A Festival Of Music News
By Scott Smith in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 30, 2006 3:42PM
We’re not sure if you noticed, but Greg Kot was a busy guy at the end of last week.
On Friday, Kot reported that the Smashing Pumpkins will not be reuniting at Coachella this April. Over the last couple weeks, published reports created a veritable Hokey Pokey of information: you had your Pumpkins in, you had your Pumpkins out. Whether Corgan backed out or was never in it to begin with remains a cause for speculation and arguments in bars. Coachella’s full lineup will be announced later today.
Perhaps Corgan is saving himself for one of Chicago’s summer fests. After first breaking the story of Pitchfork Media’s return to the summer festival scene, Kot also dropped this bomb on us: the Intonation Music Festival will also be returning.
Wait…what?
When Pitchfork announced they’d be changing the name of this year’s fest from Intonation to the Pitchfork Music Festival, we thought it sounded a bit strange and wondered if there was more to the story. Now the other Chuck Taylor has dropped.
Apparently, a dustup between some of the organizers of last year’s Intonation Fest led to everybody taking their horn-rimmed eyeglasses and ironic t-shirts and going home. While Pitchfork plans on working with talent booker Mike Reed to create their own fest, others from the Intonation group plan on creating a competing show. Awesome. It's like that scene in Superman III where the good Clark Kent fought evil Superman. Both events are planned for Union Park, the same park used as an indie rock Mecca last year.
Chicagoist is always in favor of more music. But the success of last year’s Intonation fest was due in large part to Pitchfork’s involvement. Without them, this new event risks looking like Journey without Steve Perry. And since Pitchfork has been known to be less than kind to its competitors, we wonder how many bands are going to take a chance on incurring the Wrath of Schreiber.
UPDATE: The Sun-Times's Jim DeRogatis has some additional quotes here and drops info on other planned festivals this summer.