A Lollapalooza Preview, by Paul Shirley

When I was a skinny, freckled-faced kid living on a semi-farm in Northeast Kansas, the arrival of August meant that my life was about to reassigned at the Jefferson County 4-H Fair. Soon, I would be splitting time between selling pork burgers from the concession stand and worrying over whether my Barred Rock rooster would be named Grand Champion.

Now, early August means it’s time for Lollapalooza. Music-listening is not nearly the taxing activity that 4-H was – I’ve never spent an entire year getting up at 5:45 to groom a CD – but Lollapalooza has its share of Fair-like traits. It’s always hot, the food is greasy, and it smells like the leeward edge of a hog farm.

The 4-H Fair was the culmination of the year’s work – a chance to prove that all that time in the garden was worthwhile, because someone hung a blue ribbon on your plate of five Roma tomatoes.

At first blush, Lollapalooza seems about the same – an evaluation period. But it’s the opposite, really. Thanks to compressed set lists and no sound checks and bands that are used to playing at 11 at night playing at 2 in the afternoon, no one sounds very good. If you go to Lollapalooza to judge what your favorite band has been doing all year, you’ll leave disappointed.

Lollapalooza is a break from reality. It’s about seeing old friends and making new ones and taking your shirt off and not caring how ridiculous you look. It’s a time out from real life – one that happens to play out over a backdrop of music that, while mostly disappointing, might occasionally lead you to find your new favorite band.

Most of all, Lollapalooza is a chance for a bunch of adults to act like kids again.

And this is how I see that chance going for me:

Friday

I will try to arrive early, around noon, hoping to catch Wye Oak on the Sony stage. But I will probably be distracted on the way to Grant Park by a trip through Walgreen’s on a hunt for (choose from, and depending on the weather:) an umbrella, sunscreen, and/or two factory-sealed bottles of water. After hustling through a bag inspection that’s less about invasion and more about apathy, I will see only half of Wye Oak’s set. I will be unfazed, however, because very few Lollapaloozans will have arrived. This will make me remember that this time of day is what I like most about Lollapalooza. The park is still a park, and not yet a prison riot.

A common Palooza mistake, one often made by first-timers, is to put too much stock in the headliners. The headliners don’t matter, because you’re not going to be able to see them. These days, Perry Farrell and Co. allow something like 45,387,370 people to buy tickets to Lollapalooza, and most of those people show up around 5 p.m., which is when they’ve wrapped up the day’s job or hangover, wheedled their friends off the couch, and caught the L to Grant Park. These souls represent a crush of humanity so large that, unless you stake out the right stage at 2 p.m., you’re not going to be close enough to Mr. Mathers to tell if he’s actually rapping or if it’s all piped in because he had a rough one at Schuba’s last night.

The better move is to come early and revel in obscure bands that might actually be trying. Bands like Young The Giant, who I notice, when I look down at the handy pocket schedule I picked up on my way in, are playing across the park. But then I’ll take note of the fact that The Naked And Famous are on my side of the park in an hour. I’ll recall that I’ve seen Young The Giant before, but I’ve never seen The Naked And Famous. I’ll also recall that, if I’ve learned one thing about Lollapalooza, it’s that it takes approximately one walk across the park before you give up on trying to criss-cross the grounds in anything less than 20 minutes.

So, I’ll watch 30 minutes of the Vaccines, who have proximity going for them, and where I’ll see no fewer than three girls who make me have impure thoughts, and then I’ll leave early so I can find a good vantage point for The Naked And Famous which, incidentally, is one of four bands on the weekend I’m most excited to see.

After a blistering set (fingers crossed) from the New Zealanders, I’ll ponder Friday’s set of lunch options, settling on something chicken-y that is eaten with one’s hands. (All signs point to a gyro.)

Happy that it’s only 93 degrees, I’ll wander into the last half of Delta Spirit before leaving early so I can catch Foster the People.

When FTP is finished, it will be four o’clock, or close to the end of any meaningful concerting. Sure, I’ll watch White Lies (because I will just have seen Cults in Kansas City and because I’m a White Lies semi-fanatic) but, by now, the crush is arriving and, by the time A Perfect Circle goes on at 5, any hope of a decent vantage point will have flown away with my hopes of not sweating through my shirt.

And anyway, my friends will have arrived. So, after APC (which I will watch with a creepy level of dedication), I will have a beer with Chet, the Canadian I met two years ago in this very place, and in whose basement in Toronto I’ve slept, and his cousins, who are large and who are very good at Mailmanning beers. (More on this later.)

In two words, I will talk Chet and his pals into watching Crystal Castles: “They’re Canadian.” We will Mailman two beers during the set, which we will watch from the back, before shrugging our way through a mutiny that sees two-thirds of our group depart for Muse, even after I plead with them that Girl Talk will be the most fun they’ll have all weekend.

Girl Talk will not be as good as I remember because Girl Talk is better in a smaller venue. We will leave early, hoping to beat the crowd to whatever nightlife we can find in the city. We will stay up entirely too late, and on…

Saturday

….I will not arrive at noon.

Which will be a problem, because I really want to see J Roddy Walston & The Business. (Kudos to Lollapalooza organizers on the 15-track sampler that arrived in my inbox two weeks ago, on which I found Mr. Walston and his business.)

I’ll salve my late-arriving wounds with a forced march between Disappears, Chico Trujillo, and An Horse, none of which I’ve heard of, but all of which (because I’ve not heard of them) have the potential to be the band that can turn me into that asshole who knew about Chico Trujillo before you.

