[concerts] Lollapalooza 2008 Day 3 (8/3/2008)

The original idea was to limit my day to Saul Williams, Love & Rockets and Nine Inch Nails, but even after stopping at the bar after my 10am soccer match -- yes, I managed to play soccer for an hour in the morning in the midst of all of this walking and standing, and I played pretty darn well, actually -- I was ready to go a bit earlier.

Nelson Faulkner
So, with two extra hours of festival to fill, I paged through the guide book and realized I had seen Faulkner on London Live, and the comparisons in said guide book to Jack Johnson are totally unfair, because they completely miss all the percussive elements to his playing style, which is more reminiscent of Michael Hedges, Kaki King and Stuart Davis. I'm totally a sucker for that shit, so I loved it. His self-effacing banter was pretty engaging as well, and he closed things out with a solo acoustic (!) version of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Amadou & Miriam
I was still planning the low-impact afternoon, so I grabbed a good beer and a seat over in the beer garden. They had two big screens showing the main acts that were on at the time, which were Chromeo and Amadou & Miriam. They had the sound up for Chromeo, which was unfortunate, because they kinda sucked. The other screen looked much more interesting, so I hoofed it over to the Petrillo Music Shell, where Amadou & Miriam were proffering some silky smooth and totally infectious Afropop. I probably ended up catching only the last fifteen or twenty minutes, and while I probably could have seen twice that much had I not been dawdling, it was enough to put a huge smile on my face.

Eli "Paperboy" Reed & The True Loves
To the uninitiated, this would seem like some pretty smooth retro funk and soul, but this is one of those cases where they suffered greatly from comparison to Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings from the previous day. They weren't even on the same playing field.

Saul Williams
I had heard so much about Williams, that I wanted to get in pretty close for the set, and made the mistake of starting conversations with the evening's dilemma of Kanye vs. NIN. Seeing as how Trent Reznor produced the most recent Saul Williams record, it was pretty much no contest. The set suffered a bit from sound problems early on, and Williams' vocals were hard to make out for at least the first fifteen minutes or so, which is problematic for someone who is so often described as a "street poet." Some of the spoken word stuff between songs still came through, and then there was one tune that started out with a spang-spang-a-lang jazz beat that flipped into a reggae/dancehall thing for the choruses that was awfully cool. Still, I had this conflicting reaction of thinking the band was pretty good, but not really doing it for me. A friend had been so enthusiastic about Flogging Molly that I figured I could sort of catch two-thirds of the set from each of them if I hustled.

Flogging Molly
The recurring theme on Sunday was bands I wasn't planning on seeing putting huge smiles on my face, with Flogging Molly being the third instance. The relentless combination of traditional Irish music and punk rock produced what seemed to be the friendliest moshing and crowd surfing of the weekend, at least that I saw. The band is just fun, and I actually prefer them to The Pogues as a live act, because of that absolute breakneck pace.

Love & Rockets
Then it was time to pick a spot for Nine Inch Nails and wait. Unfortunately, that meant enduring Love & Rockets. They just sucked. Hard. Daniel Ash's twelve-string was painfully out of tune on "No New Tale To Tell," but that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's nothing quite so painful as watching a band that's time has passed not realize it at all, and Daniel Ash clearly has no self-awareness whatsoever, given his misplaced onstage swagger. Then, these three sort of marshmallow men came out during the last tune, and I'm still trying to figure out what that was all about.

Nine Inch Nails
Wow. Just wow. I had never seen Trent Reznor live before, so I didn't entirely know what to expect. This wasn't just a rock show, this was a spectacle, on par with classic Pink Floyd or modern Flaming Lips, and even the latter is more of just a bizarre party. Nine Inch Nails was a machine, and the visuals were absolutely stunning.

I had the good fortune of staking out a spot next to a guy who had seen upwards of 70 Nine Inch Nails shows, which provided some interesting context from time to time. At one point, he asked if I had ever done acid, and went on to tell me that the next bit with the lights was as close as I would come without actually partaking in said substance.

Some reviews have complained about a lull during the instrumental material from Ghosts I-IV, but that's where the big screens may have actually done a disservice to the crowd. I had a pretty perfect spot to watch -- about two-thirds of the way between the stage and the sound board, dead center -- and it was the big picture of the whole stage that was commanding attention during those passages, not the close-ups that they were showing to the masses that were gathered further back. I didn't feel that the momentum let up at all, but I like quiet, intense instrumentals more than the average music fan.

Then, of course, there were the jackhammer beats and searing riffs on the heavier stuff, with the ubiquitous Josh Freese holding things down like a rock. A very heavy rock with impeccable time. I thought there was even one tune where he added a bit of swing, opening up the pocket in ways I wouldn't have expected on a Nine Inch Nails tune, although I don't remember which one it was.

By the time I was able to take myself out of the moment and see how much time had passed, it was already well past the hour mark and almost at the end of the regular set. I can quibble a bit about still not really liking "The Hand That Feeds" as one of the last songs before the encore, but "Hurt" erased any qualms I might have had. This was, flat-out, one of the best shows I've ever seen. Somewhere in the top five, but I'm not entirely sure where. A great end to the weekend that just left me in awe for quite some time.

Bands I would have liked to have seen: Office, The National