Our Final Thoughts On Lolla, We Swear

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 27, 2005 5:48PM

Now that we’ve had a few days to process last weekend’s largely successful Lollapalooza festival we have a few observations to make as we wrap up coverage.

First off, we are glad that it looks like the city is open to doing this whole shebang again next year. Hopefully if everyone can agree to terms far ahead of time with more leeway than, say, three weeks, Capital Sports and Entertainment will be more likely to construct a truly varied line-up. However we are a bit concerned that it appears as if The Dave Matthews Band has already been approached to appear at next year’s installment. Hasn’t Chicago suffered enough at their hands?

Also, Chicagoist is of the opinion that the issue of the sound bleeding over boundaries from stage to stage was not nearly as bad as much of the local (and national) press would have you believe. Personally we loved the set-up of the stages since it made navigation a breeze. If that means you can hear one band when another is silent, we’re okay with that. However when both bands were playing simultaneously we encountered no problems provided we were actually standing somewhat near the band we preferred to hear. And please, if there had been no bleed we would have been deprived of The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s verbal beatdown of Dashboard Confessional.

We do still maintain that there could have been better coverage as far as water availability and cooling stations (where were the misting tents of Lollapaloozas past?) but we are willing to forgive these as first time mistakes excused by the prerequisite growing pains a festival of this size is expected to encounter.

Now we make an open plea to the City of Chicago as they begin negotiations for next year: Please don’t fuck this up.