Three days of perfect weather; ambitious, sometimes galvanizing music; and the lowest prices on the summer circuit — what more does a music festival really need to succeed?
Well, a few things, it turns out, and the organizers of the three-day Pitchfork Music Festival, which concluded Sunday in Union Park, were in scramble mode most of the weekend as they dealt with ongoing sound problems, late sound checks and boisterous fans who shut down at least one performance, and brought city officials to the scene.
Organizers were so dissatisfied with the sound system installed Friday that they replaced it for the festival’s final two days. Yet to call the festival, organized by the Chicago-based Internet music magazine pitchforkmedia.com and respected indie promoter (and jazz drummer) Mike Reed, anything less than a success would be quibbling.
Most of the 48,000 people who attended over the weekend from 50 states and five continents had more than enough to celebrate. The highlights were many: a rare Yoko Ono performance punctuated by a 35-year-old anti-war chant, “War Is Over (If You Want It),” that sounded as relevant as ever; a thundering set by Atlanta’s Mastodon that reduced even indie-rock hipsters to giddy headbangers waving devil’s horns salutes; a still-vital Sonic Youth doing a complete run-through of the 1988 masterwork “Daydream Nation”; a white-hot set by a new Chicago all-star jazz-rock quartet consisting of Ken Vandermark, Nate McBride, Jeff Parker and John Herndon; and a star-making turn by the electro-rock foursome Battles.
The Sunday lineup was a slight letdown after the heavy hitters of the previous two days, but it still had its moments.
The ghost of Friday night’s sound gremlins returned and marred performances by Chicago quartet The Ponys and wispy psychedelic purveyors Brightblack Morning Light. In both instances, key parts of the mix dropped out until midway through the set.
But most of the music went off without a hitch.
The Sea and Cake sounded especially good, with the guitars of Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt, weaving in and out of Eric Claridge’s melodic baselines.
It was all pushed along by John McEntire’s drumming, the quartet’s command of propulsive pop, the perfect soundtrack for a sunny weekend afternoon.
The Cool Kids, the Chicago duo of Mikey and Chuck, surveyed the crowd massed in front of the South Stage early Sunday evening, and said it was easily the biggest they had seen at one of their shows.
Their songs hardened the edges of the classic Chicago rap sound, with more emphatic beats and tag-team vocals that stoked the party atmosphere without resorting to gangsta cliches. Of Montreal came dressed for the occasion, as always, with Kevin Barnes in dominatrix gear and his band donning wings, football pads and body paint.
Amid the visual splendor, the band dished out first-rate glam pop. New Pornographers were relative slackers in the fashion department, but the band’s exuberantly catchy songs rang out across the park.
If there was an overriding theme, it’s that nerds aren’t just cool, they’re the new rock stars: Girl Talk’s Greg Gillis, Dan Deacon and the Battles crew spent as much time spazzing out onstage as they did clicking mouses and twisting knobs, producing sounds that induced frenzied responses from the audience. When Gillis stage-dived while orchestrating ridiculously unlikely and outrageously catchy mash-ups of Missy Elliott, Styx, Tears for Fears and T.I., he affirmed that punk could be both visceral and digital.
Over three days that saw 39 acts perform, the park was packed and lines for toilets and beer were long, but the fans were orderly and the vibe an idyllic shade of Monterey Pop mellow. One New York nightclub executive, Adam Hertz, who was visiting the festival, noted the first-night sound problems but praised the friendly, low-key atmosphere.
“It’s obvious these promoters are trying to do something cool around the music instead of just exploiting it for money,” he said.
The only hint of trouble came during Deacon’s Saturday set. Deacon is a bespectacled, classically trained composer who has taken an unlikely career turn by becoming a party guru for the laptop generation. He waded through the crowd, and soon the fence separating the audience from Ogden Avenue traffic was feeling the strain. Promoters pulled the plug, officials from the police and fire departments showed up, and order was quickly restored, but the promoter ended the performance prematurely.
More troubling was a sound system that clearly didn’t have enough oomph to project the nuances of Friday-night sets by Slint and GZA, or the power of Sonic Youth. Even after the sound on the two main stages was beefed up Saturday (clearly benefiting stellar performances by Clipse and Mastodon), the wispy vocals of Cat Power were ill-served. She would’ve been better off on the smaller, more intimate third stage, while Deacon, Gillis and their ready-to-party fans would’ve benefited from playing on the more spacious main stages.
Festival logistics are always subject to last-minute whims of performers, weather and luck, and so it was early Saturday when city trucks didn’t arrive soon enough to water down the dusty softball fields to allow sound checks to proceed on time. Organizers found themselves trying to do the jobs themselves with makeshift containers and bottled water.
Yet the $50 three-day pass was one of the musical bargains of the summer. In a four-hour span Saturday evening alone, the aesthetic range was staggering. Mastodon appeared to animate the dust in front of the stage, creating a surreal haze that fit the technically demanding yet brutishly powerful arrangements. Virginia hip-hop duo Clipse offered nuanced takes on underworld themes over hallucinatory beats, the complementary storytelling skills of brothers Malice and Pusha T in top form. Then there was the party insanity of Girl Talk and Deacon, muting the shaky performance by Cat Power. And finally, there was Ono, joined by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. The singer played a harrowing set at Park West in 1996; 11 years later, she was in a more playful mood, even dancing during the emotionally wrenching “Walking on Thin Ice.”
But when she led the crowd in the “War is Over” anthem that she first performed with her late husband, John Lennon, at the height of another controversial overseas conflict, Ono connected the laptop generation to hers. “Together we can do something,” she proclaimed. But judging by this flawed but inspiring one-of-a-kind festival, they already had.
———-
greg@gregkot.com
For more Pitchfork coverage, go to chicagotribune.com/gregkot
