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Pitchfork Festival: A Rather Elaborate Recap

July 24, 2009 by liz gorman

all photos: Liz Gorman
all words: Dave Clifford

Pitchfork is an excellent time to see Chicago. It’s a little cooler than DC at this time of year, they have a beach, and hotels and flights are cheap in the summer time. It’s like tacking on an extra $75 fee for a weekend of super cheap, really good food, excellent beer, awesome music, and discount record shopping. Booked a flight, booked a hotel, and convinced Svetlana to let me write about it, with the promise that Liz Gorman would deliver excellent photo coverage.

We and I rolled up while Tortoise was playing on night one, and took advantage of the languid set to scope out the non-music related amenities. The first day had scant offerings – a few beer tents, one food vendor. The park grew the next day, taking over an adjoining street and providing a much greater variety of foodstuffs, beer tents (Goose Island only, but luckily, Goose Island is fantastic), and the ever-critical outhouses. Day One was “Write the Night” with set-lists authored by popular vote of the attendees. It’s interesting to have a few thousand fans of say, Fucked Up, who played the next morning, making decisions on what songs Jesus Lizard should pull from their back catalog.

Tortoise played and they met expectations. Yo La Tengo came on next and rocked through, essentially, a greatest hits set. Jesus Lizard provided another opportunity to wander and restock on beer before Built to Spill. I’d last seen Built to Spill rip through Perfect from Now On at the 9:30 Club where they’d sealed their status as My Favorite Live Act 2008 by killing it with an encore of “Going Against Your Mind.” Needless to say, my expectations were very, very high.

I was mildly disappointed. It was still a great set, but largely made up of more recent material, perhaps due to the vagaries of the “Write the Night” process. Life goes on. They came through with a set replete with extended jams on the material they provided (as expected) and as it got darker, the audience acquired the oh-so-subtle accompanying jam band aroma that would persist over the weekend. It sounded like they may have had difficulties with micing the three guitars, or someone had a loose cable, because there were parts of the songs that sounded like they were coming from underwater.

Day one complete, we were spent on hits from the 90s, and headed to the hotel (Hard Rock Hotel Chicago – We both expected it to be much cheesier than it was. The lobby bar had some well-crafted cocktails with local liquors. The Bee’s Knees, a gin-based drink, used honey chrysanthemum liquor that’s made in a dude’s garage. One complaint – The lights in the rooms are super dim.)

Day Two and the park, as previously mentioned, grows in size. Pitchfork becomes, at this point, more than a collection of bands and turns into an Indie Rock Nerdfest. The record fair has a bunch of indie labels selling their wares at cost (Touch and Go, Polyvinyl, Absolutely Kosher among a few) and vinyl dealers looking to slim down their collections (60s and 70s records capping out at the $7 price point). Flatstock draws poster artists from across the country to show their stuff, with styles ranging from photographic, to graffiti, to surreal. The show poster as art form isn’t represented to the same caliber in DC, or at least with the same ubiquity. There’s a craft fair, and this one vendor is selling glasses made out of repurposed beer and wine bottles. I grab a card to check them out later wondering about the wisdom of selling breakables to kids who eagerly hop into mosh pits. We get some shopping out of the way and go and check out the music.

Plants and Animals are the first band we see and I go to check out a review while Liz heads up to snap some photos in the press pit. I’m surprised that Pitchfork describes their music as genre-defying until their third song. The first couple had been straightforward, but the third pops from intro to chorus to bridge and then abruptly ends before it gets a chance to fully form, like an amuse-bouche. The fourth echos Graceland-era Paul Simon, and the fifth song goes from an early Police-like main beat into an Isis-esque breakdown before riffing off into a third, totally different territory. Pitchfork’s critic has validated himself and I eagerly listen to the rest of the set, glad to discover “new” music, even if I’m a bit behind the curve. That’s the other great thing about this festival – for the two years after the last one I went to I was constantly hearkening back to where I’d first heard a band, only to remember that it was at Pitchfork. It’s very well curated, and gives a wide, but still deep sampling of several years worth of music.

We go to see Fucked Up next. They are sound-checking and the crowd is psyched. One word into the first song and it erupts, with kids taking to the shoulders of the people around them and dudes (and ladies) smashing into each other in manic joy. A beach ball makes its way up to Chris Colohan, the singer, and he bites through it and discards it behind him. A second one. A third, and now he’s bitten through it and is wearing it as a chef’s hat. Song two, his shirt comes halfway off and between songs he fakes a stage dive into the photo pit. Song three and the shirt is gone and he is up against the barricade separating him from the crowd as kids fly past him, kicking into security. I am glad this is the cult he’s chosen to lead. The energy stays at that level for the rest of the set.