Then, a dilemma: Friendly Fires or Maps & Atlases at 2:15 on the near side of the park, or hike to Fitz & The Tantrums at 2:30 on the far side? F & The Ts it is, along with today’s lunch – a mediocre chicken sandwich and an alarmingly early Bud Light Lime. (I know, I know, Bud Light Lime is, at best, a girl’s beer and, at worst, probably made with a cancer-causing agent because how else could the lime taste that good.)

By now, it will be time to start worrying that the girl I met last night – Andrea? Yeah, Andrea – hasn’t returned my predictable, if excusable text – “Did you make it to Phantogram?” (She said she was a fan) – which was sent an hour ago.

I’ll probably forget about her when my cousin Stephen arrives and we have a brief argument over the cultural importance of the Deftones. (He says unimportant; I say I couldn’t have made it through college without Around The Fur, which, of course, hardly makes it culturally important, not that I’ll admit that to him.) We will compromise when he agrees to accompany me to The Drums at 4:45 before he leaves after half the Deftones’s set so he can rejoin his girlfriend at Patrick Stump, for whom (or which, depending) she has a secret soft spot.

I will lament my temporary amnesia about the nature of late-day, weekend Lollapalooza when I arrive at the Deftones to find that I am one hundred thousand yards away from the stage. I will take solace in the fact that I care very little about the rest of the acts that night; I mean, Lykke Li is great but she’s not behind-30,000-people great, and My Morning Jacket is surely going to blow someone’s mind, but it probably won’t be mine or Chet’s, because chances are good that we’ll be at the DJ/Electronica stage, watching Pretty Lights, about whom I know nothing but for whom I have high hopes, if only to justify missing MMJ.

Oh, I told you I was going to explain what a Mailman is, didn’t I? Well, you know who Karl Malone is, right? (The Mailman.) When Karl Malone would dunk, late in his career and when his legs had abandoned him, he would put one hand behind his head, for the purpose, I suppose, of flair. Concordantly, to Mailman a beer is to shotgun it, only on one knee and with one hand behind your head. The correct technique, as told to me by Chet and his merry band of Canadians is, well, complicated, but the long and the short of it is that you pull open the tab with your right hand (assuming that you are right-handed, and not a communist) while dropping to your right knee and following through with the aforementioned right hand to the back of your head so that you are in a position not unlike the one used by an Indian if he were shooting the sun with an arrow, only if Karl Malone were that Indian.

You’ll figure it out. If you can’t, come find me and I’ll get Chet to explain. You bring the beers.

Saturday night will be a blur caused in part by all those Mailmans. A blur featuring random friends I’d forgotten would be in Chicago and several girls who, it seems, like me but, upon further review, were grimacing when I was talking to them.

Sunday

A fun game at Lollapalooza is Why Is This Good (Bad) Band Playing So Early (Late)? This game is particularly fun with Titus Andronicus, a fantastic band that is playing at 12:45 on Sunday, an odd slot that is especially odd for a band as aggressive as they are.

No matter, for it will give me a reason to stumble through the streets of Chicago at what will undoubtedly seem like the crack of dawn.

From there, a blur of Rival Schools (one of those obscure bands I’m excited to see), Noah And The Whale, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., which is still my favorite band name from the past two years.

Then, a dead space because, what, am I going to watch The Cars?

And in this dead space, I will realize that Lollapalooza 2011 is almost over. This will make me sad, a little, except that my feet hurt and I’m tired of my core temperature competing with a stove burner for Hottest Thing I’ve Ever Touched.

Nonetheless, I will probably try to keep the party going by not backing down when Chet asks me to get us beers. And we will tromp off to watch Portugal, The Man, and be duly impressed by a good band with a name that’s almost as fun as DEJJ.

Then I’ll have to decide between Manchester Orchestra and Explosions In The Sky and will, with reluctance, choose Andy Hull and the boys from Georgia, mostly because Andy Hull is fun to talk to. (Name drop!)

And then it will be time for the final decision: Kid Cudi, Cold War Kids, or Deadmau5. (I’m obviously not going to watch the Foo Fighters, even if their last album wasn’t a steaming hunk of gibbon shit like the previous 24.) Kid Cudi because it would be interesting. Cold War Kids because I’ve never seen them, it’ll be dead(ish), and I really like their last album. Or Deadmau5 because it’ll be nuts.

Thirty minutes later, I’ll be standing near the back – possibly with a girl on my shoulders – while a guy on stage with a mouse hat uses electronics to make people feel like they’ve been transported to 2135. It will remind me of a Lollapalooza moment two years before, when I was standing next to Chet, having only met him that day, watching him with the wife he no longer has. I didn’t even have the girlfriend I no longer have. That, to say that it feels like a long time ago.

We were watching Deadmau5 then, too.

Soon after, Lollapalooza will be over. Sure, there might be one last hurrah – a trip into the city for a bittersweet nightcap at some tiny bar in Wicker Park. But we’ll only be staving off the inevitable. Waiting for us: jobs and cars and mortgages and taxes and the ever-accelerating spiral toward death.

It almost makes me want to go back to the 4-H Fair. At least, back then, the end meant a return to the blissful existence of a child. The end of Lollapalooza means everyone goes back to being an adult.

Sorry. I’m ruining it. And for no good reason – Lollapalooza 2011 hasn’t even happened yet.

And that, my friends, is very good news. We don’t have to worry about that re-entry into adulthood. Not yet, anyway. There’s a whole weekend ahead of us.

So go. Find a new band. Drink a Bud Light Lime. Get someone pregnant in a Johnnie-On-The-Job.

Most of all, enjoy being a kid again.

There will be plenty of time for adulthood later.

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