Lollapalooza 2010: Metric brings "Stadium Love," Graham Elliot brings tasty food, and Gogol Bordello brings gypsy punk zaniness

Day 2, August 7, in Chicago

By Nicholas Jackson
Published: August 8th, 2010 | 12:00pm

It was another early morning and all the Lolla revelers were late to drag themselves out of bed, bedraggled. Hayden Thorpe of the UK-based indie rock group Wild Beasts seemed more enthralled by his surroundings than anybody in the respectable-sized crowd. “This is an amazing setting,” he said of Grant Park, a place Chicagoans tend to take for granted. “This is how it should be done.” The quartet did a great job claiming their space, filling the air with soaring guitars and falsetto vocals. The group’s light indie pop could be considered soft by most of the crowd at Lollapalooza, but that would be from passersby that didn’t pay any attention to the brutal, violence-laden lyrics that spoke of rape and other ills.

In many ways, Dragonette is similar to Wild Beasts, which made it a shame organizers layered the two sets, forcing many to leave the PlayStation stage early to catch the Canadian electropop trio’s set. Fronted by the lovely Martina Sorbara—who plays the awkward part of a typical rebellious youth all grown-up (the 31-year-old comes from a famous Canadian political family)—Dragonette put on a surprisingly upbeat and energetic performance for a group that has clearly overbooked themselves. The band played a much talked about after party with Cut Copy the night before, but the standing-room only crowd seemed reason enough for Sorbara to give her all on the stage as she lead the others through an emotive set of punchy pop numbers that didn’t disappoint.

Following Dragonette proved almost too difficult for Stars, another Canadian group that should have its act together by now considering their extensive touring under this moniker and as members of Broken Social Scene. The confetti cannons weren’t enough to make up for Amy Millan’s thin vocals.

After Stars, it was time for lunch. Lollapalooza is typically painful to navigate, but this year organizers did a great job by expanding the enclosed area, stretching everything west across Columbus Avenue. Like the toilets, the food lines were fairly short and moved fast. Graham Elliot—the well-known Chicago chef who is becoming famous thanks to his association with the new Gordon Ramsay-helmed vehicle, MasterChef—was responsible for signing up and bringing in a lot of the different food vendors this year. Offerings included traditional Chicago-style pizza from both Giordanos and Connie’s, as well as various gourmet burgers (Kuma’s Corner!), pulled pork sandwiches, smoothies, seasoned fries, and more.

Perennial festival favorite Gogol Bordello was a great act to follow-up a short respite. The New York-based gypsy-punk collective, headed by Ukrainian Eugene Hütz, can turn any group of people into a dancing, moshing, singing mess. Shirtless, as usual, he led the large, grungy mass of violin-playing, cymbal-smashing, multi-cultural musicians through a fast-paced set that delivered. The crowd loved Hütz—but then again, they always do.

Moving to Kidzapalooza (a.k.a. the kids stage) for the first time, I realized it’s really not for kids at all. It’s a place for great musicians to put together a child-friendly set that draws a larger number of hipsters than it does children. Why else would Chrissie Hynde, the American rock legend best known as the frontwoman of the Pretenders, perform here? “Don’t worry, the kids are safe as long as I’m on this stage,” she said as she started her set with Welsh producer and singer JP Jones. When Hynde announced in February that she was working on a new album with Jones under the moniker JP, Chrissie & the Fairground Boys, she called it her best work yet. The songs were true to, but perhaps hurt by, the kid-friendly promise.

One of the most impressive sets of the day came from Metric, led by Emily Haines, also a member of Broken Social Scene. Saturday, it seemed, was a day for the Canadians. The crowd swelled for this performance to an unmanageable size for the early afternoon and bounced and moved to the repetitive drum kick that marks most (or all) of Metric’s songs. Is that the appeal? It’s hard to know, as the power pop performance seemed to be something all large Canadian groups that find success in the U.S. today have a formula for. It could be Haines herself, who manages to sing, play the guitar, and man the keyboards all while looking good and strutting around the stage. Her work is informed by an unstoppable energy and the beats reflect that. I guess that’s the appeal: the unspoken message that seems to say success is possible if one works hard enough.

Social Distortion would know; they’re veterans. They were punk before it became fashionable, said a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, and that’s obvious in the way they dress and the disaffected way they play. It was odd to see this act go up only a couple of hours before Green Day, today’s watered-down punk act, but they drew a respectable crowd, especially considering the average age of a Lolla-goer is probably 20 and thereby half as young as the group itself, which formed in the late ‘70s. The band delivered though, treating attendees to some covers—including Johnny Cash’s iconic “Ring of Fire”—and a taste of songs new and old.

Watered-down or not, Green Day drew what appeared to be, unexpectedly, a larger crowd than the one that turned out for Lady Gaga the day before. As I said yesterday, she drew a huge crowd that anticipated she would be the show to see for the season, but problems with her audio and video for viewers from a distance sent some of the crowd home early or to the north side to see the Strokes. These people were willing to fight traffic and each other for a spot close to Billie Joe Armstrong, who gave out one of his guitars to a fan invited onstage to sing guest vocals. Stretching their set past the 10 p.m. deadline and filling it with heavy pyrotechnics, Green Day earned their spot as headliners twenty years after their first Chicago show.

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