Saturday 14/07/07 Day Two @ Pitchfork Festival, Union Park, Chicago

Happy Bastille Day, ladies and gentlemen.  First out of the gates, The Twilight Sad.  This band is the living embodiment of that Elliott Smith song, ‘Bottle Up & Explode.’  Take heart, you won’t be hearing The Twilight Sad on Grey’s Anatomy anytime soon.  In one song, they single-handedly obviate the very existence of Snow Patrol.  When the catharsis hits, the pupils of singer James Graham roll back behind his eyelids so all that’s visible is the whites.  And when this happens, anything’s possible.  Telekinesis.  Pyromania.  Levitation.  Salvation.  Without even knowing it, The Twilight Sad have raised the bar to a Sergei Bubka altitude.  All who follow today shall fall short, that is, until the arrival of the seven o’clock hour.  At the Balance stage.  Until then, revel in the memory of The Twilight Sad.

Over at the Aluminum stage, Califone nurse our hangovers with their gentle brass excursions.  Ping-pong back to the Connector stage where Austin pop fiends Voxtrot are providing agreeable accompaniment to a Saturday in the park.  Bassist may very well be on loan from Deerfield’s The Redwalls – the McCartney guitar does not go unnoticed.  And, imagine that, Voxtrot use Vox amps.

When three o’clock hits, two of the more soporific acts of the day take the stage.  On the Aluminum Stage, Grizzly Bear unleash the reeds and the trilling, the woodwind infusion, the flute and clairnet.  Over at the Biz 3 tent, the gentle slide guitar of Beach House sets a tone of eastern seaboard summers, skipping stones on the waves, Manchester-by-the-Sea…. 

Open your eyes, fool.  That ain’t the Biz 3 tent.  That’s the Balance stage.  Damn the march of progress.  The Wild West atmosphere of last year has vanished.  Brazilians, booze, and booty-shaking – eradicated.  In its place, a genuine stage with authentic security.  And, worst of all, guard rails.  Don’t lose hope just yet.  There is melee to come.

Bypassing Battles for Fujiya & Miyagi.  If you don’t know their name, they repeat it, ad infinitum, in song.  That doesn’t stop the hack to my left in the photo pit from scrawling the phonetic spelling of the band name in her notepad:  Fooojeeeyah…Meeyahgeee.  And right beside that, she’s written, “track one” and next to “track one” she has drawn a line, a blank line, upon which she will write the title of track one when, at last, she deduces just exactly what track one is. 

This is comprehensive journalism.  

She could’ve just written the following: Fujiya & Miyagi = Hot Chip V2.0

Iron & Wine are playing the Aluminum stage but let’s just stick around here for Professor Murder.  He’s got to be good.  He’s got the same synthesizer as we do (Roland SH-32).  Wait, there it is again.  In duplicate.  And, hold the phone, is that the selfsame sampler (Roland SP-303)?  Take a seat and stay awhile. Turns out the good professor’s got some adjunct faculty on board – I count three others in addition to the guy bashing the cymbal at the front of the stage.  Would stay longer but metalheads Mastodon are getting much buzz. 

Six o’clock now and the park is packed.  Cut a huge long arc of a swathe around the teeming horde to get to the side of the Connector stage.  Yeah, that’s Mastodon alright.  They’ve got a big banner at the back of the stage.  Photographers are trying to cram two ear plugs inside each canal.  Gigwise opts for hearing loss.  On the subject of deafness, a scraggily young man in a Def Leppard T-shirt gets his pint of Jack Daniels confiscated by security.  “Drink it!” he tells the guard.  The guard shakes his head, takes a seat, wipes the sweat off his brow.  The pint stays hidden in the dust of the ground.

Mastodon.  Yeah.  They’re loud.

Is Clipse on yet?

Okay, this is the last of the mainstage sardine feeling for me.  Pre-Clipse, a guy comes into the photo pit with a cardboard box full of keychain flashlights.  They are white.  They read ONOCHORD CHICAGO, y.o. 2007.  He passes the box to the kids at the front.  The kids at the front pass the box to the kids in the back.  The kids in the back pelt the photo pit with Yoko’s keychain flashlight, dozens of these trinkets, showering down like cylindrical white hailstones.  The forecast called for thundershowers.  It didn’t call for Yokoshowers.

Like the GZA last night, Clipse inject a much-needed boost to the energy level.  As we depart the photo pit for the Balance Stage, they ease right into that classic from Baby – altogether now, “brrrrrrrr (bird call, not declaration of coldness)…What Happened to That Boy?” AKA The Unofficial Theme Song of Gigwise Chicago.  Were it not for the madness about to happen, we’d have stuck around for 'Grindin’.”