Lollapalooza 20Jul03

The Crowd:

    It was about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  First off: the girls.  OK, there were lots of naked girls.  Dozens of naked girls.  OK, not one was under 250 lbs.

Lord knows I exaggerate for affect in every conversation.  “That lady is 160 years old!” I just consider myself an appreciator of hyperbole.   I’m not kidding you 250 lbs and no clothes.

I’d like to personally thank the decade of the 90s, which taught us that you should be very comfortable with your body, no matter the shape or size.  There was a “Paint your tits” booth, but the painting was done behind a screen and they used this big, stupid bandage tape over the nipples (not to mention, on 250# girls).   Next to that was a tribal tattoo T-shirt booth, the obligatory Hemp clothing hut, a real tattoo trailer, so you can get your official Lollapalooza tattoo on your fat fucking bicep.  After that, there were about 30 booths of T-shirts, food and jewelry that show up at flea markets and traveling parking-lot carnivals and State fairs.  Look, kids, when your entire counter-culture ensemble can be purchased at Spencer Gifts in any mall, it’s no longer counter-culture.  But I’m very happy you feel cool in your dreads, piercing, tattoos and other trendy shit that was old and tired by the time I graduated high school a dozen years ago. All I can think to say is: Gay fucking poser retards, stop being such  fucking sheep.  Please aspire to upgrade to lemming, they die in groups.  The rest of the crowd was frat jocks. Oh I hate the fucking Midwest. OH!-the best part an X-box tent and golf-carts made into traveling video games for those too fat to make it up the hill to the tent.

            There were a few decent girls (my standards had to adjust quickly). Some (3 or 4?) were even kinda hot, but none were to die for.  This is NOT the old punk rock crowd I remember.  I keep going back to Edd’s analogy: Punks supposed to be lean and mean, livin’ on shit and pissed at the world because of it, not sitting on your ass on your mom’s couch eating cheese puffs and paying $120 for official Hot Topic® Punk-certified jeans.  {We don’t then discuss that Edd’s mom keeps his cupboards stocked with toilet paper, paper towels, and every other amenity for comfortable living ;-) }.

            I know I’ve said all that many times before, but to be faced with such a vast amount of mediocre-thinking, fat, sloppy, pieces of shit just reveling in their supposed uniqueness has really had a morose affect on my psyche.  I mean, I knew what I was going into-this is the X-treme radio crowd. But I didn’t expect the harm it did to my ability to interact with the species.  God bless jobs in academia.  Of course there are idiots here, too. You may know more than God about DNA, that doesn’t mean you know your ass from a hole in the ground, but that’s a tangent. For the most part, I work with humans.  

            I’ve never been svelte, and never really cared outside of being comfortable in normal clothes and loathing my sore, weak back, but these people weren’t a little out of shape. They were morbidly, sloppily obese and it pissed me off.  Like gay-ass Henry Rollins pissed off.  I think I’m gonna go home and work out till I have an aneurism.  

            The Show:

            We arrived about 7pm. I wanted to see Jurassic 5 ‘cuz Steve gave me some cds and it’s pretty decent. It’s basically hip hop, but the music is pretty mature and interesting.  But they played too early. I did have to work from 1-3.  We got there about ½-way through Incubus, whom I know nothing about. There were pretty generic. That’s when we did our tooling around and people watching (as much as we could take).  We had pit tickets, but once we saw the pit-there was no way in Hell we were going in there.  Why the fuck do they pack shit like that? There was no way we’d get into it unless we wanted to do that “pit thing” and fight our way in.  I was hoping to trade tickets with someone who had seats and wanted to go into the pit. Most people I talked to either had no tickets on them, weren’t coherent enough to form complete sentences, or answered a different question than the one I asked.  The rest were not about to go into the pit either.  So off we went.

            Before I talk about the music, let me say that the Jumbotron thing was brilliant crowd control.  I mean brilliant.  The screens let you play trivia like at restaurants and bars, but you used your cell phone instead of a console.  The trivia and polls were, of course, all Lollapalooza-related.  In between questions and polls, there were commercials, movie trailers clips from comedy central and such.  I saw one commercial that was for Tomb Raider the movie, Tomb Raider the video game and Jeep, then a crank-yankers interview with a Perry puppet.  I really think I was witnessing a big change in things.  Not only is this going to show up in every concert, not just festivals, but every bar, movie theatre, sporting event and everywhere else we need to sedate our fat, stupid, quick-to-anger masses with flashing lights-even regular restaurants. You know how belligerent crowds get waiting for set changes. These people were drooling putty melted into their seats. No noise or rowdiness at all. I was impressed.  Call Perry a corporate sellout all you want. This was smart, and his crowd is obviously no longer the oppressed, free-thinking artsy types.

            For the rest of us, at the front of the stage were the Belly Dance Superstars, performing while the set change went on behind them.  There were also dance numbers by

The “Lolla Girls”- the stripper-lookin’ chicks who writhe around during the Jane’s Addiction set.  Someone there had to have a body-mass index under 30.   

            So we were pretty far right for Audioslave. We could see the whole stage, but we were right in front of the drum sub-woofers.  Not that it matters, because the whole band sounds like bass drum sub-woofers.  Chris Cornell sounded fantastic, when we could hear him. But can you say unanimated? He just walked slowly around, mouthing the words without a whole lot of expression. He had a part of the set where he played 3 songs solo with an acoustic guitar. That was cool, even if he did play Elvis Costello’s “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?” I really enjoy his arranging. He really is his own artist. After that,  he was much more animated for the last few Audioslave songs, jumping around like a crazy person as a proper front-man should.  They didn’t do any agenda-pushing.  The closest thing was dropping a Peace-sign banner during the last song. I’m OK with that. You see that at Allman Bros. Shows. (Wait a minute, I thought Morello said he wanted his music to inspire violent, bloody revolution?).  Cornell did have a moment where he was lamenting the fact that MTV banned the new video until they removed scenes of Cops being beaten.  He said, “I saw it 500 times while we were making the video. It doesn’t make me want to go out and do it, but we can watch Rodney King all day on CNN.”    Well what ever, if you feel you must “even the score”, there tough guy.

