SUNDAY
2:00 p.m.: Just outside the gates, a scrawny white teenage boy agitatedly subjects disinterested passerby to a loud a cappella anti-Bush rap. Gosh, and we thought these lefty do-gooder types were against cruel and unusual punishment.
2:31 p.m.: Surprise hit of the festival: Scotland's Los Campesinos! (The exclamation point is theirs, but we'd give 'em one if it weren't there.) They share a label with Broken Social Scene, and they capture the same cheery-weird-y vibe. Like Tokyo Police Club, they only have an EP available (Sticking Fingers Into Sockets), but we're guessing more will come gushing forth soon. The EP includes their cover of Pavement's finest song, "Frontwards," which they also played here, at their first-ever U.S. show.
2:45 p.m.: Forget rehab or battles with the battle: Somebody really needs to stage an intervention and force-feed Amy Winehouse some corned-beef sandwiches and maybe some nice potato knishes. At this point, the disconcertingly skinny soul sensation's towering bouffant weighs more than the rest of her, and her eyebrows look frighteningly like black caterpillars. Winehouse has got a voice big enough to fill up all of Chicago, and her band sounds terrific, but she seems nevertheless seems bored. Her apathy proves infectious. Winehouse seems awfully young to be going glumly through the motions.
4:17 p.m.: The Stooges take the stage in oppressively hot and humid conditions, though guitarist Ron Asheton plays in pants and a long-sleeve camouflage jacket. The band—featuring punk legend Mike Watt on bass—opens with "Loose" from its seminal Fun House, and frontman Iggy Pop is suitably riled up. A few minutes later, he'll jump atop the guitar cabinets and hump them.
4:24 p.m.: Iggy's first stage banter: "Hello, motherfuckers! We. Are. The fucking Stooges!" The crowd goes nuts, especially when the band breaks out "I Wanna Be Your Dog" a few minutes later. Afterward, the crowd up front chants, "Ig-gy Pop! Ig-gy Pop!"
4:41 p.m.: Iggy prefaces "Dirt" ominously: "You know, underneath all the horrible pronouncements of the high and mighty, and under all the hideously clever schemes of our media leaders, there is still dirt." Sure, "Dirt" was on Fun House, but here, it's kind of a momentum-killer.
4:44 p.m.: Dumb T-shirt File: A drawing of George H.W. Bush, saying "I SHOULD HAVE PULLED OUT."
4:45 p.m.: During "Real Cool Time," Pop makes a good and bad decision. "I'm so in love! Get up here and dance with The Stooges!" he booms, ordering security to let people rush the stage. "Share the stage!" he yells. Within minutes, as estimated 250 people swallow the stage and the band. One lone bodyguard has the impossible task of protecting Pop during "No Fun."
4:50 p.m.: Pop seems a little surprised that the super-fans he let on stage are slow to exit so the band can finish its set. "Thank you!" he yells. "Now we all have to calm down. Time to go!" But no one's leaving. Pop eventually makes his way behind the guitar amps as girls continually paw at him and kiss him. Meanwhile, the audience controls the mic. "Yo guys! Check out Catastrofuck!" says one guy.
4:57 p.m.: After a seemingly endless delay, the stage has mostly cleared, and Pop is relieved. "Thank you, Lollapalooza dancers! Thank you, Chicago people! I would thank God, but he didn't come onstage!" He may have—there were a lot of people up there.
5:09 p.m.: For the last song of their set, Kings Of Leon introduce special guest Eddie Vedder, who plays some thrash tambourine and sings a bit. The people who've been camped by the big stage waiting for Pearl Jam's fest-closing set freak out. A gaggle of people with backstage passes are awed, following him back to his dressing room.
5:10 p.m.: Swedish pop sensations Peter Bjorn And John lose sound after just a few minutes, beginning a delay that lasts more than half an hour. When the band returns around 5:45 with the quiet "Amsterdam," the dance-party jams of !!! on the neighboring MySpace Stage drown them out.
5:57 p.m.: Silversun Pickups bassist Nikki Monninger joins Peter Bjorn And John for their ubiquitous hit "Young Folks." There's a healthy exodus after the song ends—one guy says, "That's all I needed to hear." Too bad, because the final two songs, especially "Up Against The Wall," are fantastic.
6:18 p.m.: The always-feisty (and now scraggly bearded) Isaac Brock introduces Modest Mouse with, "Hi, we're one of the bands at the festival. Thank you for shopping Modest Mouse." Oh—there are sign-language interpreters (is that the right word?) at both of the big stages, signing away along with the band. They're amazing, dancing along and trying to keep up. We have no idea whether they translated "a fake Jamaican took every last dime with that scam" properly. Modest Mouse—yup, still with Johnny Marr—plays a set damn close to the one they played in May in Chicago, which is still damn fine.
6:32 p.m.: Incredible Tattoo File: In huge lower-case letters across the small of a guy's back, the word "rage," as in Rage Against The Machine. The letters are probably five inches tall.
7:15 p.m.: TV On The Radio begins the penultimate set of the festival on the MySpace Stage (along with Café Tacuba on the Adidas Stage on the other side of the park), concluding a roughly 14-month tour. A large crowd watches, but the growing super-crowd awaiting Pearl Jam—performing in 45 minutes—already swallows up most of Hutchinson Field. Guitarist Dave Sitek plays with wind chimes hanging from his tuning pegs, and he uses them to strike the drum cymbals.
7:44 p.m.: All of TV's songs punch harder live, but when the band busts out the propulsive rocker "Wolf Like Me" (from last year's phenomenal Return To Cookie Mountain), it hits 100 times harder. Fists pump furiously, and the crowd erupts.
7:55 p.m.: TV ends with "Staring At The Sun," the standout track from 2004's Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, causing the crowd to erupt again. They aren't pleased when the band stops playing at the appointed time. They chant "One more song! One more song! One more song!", but the all-business stage manager tells the band they can't play. The crowd grows more dismayed, then begins to chant "Fuck Pearl Jam! Fuck Pearl Jam! Fuck Pearl Jam!" The gigantic crowd behind the MySpace Stage would disagree.
8:03 p.m.: Promoters were supposedly expecting 70,000 people for Pearl Jam, and if that's how many it takes to absolutely pack half of Grant Park, that's how many there were. Maybe it doesn't sell a ton of records any more, but PJ is still one of the biggest bands on the planet, and the live show helps explain why. Even from a quarter-mile away, the opening salvo of "Why Go" and "Corduroy" sounded amazing. Fireworks greeted "Evenflow," which was a nice touch, and Vedder unsurprisingly climbed on the soapbox to protest BP's decision to dump pollutants in Lake Michigan. (The band even did an impromptu half-song about it!) When Pearl Jam is on, it's on, and it makes us want to go back and listen to albums two through four (Vs., Vitalogy, and No Code) at high volume. Along with much of the crowd, we ducked out toward the end of the main set to beat the heat and the people. The finale, "Rockin' In The Free World," apparently included guests Ben Harper and Dennis Rodman, both old friends of the band. This show and a Chicago fan-club show Thursday night were the band's only two North American dates in 2007, and whichever Lollapalooza booker talked them into it deserves credit—they'd make a solid headliner any year.
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