In counterpoint to this, I go check out Antlers while Liz recovers and meets up with some friends of ours from DC. The mellowness is about as far away as you can get from Fucked Up’s mayhem, with more of the crowd seated than standing. Antlers are playing “sad bastard music” on the festival’s Balance stage (B stage) with crystal clear falsetto singing and steady, marching band worthy drums. There’s more folks talking to each other than sing-along songs and it’s clear that some of the crowd just came to grab a beer in a shorter line and escape from punk rock for the moment.

Mid-afternoon, Ponytail plays the B stage and recaptures the same energy of the Fucked Up crowd from earlier in the day. Unlike when they hit American University, the crowd here is dancing and it looks like there’s a few thousand people jamming along. Molly Siegel, their singer, is beatific as always, grinning from ear to ear when she’s not using her vocals to provide the fourth instrument. Like Fucked Up, earlier, the singer bounds to the barricade and security tries to get the crowd to push back to no avail. A hundred people are rhythmically pogoing in the core of the crowd and Siegel has become the approximation of a Sufi Dervish, whirling around, lost in the music, eyes rolling up in the back of her head. I’m not sure if they’ve played to a crowd this big before, probably at Whartscape, and they’re all loving it.

Like Antlers did earlier, Yeasayer provides a nice break to kick back with a beer. The festival’s been mostly temperate this year, and the highs today don’t hit more than 70. A few afternoon showers keep the audience cooled off and force people to seek out the tree line, but they also prevent the funk from acquiring on people getting sweaty in giant crowds.

MF Doom is up next and apparently it is very, very difficult to sound check for a hip-hop act. He starts about fifteen minutes late, but the music is coming through super crisp. His crew is smallish, with a DJ and a singular behemoth of a hype man. But the lead rhymes are really good, there are no pauses for banter in between songs, and they just keep the beats coming. A friend of mine turns to me and says “Apparently there’s a rumor that he doesn’t play his shows. He just sends a dude in a mask to rap over a backing track.”

This demands closer attention. Unlike the hype man and the DJ, there’s been no variations from the record by MF Doom. He hasn’t lost his breath or dropped a single beat or said anything. At one point, he lowers his mic from his mouth and the rhymes continue unabated. This is bizarre. It’s not uncommon for a rapper to use his album as a point of reference for his rhymes, but what Doom is doing is almost egregious. It’s unclear if he is the man in the mask. Here’s the thing about Doom though. He styles himself after Dr. Victor Von Doom, supervillain, enemy of the Fantastic Four, and all around mad genius. Dr. Doom for you non-nerds out there, frequently employs Doombots, replicas of himself, to suit his villainous aims (convenient from a writer’s standpoint – if one writer kills off Doom, the next can just say that it was a Doombot). Somehow, if this is a doppelganger, the comic nerd side of me is fine with that.

Beirut is everything that’s expected of them and people love them for it. There’s no missteps in their set. Everything flows from beginning to end. I had no idea Zach Condon was as young as he is. I had no idea he was the trumpeter as well as the singer. Dude is impressive. Band is impressive. Set is one of the best of the weekend.

Looking at the schedule prior to coming I was bummed out that I had to choose between Beirut and Matt and Kim, with Matt and Kim scheduled to start 5 minutes after Beirut. I’ve never seen Beirut. I love Beirut. I’ve seen Matt and Kim twice but there’s still a part of me that’s griping about having to make the (Sophie’s) choice

But as Beirut wraps up, I can hear that Matt and Kim still playing and I head over to the B stage as they start their second song (!!!). I make my way up to the center of the thick crowd as they launch into “Cutdown” and all is good and right with the world. Kim doesn’t stop smiling through the entire set and they’re playing everything at a slightly faster tempo than their album in order to make up for lost time and get the Black Lips on stage faster. The crowd adores them, and Matt stands atop his stool like a choral director to guide sing-alongs. Beer commercials aside, I would definitely check Matt and Kim out when they hit town next (9/16 at the Black Cat, according to the flyer a dude hands me on my way to rejoin the crew) because they’re rapidly graduating.

The National are the last band we see, spread out on a picnic blanket, and it’s amazing how many people bring their kids out for this. Looking across the back of the crowd there are tykes on shoulders everywhere. The clouds from earlier have cleared up, and the purple stage lights match the purple clouds. It’s a pretty good day.

A note on food in Chicago before Day Three. Everything in Chicago seems big and served with a pork product. The festival fare ranges from slices of deep-dish pizza for $5 to curry fries, to a lamb-beef-pork hybrid sausage served with an eggplant/red pepper sauce, to a huge range of vegan meat simulacrums. The epicurean highlight, however, were the pancakes at South Water Kitchen in the Hotel Monaco. These are pancakes like I had never had; buttermilk and more like a biscuit than a sorry syrup sponge. They almost didn’t need anything on top, but I was glad to ladle the provided syrup over them. They were huge, filling, and cheap. If you are in Chicago, near downtown, go in and get these. I was massively disappointed on Monday to find out, at 11, that breakfast was only served until 10:30. (The brunch bartender also was super generous for the mimosas to the ratio of probably 9:1 champagne: OJ).

