SATURDAY
12 p.m.: Gray, occasionally intensely cloudy skies keep Grant Park cool and comfortable, though the threat of rain is always imminent. Aside from some occasional sprinkles, the rain stays away until about 8 p.m.
12:45 p.m.: We rushed to see Tokyo Police Club and didn't make it, but still heartily recommend Tokyo Police Club. The young Toronto band (which some have accused of Strokes-aping, but whatever, they're better) just signed to Saddle Creek. They're pretty awesome in general, so we're going to assume they were awesome here.
1:30 p.m.: I'm From Barcelona, all 10,000 of them, bring the kind of pure cheer that Polyphonic Spree always gets credit for. We only catch the last couple of songs, but there's most definitely a guy in a bear costume onstage. They sound fantastic on a huge sound system, too, which is an unexpected delight. Fun fact: I'm From Barcelona is actually from Sweden.
1:42 p.m.: Tapes 'N Tapes give the festival a shout-out as they race through lots of old songs and several promising newbies.
2:06 p.m.: We have no idea how a band like The High Class Elite gets on Lollapalooza, though we don't actually see them play, so maybe they're great. They hang out schmoozing in the press area, the singer's tight white pants leaving little to the imagination. The band also features a pair of ladies in gold dresses. We are confused, but a little happy about it. Also spotted in the press enclave: Perry "King O' Lolla" Farrell, the singer from Snow Patrol, members of Interpol, Spoon, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and lots of nerdy journalists.
3:26 p.m.: Rumor has it that Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder will be playing a song or two on the Kidzapalooza stage, and the number of dudes sporting PJ shirts when we get there gives us some hope that it might actually happen. My Morning Jacket's Jim James does a warbly version of "The Rainbow Connection" on banjo, and then the MC announces that Patti Smith and Perry Farrell will be out soon. Then he stalls for more time. Then a teen girl does covers of Joni Mitchell and John Mayer songs. Then Perry shows up and says Patti's running late. Then Perry tells the kids—whom he apparently thinks are really slow, based on the way he's talking—how green the festival is. And how they won't see any trash on the ground at Lollapalooza because everybody is so nice. (He must be looking at a different ground than us. And he's calling it "the floor," because obviously kids don't know what the ground is.) And how Chicago is a nice, green city. And then he tells the kids about how Patti Smith made a special appearance at the kids' stage last year and talked about how fucked-up Israel was for bombing Lebanon. (This is not a joke: She actually did that, and he actually brought it up.) This goes on for an uncomfortably long time. Finally, Smith shows up with Lenny Kaye in tow and plays four songs, including a cover of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "People Have The Power." She dedicates a song to Jerry Garcia. The punks have officially become the hippies. Vedder doesn't show. A writer we met from Billboard is totally bummed. Oh well, she probably went to their fan-club-only show on Thursday night at the Vic in Chicago.
3:27 p.m.: On the AT&T Stage: the improbable return of Silverchair. The Aussie grunge band made a splash a decade ago because its members were all barely old enough to drive. They would have remained a '90s alt-rock footnote, but a steady presence in their home country has made their new album, Young Modern, a respectable hit stateside. Sure, Silverchair still plays mostly middling alt-rock, but you have to admire their tenacity. Frontman Daniel Johns is clearly enjoying himself on the giant stage.
3:30 p.m.: Power-pop band Motion City Soundtrack—Lolla's lone bone thrown to the Warped Tour crowd—takes the MySpace Stage immediately after Silverchair. The stuffed rooster returns.
3:32 p.m.: The crowd for L.A. band Cold War Kids is too big for the smaller Citi stage. People spill into the neighboring lawn and block one of the main thoroughfares. If they come back next year, promote these guys to one of the bigger stages.
3:39 p.m.: Incredible tattoo alert: On the back of a calf, a hand holds a lighter. The wisps from the light form the highly detailed face of Kurt Cobain.