            I still think Chris Cornell is about the coolest guy in the world.  He’s like Todd on Beavis and Butthead.  I just immediately feel cooler because I’m doing something where he’s in the room-even in my short pants.  Now, Tom Morello… What a flaming, wanker, poser dork.  First off, he comes out in his home-made South American Dictator’s uniform (I know, all Dictator’s Uniforms are home-made), wearing his little snap cap with the red Commie hammer/cycle star.  I do appreciate textural guitarists, sometimes more than noodling guitarists, but this guy’s whole show is in his pedals and treble knob.  I don’t know if I should give artistic credit for the cool parts to him or Tom Schultz.  I guess he gets credit for picking interesting ones.  I gotta say, he did a cool scratching thing on the strings that sounded like record scratching, but it’s not cool if it’s the Line 6 ® “Record Scratching”™ pedal.  He’s the kind of guy that points his index finger straight up in the air after every sustained chord and 2-8 times per solo. 

The drummer looks like Danzig. He’s about 5’2” with a 60 inch chest and 20-inch waist.  It was kinda cool because the back set for Audioslave was these 3x8 panels of something mimicking polished chrome, so you could see the whole crowd behind you.  The Drummer was backward and facing into the chrome.  It was neat.  The bass player, well the bassplayer had tattoos.    All in all I enjoyed Audioslave and just may be inspired enough to try to listen to the disc some more. Oh as a to fill-in on the multi-national corporation discussion. All of Audioslave’s equipment names were covered over in black electrical tape. That tells me that they are only masquerading as South American socialists.  You can tell they are actually European Socialist because they think their problems will go away if they just bury their heads in the sand on the issue.

 After the set, they brought out the video game high-scorers for the day.  There was, of course, one female, who was, of course, 250lbs (at least), who, of course got onstage and immediate pulled her shirt off and jumped around like a fuckin’ maniac for two minutes while they announced the rest of the people.  But…

Jane’s Addiction was great. They are just a different band.  I mean a completely different band. I also mean it in a good way.  Jane’s are an interesting band in that they can be tight as hell and jam like a motherfucker when it’s called for, and be sloppy and crazy when there’s just something else to focus your attention on.  It’s OK to fuck up that solo or vocal line if you’re busy climbing the set or socializing with a girl in the audience.  They just don’t give a fuck.  They understand (and Dave Navarro has said this) that they are there to put on a show. If you want the definitive version of the song, listen to the record.   I love that. If you don’t Jam or play improvised music, run around and break things. Don’t just play the album for me. That’s really all Audioslave did. I truly believe that Dave is an exceptional guitarist and Steve Perkins is an exceptional drummer.  Perkins was absolutely out of control on “Ted…Just Admit it”.  His set was most impressive. He’s using a triple bass-drum single cannon and about a 30-piece set with some kind of auxiliary small tom set hanging off the front, pointing toward the guitarist.  That doesn’t even count the whole other set they wheeled out for “Jane Says” with the steel drums included.   Chris Chaney has a great sound.  I enjoy his writing on the new disc. I don’t need to comment on his skill ‘cuz he’s an old studio hound.  You simply can not find better musicians than these guys.  There are no better bassists than Will Lee, Pino Palladino, Doug Wimbish, etc. You get a guy who can play anything, then turn loose on a band-it’s just awesome.  Nothing demonstrates that more than Wimbish in Living Colour.  But Jane’s music calls for a real bass player, not a personality.  There’s lots of character in the notes, but you might have to be a bass player to get it. I don’t always know what other people get out of the instrument if they don’t love it like I do.  Chris plays Eric’s music pretty much faithfully, so his real contribution will have to be judged over time, which is really the nature of his business.  They played really, really well.

Perry was the biggest change, though.  He sounded better than on any live recording I have.  And I personally have never seen anyone happier to be on stage.  The old Jane’s had this gypsy thing going on.  In 1990, the stage was covered in oriental rugs, candles, found art, Christmas lights and burning incense.  Everything was very eccentric, artsy and bohemian.  This year, the whole set was Chrome (Andy, what do you call that pattern they put on truck running boards?).  It was that stuff. Super clean, super sleek, super polished platforms over the amps and monitors.  Perry was all Las Vegas with silver glitter pants with matching  jacket and gloves and a ruffled shirt this color.  He was Mr. Song and dance and very pleasant and thankful with the crowd.  Years ago he would pipe up with some pretentious shit that made you want to beat his head in just about every show.  There was nothing like that at all.  And you really get a different sound from a band that loves what they are doing and happy to be there.  It really came through.  They only played for an hour, but I think the set was (Not too sure about the order in the middle of the show):

Stop

Pigs in Zen

Been Caught Stealing

Strays

Ocean Size

Summertime Rolls

Up the Beach

Just Because

Ted…Just Admit it

Jane Says

I’ve got to say I’m glad I went.  But I hope this isn’t the only way I’m going to see this band in the future.  They might be afraid to tour without a festival, but I’d love to see some theatre shows with longer sets.  

Well this was enough hard work today, time for class.

~Jimm