We catch Frightened Rabbit’s last few songs to start Day Three and they sounded fantastic. The Midnight Organ Fight has been on repeat for a while for me but their live show is a cut-above the album.

The weather warms up and we go to check out Killer Whales on the B stage. They’re a local Chicago band and have set up a pair of drum kits, which, as huge Black Eyes fan, is always a good sign. Not to disappoint, these young, shirtless punks launch into familiar sounding dueling drums on the first song. They seem to borrow rhythmic elements from the early 00’s Dischord group but go deeper into island and Afro-beat than their more free Jazz influenced predecessors, almost like a Vampire Weekend on meth. There’s surf influenced guitars, falsetto harmonizing, and it’s overall a fantastic set. (You can check them out here: http://www.myspace.com/killerwhalesmusic)

Pharoah Monche comes out with two back-up singers in addition to his DJ. They sing. He raps. He freestyles in parts. He talks to the crowd in parts. Pharoah Monche does not need a backing track. At one point in the set he lets his DJ do a turntable solo while he catches his breath and gets some water. He is clearly not MF Doom (at one point, after the solo, he makes a point that his DJ is not just pressing buttons). The crowd, when urged to, raise their thousands of skinny white fists in the air and pump them in rhythm. He finishes and comes out again for an encore of “Simon Says.” It’s a great set. It’s also a reminder of how segregated indie rock can be/how segregated Chicago is. It’s unclear as to which plays a bigger part here.

The Thermals play next, starting early, and the beach balls come out once more. They start off with material from Now We Can See before moving into The Body the Blood the Machine with “Return to the Fold.” Out of all the bands so far this weekend they seem to be having the third most fun (Fucked Up #1 Fun, Ponytail #2 Fun).

After this, the Walkmen, and it’s interesting that this band formed after Jonathan Fireeater. They open up with slower, more alt-country influenced fare and keep playing blues influenced rock for the first half dozen songs or so. A couple of ladies in front of me are snapping shots of the singer on their point and shoot cameras. This is an attractive bunch of dudes. They play “The Rat” and a few more off of Slings and Arrows. Liz and I meet up and talk about sticking through a few more bands to see the Flaming Lips or heading up to Wicker Park to check out this bar that a friend of mine had recommended, The Violet Hour. After three days of music, we decide on the bar.

It turns out to be a very, very good decision. The Violet Hour is up in Wicker Park which is further from the festival than it looked on my iPhone, and walking there, it seems weird how much of Chicago rolls up its carpet on Sunday. We get to the bar after a midway stop for emergency margaritas.

The front of the Violet Hour is a big wall of graffiti. The door is hidden in the middle. There is a person outside smoking a la The Gibson, and when we ask her if she’s the door person she asks if it’s that obvious (it is). It’s almost pitch black when we go through the velvet curtains to the interior and we need her as a guide.

Behind the bar is a different sort of guide, bar manager Michael Rubel. Most of his staff is either at Pitchfork or at a BBQ today, so he’s filling in. The bar is expansive, stretching between two rooms and it’s just him and a dude he’s training, serving a crowd of around sixty people. Liz orders a pisco sour after overhearing someone else’s request for one and when he says “What kind of pisco?” I am immediately heartened. He gives us a lesson in Peruvian piscos (there are four classifications and a number of varietals within those classifications, like wine) pouring samples of a number of them as he goes. I get mescal, which if you can get the good stuff (and he has the good stuff) is amazing. The cocktails come in tiny glasses with little pitchers of extra cocktail on the side. He and Liz swap industry stories and he points out they have six kinds of ice. I immediately start thinking of ways to lure him to come to DC for something, anything. We drink for several more hours, with friends joining us partway through. Since it’s a slow Sunday they reserved some space at the bar for us once we told them we’d have extras joining, and a few regulars move down. They’ve got decent grub for a bar that cares so much about cocktails. He breaks out the 18 year Sazerac Rye by way of apology when things get too fast for him to keep up with our orders.

The festival over, we leave on Monday in a pretty wrecked state from the night before. The cab lurches across lanes on the highway with the libertine attitude of Chicago drivers, distressing my intestines. As always, United Airlines proves to be a headache; as always, O’Hare proves to be a headache. Navigating them hungover is never fun. But Chicago was.

Summer Festival Tips

1. Pack a bag to bring with you to the fest. Include an umbrella, blanket, sunscreen.
2. Try and see every band you want to see, even if only for a few songs, unless you’re absolutely devoted to seeing every song by a given band – Diversity, for me, is the highlight of these things
3. In the same spirit, it can be worth it to ditch a band you wanted to see to check out a band you’ve never heard of (see Killer Whales).
4. Go to a festival where beer is cheap
5. It can be worthwhile to walk five minutes further to the nearest beer/outhouse line to avoid a fifteen or twenty minute wait
6. For a multiple day fest, try and crash in a hotel; you’ll need the sleep

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