere Krauts Kraftwerk on Saturday. Forked proved to have their finger on the pulse of the scene with prescient performances by early incarnations of '80s heavyweights Adam And The Ants, The Cure, and Siouxsie & The Banshees. Although Forked normally focused on punk and far-end fusion, the bill was rounded out with sets by Grandmaster Flash and Fela Kuti's festival-stopping Egypt 80 (whose set-up and take-down time completely derailed Saturday's schedule), establishing Pitchfork's lhabi wedging in a handful of incongruous world-music and urban acts onto a bill dominated by rock bands.
1989
By the time Reagan was leaving office, Pitchfork had been reborn as a poorly photocopied monthly zine and cassette label. Though they now fetch over $80 a piece on eBay, Pitchfork's quarterly cassette compilations originally could be had for just $4 and a self-addressed stamped envelope. A feud with Big Black's Steve Albini lead the promoters to look beyond Chicago for under-the-radar acts, and their tape comps spotlighted diverse scenes, ranging from D.C.'s emotional hardcore to the UK's gruff, fuzzy shoegaze. The '89 festival revealed a soft spot for distortion pedals and sonic dissonance, with headliners Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. indulging in plenty of both. But when it came to heavy feedback, nobody did it better than My Bloody Valentine's 15-minute white-noise holocaust. Pacific Northwest grunge stalwarts Mudhoney played a balls-to-the-wall set that had everyone swearing that if a band from Seattle was going to make it big, they'd be it. In a bold move that alienated half the crowd, Pitchfork pulled a genre 180 and switched from rock to rap for the Sunday lineup: The Jungle Brothers kicked it positive before Boogie Down Productions and X-Clan tried to educate the mostly white crowd on the tenets of black power.
1999
The bleak popular-music landscape of 1999 didn't stifle that year's festival. Pitchfork, now in its contemporary form as a website, continued its modus operandi of splitting the focus between the future and the past. Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros headlined, while emo made its first appearance since Sunny Day Real Estate's 1994 breakthrough performance, as El Paso road warriors At The Drive-In offered a sparsely attended set at one of the tent stages. The festival struggled in choosing the now-annual token hip-hop acts, as most of their choices, including Jurassic 5 and Kool Keith, were already slated to appear at upstart rival Coachella's inaugural festival. The promoters instead turned to a pair of acts whose albums had yet to drop, coming up empty with an appearance by Jay-Z-protegé Memphis Bleek in advance of his debut, Coming Of Age, but scoring a win by booking a pre-Nia Blackalicious to great success.
