I spent this past weekend in Chicago's Union Park for the 2006 Intonation Music Festival. The festival, curated by Vice Records, was kind of the inaugural festival of the summer season...and in many ways it felt like it. While there were some amazing performances and memorable moments, there were also what seemed to be a lot of filler acts that the majority of the crowds didn't care about. The positive side to this is that it created a much more "festival like" atmosphere, as many people were content to lounge around in the park and just hang out with the music in the background. I was able to get a ton of video footage, some of which you can check out by clicking on the image at the beginning of this post. The LG team is in the process of creating a player that can house almost all the raw footage, so you can check out some songs in their entirety as well as see just how bad of a camera man I am! We hope to get that up by Friday, but first a little more on the Festival.
Festivities began on Saturday at 1 PM with the Favourite Sons, who actually had one of the better performances of the day. While the weather was a perfect 78 degrees with not a cloud in the sky, it seemed that the turn out was not as strong as it should have been. This could have been due to the lineup as many people felt, including myself, that Sunday had a far superior schedule. In any case some of the most memorable moments of the day included a beautifully intimate set from Jose Gonzalez, a mid-afternoon dance party from Chromeo (despite some major sound problems) and an all out massacre by Lady Sovereign right before the Streets closed out the night. I felt bad for Mike Skinner and company as the S.O.V. kinda blew them out of the water. I think the crowd shot their load too many times during her performance and was fried by time the Streets took the stage.
One of the biggest mistakes the festival organizers made was getting two local radio personalities (I think that's what they were) that were there to promote some movie about the "Windy City" to
introduce all of the bands on Saturday. Not only were they not funny, but their "scream as loud as you can and wear a diaper on stage" brand of humor was actually starting to piss the indie kids off...and for once I had to agree. I found it really strange that Vice, who is cooler than cool, would let such idiots get involved with the festival. Thankfully the humor and little introductions were much more entertaining on Sunday, so maybe they realized that not all people in Chicago think guys with a south side accent screaming shiz are funny...only some of them - are funny, I mean. What? (Just wanted to get parentheses in this sentence as well. Thanks.)
Sunday morning started out wet but cleared up by time the first act hit the stage. People seemed to be hurting pretty bad for the first couple of acts, but the Festival was sponsored by Sparks so it seemed like by 4 PM everyone had a bit of a twitch and orange lips (because the Sparks is like Red Bull with booze in it and is bright orange, see?). There were a ton of great performances on Sunday, including tight sets from Annie (she is purty), the Constantines and Robert Pollard (he is drunk). Early on in the day Rhymefest showed everyone how entertaining live hip-hop can be when it's done right. He had some great moments including a freestyle segment, an accapella jam and a track where he showed all the "white indie kids" in the audience how to do the "two-step." Definitely one of the most entertaining sets of the weekend.
My favorite act at the festival was Jon Brion, who playing on the second stage at 6:15 actually got called out for an encore. He was just really engaging and enough of an entertainer to know how to keep a crowd captivated. He started out his set by playing a couple of acoustic songs including a Billie Holiday cover. Later in the set he couldn't resist showing off a bit (he is an incredibly well respected musician in the purest sense of the word) by starting on drums, looping what he played and then moving on to keyboard & bass and doing the same thing. Finally he would get to guitar with all these music loops playing that he had created and start singing over them. It was pretty impressive and would have been a bit much by anyone else, but Brion is just goofy enough that he pulled it off. You would think that the set couldn't get anymore interesting but then he brought out Benmont Tech on keys and the drummer from some band called, err, Wilco and proceeded to do "Waterloo Sunset" by the Kinks and various other good times Jams. Very impressive.
The festival ended with Bloc Party who had easily the biggest turn out for the entire weekend. In one of those festival moments, it started to rain as they took the stage so the crowd was littered with umbrellas popping up out of this mass of people. Thankfully the rain only lasted a couple of minutes and Bloc Party went on to play for quite a while by festival standards. They did not disappoint and the crowd responded with Sparks fueled sing-a-longs of almost every song. All in all it was a good weekend and there were some memorable moments, but I still can't help feeling that this was just a warm up for the Pitchfork Music Festival and the mammoth Lollapalooza. Bring it on!