A lone Dutchman is wandering through Chicago, his sandals strapped tight, a backpack secured with a day’s supply of water, and his eyes fixed on the famous skyline. Surrounded by high-rise buildings, Grant Park itself is one of the city’s most recognizable settings, but also a prime spot to take in the neighboring architecture. Buckingham […]

I never had wanted to attend a concert more than this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. After seeing hundreds of bands during the course of the past two decades, The Flaming Lips’ headlining spot at the Chicago festival was going to be unlike anything I had experienced. It would be louder. It would be more colorful. […]

If Eugene Hütz ever takes his eclectic band back inside dingy clubs, he’d be doing a disservice to festivals worldwide. Promoters need Gogol Bordello just as much as the gypsy punks need those large venues. The band embodies everything about open-air concerts, and does so knowingly and affectionately. Commanding Lollapalooza’s AT&T main stage less than […]

Atlanta’s Black Lips don’t play rock ‘n’ roll. They play rock ‘n’ tumble. Or rock ‘n’ flail. Or rock ‘n’ repulse. The bluesy foursome has built its reputation as much on the lineage of Nuggets and Mersey punk as it has on its disgusting stage antics. So when the quartet sauntered onto Lollapalooza’s Bud Light […]

When Jamie Lidell sent members of his backing band into the crowd during his Saturday evening Lollapalooza set, he couldn’t have known that it would serve as a metaphor for his 55 minutes on stage. If he did, and he still allowed his mates to leave him solo on the MySpace stage for almost half […]

When a local radio personality walked onto Lollapalooza’s AT&T stage Saturday to introduce The Ting Tings, the responding cheers weren’t from a crowd that loved the British duo’s danceable rock ‘n’ roll. Instead, the roar was from a couple thousand people hoping to enjoy the much buzzed-about 12:45 p.m. gig … and it was from […]

There are career-defining performances, and then there are career-altering ones. The Beatles weren’t defined by “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, but it certainly set the course for the rest of the band’s career. The Who’s path wasn’t so much redirected by a 1979 concert in which almost a dozen people were trampled to death […]

When visual artist Scott Masson started Office in 2001, he meant for it to use corporate themes such as costumes and props throughout the band’s performances … not for it to parallel homogenized, lifeless, assembly line, conglomerate slog. Yet that’s exactly what he had when his Chicago ensemble took the PlayStation 3 stage Sunday afternoon […]

At a concert run by a media outlet with a reputation for ahead-of-the-curve taste-making, this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival featured more than its share of original hipsters. Mission of Burma. Public Enemy. Wu Tang Clan members Ghostface and Raekwon. A double dose of Lou Barlow in Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh. So it shouldn’t have come […]

Part of what gives Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary Woodstock its sense of purpose is the seemingly mundane footage of people walking. Several times throughout the Academy Award-winning film, shots stay on concert goers as they move in masses along the streets, through the gates, and barrel into the historic landscape with unified excitement, joined in […]