The last six or so months have been fun leading up to the annual Pitchfork Music Festival. Living in Champaign is an almost perfect staging ground for someone who wants to experience different music whether it be nightly, weekly, or seasonally, thanks to the central location between major cities and venues. This year Pitchfork says the number of tickets sold has not been raised, yet at the fest it felt that way. I attended both Saturday and Sunday and it was a completely different experience between the two days.
I arrived early on Saturday to pick my ticket up from will call, run down the street to the Billy Goat Tavern for a ‘borger, and make my way to the back corner of the festival to enter (it’s a trick to not enter Union Park from Ashland). Upon entering I was relatively surprised to find a pretty empty park.
The first band I saw was Cymbals Eat Guitars. I know the band from a steady stream of bloggers enthusiastic about their music, yet was not familiar enough with them to fight my way toward the front. Instead, I took it easy and watched their set from a few hundred feet back. The music sounded good, well put together, and there is no doubt as to their level of talent to be featured on the main stage, even if it was just after the gates opened. It was very apparent, however, the band is somewhat overwhelmed with the fact they are playing at a summer music festival in such a large city. With a little work on their stage presence over time they will soon be an act to catch.
After the Cymbals Eat Guitars set, I headed westward in the park. Plants and Animals started up their set on the Connector stage, which is the other large stage right next to the main stage. Their show was crisp sounding from the decent distance away I was. At the same time, The Dutchess & The Duke went on at the Balance stage, a stage set up on the South side of the park. In order to get a good view of Bowerbirds, who my friend I went with was completely excited to see, we headed over to catch the end of The Dutchess & The Duke’s set.
Early on the Balance stage was relatively calm. Next up was The Antlers making their first ever appearance in the city of Chicago. Interested more in crafting melodies than controlling their crowd, the band weaved in and out of trance inducing lush guitar ballads. It is this sense of musicianship and an audience being truly interested in the music that sets Pitchfork apart from some of the other major festivals, which I love.
The Bowerbirds then took over, adding to the calm, fun atmosphere as if it was the calm before the storm. Their set was one of my favorites, turning me almost instantly into a fan. For those unaware, Bowerbirds is (especially live) mostly Phil Moore on vocals and guitar. Sounding incredibly similar to Andrew Bird, Moore mesmerized the crowd, mostly loyal fans, wth some incredibly beautiful nu-folk bliss. A side note: Beth Tacular is even better looking in real life, a trend we will see reappear a bit later.
But the storm was just beginning to brew. We knew we wanted a good position to watch Matt & Kim, so by this point we decided to forgo attempting to move back and forth between stages and camp out at the Balance stage and just keep moving up. By the end of Bowerbirds we managed to weasel our way up to the rail, front and center. Little did we know, Pitchfork decided to schedule the loud, rambunctious indie crowd favorites for the Balance stage. Ponytail was about to hit the stage.
No sound check needed, other than a few random noises from lead singer and to confirm that the guitars were in fact plugged in. I can’t even begin to try to describe the show Ponytail performed. It was a weird concoction of random, high-pitched noises over screaming guitars (a Tele and Thinline Tele so they were extra bright) and a drummer who was full of fills. Unfortunately, I was caught without hearing protection in the front of a loud rock band. Some of the noises were just over the top. The press was laughing, as were some members of security, at some of our faces that turned sour every so often. A bunch of the girls to my left ended up covering their ears in between the desire to jump and dance. To my right was the crazy crowd: crowd surfing, pushing, jumping, and dancing. Eventually the singer jumped off stage and into the crowd. This helped only to make sure the barricade wouldn’t hold and about 20 security guards had to hold the barricade up.
After about 45 minutes the set was over, but the storm kept coming. In a rapid attempt to fix the barricade, random straps, a tower of some kind, and finally the MISSING BOLTS were put into place to assure the shear mass of people behind me would not crush me.
Next up was a set by none other than Wavves. “I bet all of you want to hear about Barcelona?” “PSYCH!” I thought it was funny that singer Nathan Williams wore a Bulls hat Saturday. Something about the running of the bulls and that hat connected and I just thought it was pretty ironic. Anyway, the set went without flaw, although due to delays before the band didn’t play very long. I, however, was not disappointed, as Wavves didn’t really live up to their live performance standards I’ve read so much about. Maybe it was the fact Nathan was scared of mixing too many drugs for fear drummer Ryan Ulsch would once again grow pissed off, dump beer on Nathan’s head and leave the stage.
Lindstrøm casually started setting up his MacBook Pro while relaxing on stage with a nice cigarette. All the way from Norway, Lindstrøm played a nice relaxing set, although I felt it was sort of dragging as he began to get nagged by one of the volunteers who was trying to get his off the stage. He played nearly an hour after taking the stage at 6:42.
Still up front! A simple enough change of table for half-sized drum set and 2 keyboards gives rise to a flood of fans. Of the approximately 18,000 tickets sold, I would venture to guess at least half of the guests were standing behind the Balance stage for Matt & Kim. One guy even climbed a tree, giving him a pretty good view I guess. After reportedly downing a 6 pack of Coke and a couple of energy drinks, Matt & Kim took the stage to “Brooklyn Go Hard.” I have never seen a person so enthusiastic and happy as Kim. It didn’t seem to bother anyone in the crowd that most of the beats she plays are exactly the same, or that both of them repeatedly messed up, no the fact that you could jump around repeatedly singing Yea Yeah was more than enough to make the $35/day ticket worth it. I really didn’t get much of a chance to take pictures or video as we let the couple of girls behind us get to the front because we felt we could keep people off of us better than they could. Attempting to get away from the Balance stage after Matt & Kim proved to be near impossible.
The idea to run over and watch The National didn’t work. However, we ended up in almost the exact same spot we started the day at watching the main Aluminum stage. The crowd went from being an average of about 19 to 35 going from Matt & Kim to The National. Their show was a nice relaxing end to the day, a day filled with some amazing music. All of my favorites were performed including “Fake Empire,” “Apartment Story,” “Secret Meeting,” and as an encore, “About Today.”
It was weird driving down Damen west of the United Center leaving the festival. My friend really didn’t know where he was going, other than “away” from the festival grounds and toward 290. With the number of bicycles and “L” travelers it wouldn’t have been much to just take Ashland but apparently he wanted to venture. I guess I just never realized how gentrified the near west side has become, especially around the United Center.
Other random notes from Pitchfork Day II:
* Around 4 during Bowerbirds I heard sirens repeatedly. An ambulance had to pull into the baseball diamond (it is a park after all) to attend to and cart away a festivalgoer.
* Doom refused to take the stage until he was paid up front in cash. This after he arrived to the stage 9 minutes late. Oh and he was dressed completely in camo, looking almost like a tree.
* Many people complained of both a lack of porta-potties and weak soundsystems overall. I didn’t experience a problem with either, but Pitchfork brought in 35 extra green boxes for Sunday.