3:40 p.m.: A guy passing the BMI Stage as Lady Gaga plays says, "This is that hot bitch." Lollapalooza: where musical discourse thrives! A quick glance at Gaga's MySpace page proves him right, though. Also, Gaga has the distinction of being the last performer listed on this year's Lollapalooza T-shirt.
3:42 p.m.: At the PlayStation Stage, Chicago rapper Rhymefest is off to a late start. His large band—keyboardist/computer man, bassist, another keyboardist, three-person horn section, guitarist, drummer, and a DJ—stand around onstage while the could-be-larger crowd waits patiently. In the meantime, the sound-bleed from the neighboring Adidas Stage provides everyone with a taste of Sound Tribe Sector 9. This year's new stage configuration—only two stages on the big fields, with smaller stages next to each other—only exacerbated sound-bleed problems that weren't as much of an issue last year.
3:45 p.m.: Rhymefest finally appears after a hypeman/backup singer asks the crowd, "Are you ready to experience one of the greatest entertainers in the world?" Rhymefest seemingly freestyles without any beat or accompaniment. Someone in the crowd yells, "Hey, where's the music?" Indeed, during the next song ("Devil's Pie" from last year's Blue Collar), only the DJ is doing any work. The band sounded great, but did Fest really need to give everybody a solo, even the bassist? Between the bass solos and The Roots' back-to-back shows, hip-hop fans could be forgiven for thinking they'd stumbled into a jam session between Primus and Bootsy's Rubber Band. Fest bravely focused on new material from forthcoming albums, dipping into Blue Collar for only a handful of songs, and going a cappella more than once.
4:30 p.m.: On the AT&T Stage: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the one band no one had to come to see. The band played Friday night at Chicago's Metro club, an after-party Saturday, and supposedly again on Sunday.
4:31 p.m.: We ask Tokyo Police Club's Graham Wright and Greg Alsop a favorite question from A.V. Club days of yore, spun for this event: "Who at Lollapalooza could your band take in a fight?" Alsop opts for Matt & Kim, citing the simple numbers game: A quartet has twice as many fighters as a duo. Wright chooses fellow Canadian Sam Roberts, whom he says would understand the country's hockey-fighting rules. "We could jersey each other!"
4:32 p.m.: Dumb T-Shirt File: "Drink apple juice because OJ will kill you," wrapped around a drawing of a white Bronco. The shirt looks totally new, in spite of its 13-year-old reference.
4:33 p.m.: The Roots open with "Here I Come" from last year's Game Theory to a massive crowd. The pot smoke quickly grows thick. Like many of this year's acts, ?uestlove, Black Thought, and the gang selfishly attempt to ruin hundreds of loud conversations by stubbornly insisting on performing "music" during their set. The Roots get props for prominently featuring a sousaphone player (he's like a sousaphone hero or something) but lose points for adopting atrocious punny alter egos like Tuba Gooding Jr. and Lord Of The Strings. Black Thought makes a point of repeating these terrible puns, but they don't get any funnier the second time around. The Roots trot out rapid-fire versions of the hits with plenty of soloing and vamping, along with the requisite standard hip-hop hits medley, which run the gamut from Ol' Dirty Bastard's "I Like It Raw" to, um, Mims'… well, you can probably guess what Mims song they covered.
5 p.m.: The schedule says Brazilian electro-dance outfit CSS should be on the Citi Stage, so why is indie-pop duo Matt & Kim up there instead? Flight delays forced CSS to cancel. That'll learn 'em for trying to do too much in one weekend—they played the Virgin Festival the day before.
5:30 p.m.: The charmingly spacey Regina Spektor seems tuned into some wondrous frequency all her own. Performing with just a guitar, piano, and drumstick, Spektor bravely battled terrible sound and the free-floating boorishness of festival crowds to deliver a pretty spectacular set that peaked with a triumphant, appropriately anthemic "Fidelity." Somebody really should cast Spektor (who looks like Ronald McDonald's hot Wiccan cousin) and Tori Amos in a buddy-cop movie about piano-playing singer-songwriters who fight crime in their spare time while wearing black latex catsuits.
