When Neon Indian regretfully informed fans that they would have to stop playing just one song into their set, their Lollapalooza crowd started murmuring. When a few minutes later an announcement was made that all attendees had to evacuate due to impending weather, the murmur turned into a dull roar. With not a cloud visible, some 60,000 music lovers were instructed, then reminded, then forced to leave by a barricade that swept fans from the North side of Grant Park to the South and finally out into Michigan Avenue where the green blanket clouds of Lolla doom were finally visible. The two and a half hours between the announcement and the re-opening of the gates have already gone down in festival history.
Despite the lapse in music (and lack of clear instruction as to where those 60,000 people should go to wait out the storm), this year’s Lollapalooza seemed another resounding success, drawing some 270,000 attendees and more than 100 acts from around the globe and resulting in just two stabbings – statistically speaking, that’s pretty good.
Nowhere else in the U.S could you have caught Black Sabbath this year, and nowhere else would Black Sabbath play at the same stage as Avicii. It’s also unlikely that Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell would play an aftershow but not the fest itself with his band Jane’s Addiction at any other festival, or that anywhere else original Jane’s Addiction fans would show up dressed in the same scandalous outfits as their teenage daughters. But at Lollapalooza, it seems that anything can happen.
Just one of the only-at-Lolla elements is the crowd the festival draws. This weekend moms in cowboy boots shoved past drunken baseball-capped twenty-somethings who were busy ogling barely dressed teens that were too giggly to notice they were lurching into families of four. A Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt was as common as a Misfits tee but both paled in comparison to the number of exposed midriffs and top knots. Though there was at least a 60-year age range among attendees, from the old school Ozzy fans to the tots being carried by hip parents, everyone seemed to have two goals: stay as cool as possible and see as many acts as possible.
With temperatures in the 90s every day of the fest, the first goal was a challenge, but having acts spread out over eight stages and three city blocks made the second goal difficult as well. Making the trek from the Bud Light Stage at Monroe Street to the Red Bull Soundstage near East Roosevelt Road was an exercise in patience and a test of dodge and weave skill. Wading through the steady stream of bodies on Friday was challenge enough, but after the gates reopened on Saturday determined festivalgoers also had to leap out of the way of their mud-covered counterparts. Getting from place to place was in a word chaos, but a necessary evil for those who wanted to catch such combinations as Sigur Ros, Florence + The Machine and Zed’s Dead.
That combination was not as unlikely as it sounds, as it seemed that every genre was represented or at least acknowledged in the 30-some hours of music.There was a definite emphasis on electronic music at the massive re-tooled Perry’s Stage and indie rock could be found all over the lineup and throughout the grounds, but other genres had their day as well. A smattering of hip-hop cwas found with acts like The Weeknd and J. Cole, and rock was given its nod with such acts as The Gaslight Anthem, JEFF the Brotherhood and Dawes. Headliners ranged from The Black Keys to Jack White with Bassnectar, Frank Ocean and Santigold sprinkled in for good measure, and if you couldn’t fit all that in at the festival, official Lolla afterparties were more than happy to help you out.
From Wednesday until Sunday night, some 40 official afterparties filled Chicago’s venues, and even more artists could be found at The Hard Rock Hotel’s many official Lolla events. If you missed The Walkmen, no problem, they played at Lincoln Hall on Sunday. If you didn’t catch Childish Gambino, he had his own set at The Vic and then made an appearance at the official end-of-Lolla afterparty at The Hard Rock. In fact, if you eschewed Lolla altogether and hung out at The Hard Rock all weekend you would’ve glimpsed Delta Spirit, Zedd and even Dave Chappelle and Jack and Kelly Osborne just hanging out at the ck one parties and It’s So Miami Oasis. But then you would’ve missed the mud.
Some of our favorite Lolla moments were the live saxophone solo at the end of M83’s “Midnight City,” watching two women signing the lyrics of The Big Pink songs onstage for deaf fans and hearing the Google Play stage explode with the voices of everyone present singing along to fun.’s “We Are Young” after making it back into the festival after the rain. Wandering from stage to stage and just observing was also a treat, as you just might catch a hipster at the same stage as a biker dad or watch a child with a green mohawk get down harder than the college kids to a Skream & Benga song. Like we said, at Lollapalooza anything can happen.
While most festival attendees seemed happier nodding along to The Shins and Franz Ferdinand than whooping or responding to artist’s calls to put their hands in the air, the jubilant faces that poured into Michigan Avenue after the last artists finished (or were cut off from) their sets on Sunday night showed that neither rain nor mud nor vomit would dampen the Lolla experience. With at least another nine years in the festival’s contract, we hope that it only gets bigger and better. Either way, we’ll be back next year to find out.
