By Christopher Campbell
Western Herald
An old woman yammered on her cell phone as the L-train shot through Chicago’s downtown.
“I’ve never seen it so busy! It’s never like this!” said the woman, gaping at the horde riding toward Union Park.
The L emptied at the Ashland stop.
On the platform, pigeons bumbled, a huddled man read the ingredients off a package of gum and loud music could already be heard.
The music was pumping from Union Park, where the three-day Pitchfork Music Festival brought 18,000 people per day.
Kristian Matsson, also known as The Tallest Man on Earth, confessed to his audience:
“The sun is really hot; I haven’t slept for two days,” adding later that the audience was seeing him at his weakest.
Tallest Man’s voice shot across choppy water.
Three hours after the festival started, promoters slashed water prices to $1 per bottle. Also, a giant Greyhound was pulled onsite.
The Greyhound was dubbed “The Chill Out Bus,” and had its air-conditioning on full-blast. Anyone could board and, although the bus was stationary, it had a driver, a rapping driver.
“This is Greyhound schedule 1603, I’m your driver Virgil B. and we’re gonna be headin’ to the Windy City,” said hoarse-voiced and Greyhound-garbed Virgil.
“I got a lotta stops but not a lotta time, so I’ll tell yuh what they are when I’m done with my rhyme, thank you for riding my Greyhound bus, just sit on back and leave the driving to us,” spat Virgil.
Broken Social Scene was silky smooth and headliners Modest Mouse closed the evening under hot July skies peppered with airborne glowsticks.
Using banjo, horn and whatever else they could grab, Modest Mouse opened with an eight-minute version of “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes.”
“You guys must be hot,” front man Isaac Brock told Friday night’s audience.
“Go get some more water in plastic bottles, the Earth can take another hit for you,” added Brock.
At around the time Modest Mouse played “Dramamine” and “Satin in a Coffin,” Brock decided to have a snack. He grabbed one of the many stray glowsticks, bit into it, and dumped the fluid in his mouth.
“I thought it might be a good idea to eat one of them,” said Brock, who urged the audience to learn from his mistakes because, “the chemical taste will probably never leave my mouth.”
“But my spit glows,” said Brock.
As for Saturday, it was WHY?.
Legend has it Yoni Wolf, WHY? front man, unearthed a forgotten four-track recorder in the basement of his Rabbi father’s synagogue.
In that basement, Yoni became a confessing, unorthodox hip-hopper whose vocal chords ring like broken elevator cables.
Discogs, an online database of information about music recordings, describes WHY?’s stuff as candytime-dissonant, singsong-suicide style.
As for Sunday, Neon Indian flooded the grounds with “Psychic Chasms.” As songs ended they improvised into the next.
Last weekend in downtown Chicago, “Transformers 3” was being shot. In the downtown loop, traffic was being rerouted; cars were crumpled and stacked, busses overturned, and somewhere Shia Labeouf was being heroic with Megan Fox’s replacement eating up his game.
Up in Wrigleyville, beers were $7 during Cubs games. At the Hyatt Regency, it’s likely that a woman with a nose job and $6,000 Louis Vuitton bag soared up an escalator. And, down in Union Park, right off Greenline Ashland stop, Pitchfork was happening.
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