5:31 p.m.: The Hold Steady takes the MySpace Stage to an exuberant crowd, opening with "Stuck Between Stations" from last year's Boys And Girls In America. Later, frontman Craig Finn says, "Last year we played here, and I said it was the most fun I've had before 3 o'clock. Now I think it's the most fun I've ever had." Finn and his bandmates are clearly enjoying themselves.
5:40 p.m.: Finn introduces the next song by saying "This song's about a boy and a girl…" Yeah, that narrows it down. "…and a horse." Ah, that would be "Chips Ahoy."
5:56 p.m.: "Hot Soft Light"—ugh, Finn needs to stop using the phrase "kickin' it" in his lyrics. The Hold Steady's set inspires the most fist-pumping of any performance all weekend—it's constant during every song.
6:28 p.m.: Finn is clearly humbled by how far his band has come in four short years—from five dudes drinking beer together to opening for The Rolling Stones in Dublin next month. "There is so much joy in what we do up here," Finn tells the crowd. "I want to thank you for being part of that joy. God bless you all."
6:30 p.m.: We—in this instance, Josh Modell—like Snow Patrol, dammit. The hits and hooks are huge. Sure, who needs "Chasing Cars" again? But "Chocolate" and "Hands Open" are fucking massive. Singer Gary Lightbody (real name!) shouts out to the hep indie bands he's seen: Tapes 'N Tapes, Clap Your Hands, etc.
6:34 p.m.: Most Confusing Shirt Seen At Lollapalooza: "MUSIC IS THE NEW COTTON."
6:35 p.m.: Oh, Perry, please stop talking. His introduction for Yeah Yeah Yeahs is hilarious: "Every once is a great while—maybe five or 10 years—a group comes along with such great talent…" Yes, five years is practically an eon.
6:37 p.m.: Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O is dressed like a dominatrix from Blade Runner. You never realize just how much she screeches until you see her live. In Chicago, her howls bounce off the high-rises that face Grant Park, undoubtedly riling the residents who complained about Lollapalooza's noise last year.
7:20 p.m.: O prefaces "Maps," Yeah Yeah Yeahs' breakthrough hit, with an introduction that sounds like a hair-metal singer circa 1986. It's impossible to really make it out, but it amounts to "Are you ready to PARTTTTTTTTTTTTYYYYYYY??!?!?!?!"
7:30 p.m.: Dumb T-Shirt File: "This is why I'm hot," with an anthropomorphic earth sweating.
7:34 p.m.: Man, Spoon has so many hits that it can just fill a set with 'em and be done with it. Not hits as in bona fide radio hits, but hits, hook-y beauts that you can't unstick. "The Way We Get By," "I Turn My Camera On," "Small Stakes." Even without some of the hotness from the new Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, things were working.
8:05 p.m.: On the train, a car full of Lolla revelers heading home early sings "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman, repeating the hook "Aye-e-I had the feeling that I belonged, and aye-e-I had the feeling that I could be someone, be someone…"
8:06 p.m.: One guy discusses the day's performances: "The Fratellis? Unless they're playing something from The Goonies, I don't care."
8:30 p.m.: Saturday's big finish is a competition between Muse on one end and Interpol on the other. We know woefully little about Muse except that it's from England, apparently pretty huge, and people compare it to Radiohead. It's all bombast and light show, at least as much cock-rock as Yorke-rock. It's bright. Wayyyyyyy on the other side of Grant Park is Interpol. They stand there and play songs, some of which we like ("Not Even Jail"), some of which we're not that psyched about ("No I In Threesome"). So it goes.
10:01 p.m.: Lollapalooza isn't the only exciting thing happening in Chicago this weekend; the new Batman movie is filming smack in the middle of downtown, just blocks from the fest. We run into the production on the walk back to the office. A P.A. dutifully lies to an onlooker, telling her that they're filming a movie called Rory's First Kiss. Then why does that SWAT truck say "Gotham Police Department" on it? According to one film-nerd blog, the Chicago Board Of Trade building was the inspiration for Wayne Tower, and right by the Board of Trade is where the action was.
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