PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVAL
UNION PARK, CHICAGO, IL
WORDS: AW HENDERSON
PHOTOS: MATT THOMAS
& JEREMY NELSON
& LIZ BUSTAMANTE
SATURDAY, JULY 14, 2007

Here's a fun and fake Q&A to get us into the thick of things:

Q: The Pitchfork Music Festival. That's in Chicago, right?
A: A'yup

Q: And a bunch of bands played?
A: Double yep.

Q: Anyone I've heard of?
A: Depends. Sonic Youth? Slint? The New Pornographers, Yoko Ono, Mastodon? How about De La Soul, of Montreal, GZA or two-fourths of Pavement? And, if you've been keeping up with the blogs at all for the last year, names like Menomena, Deerhunter, Dan Deacon, Girl Talk, Grizzly Bear and Clipse should be ringing some bells as well.

Q: Whoa, that's crazy! How many arms and legs did that cost?
A: The only arm harmed in the purchasing of my $35 two-day ticket was my own, when I got so excited I fell out of my chair.

Q: Man, that's cheap! I bet it was hot though...
A: Nope. Compared to 2005's Pitchfork curated Intonation Fest (colloquially known as the day the sun melted the earth), the weather was downright balmy, and water was pretty cheap, too (no more 45-minute waits in line for a go at the water fountain, although the port-a-johns were as popular as ever).

Q: Then why the hell wasn't I there?
A: Good question...

This year's Pitchfork Music Festival was a behemoth to behold. Kicking off with three straight renditions of modern classics on Friday (Slint's Spiderland, GZA's Liquid Swords and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation), the weekend was pretty damn packed with great acts back to back. As is inevitably the case with festivals this tightly scheduled, I was not able to get close enough to hear some of the bands I'd set my heart on. For one thing, I was about halfway through the 16 hour drive to Chicago when Slint took the stage, and so missed the entire first day. Not getting to see Thurston and co. rip through "Eliminator Jr." on stage was a bummer, although not an entirely un-salvaged one. But we'll get to that later.

As far as Saturday is concerned, although The Twilight Sad took the stage at 1:00 p.m. my day didn't start until 4:00 and the arrival of Battles to the Connector Stage. I managed a comfortable spot in the crowd about halfway up the front, directly aligned with drummer John Stanier's eye-catchingly tall cymbal stand, which stood in mock reverence of the Sears Tower behind us. The snakelike Tyondai Braxton, who I will call the lead singer for lack of a better word, led the audience through Battles' complex labyrinths of rhythm and guitar like any good Pied Piper should, swapping in a laptop and vox processor for the out-of-vogue pan flute. Braxton, who reminds me of all the people I've ever wanted to be friends throughout my life, did a good job of adapting his undoubtedly club-perfected stage presence to the open outdoor setting. "Atlas," one of my favorite tracks from Battles' latest, Mirrored, was the highlight of the set, but there was not a weak moment in the hour that they played. An extended intro to "Race In," which began as a tantalizingly drawn-out tap-dance across the drums before we realized it was really just cover for Braxton's mis-plugged laptop cable, carried the band forward even more strongly than on record, rather than break their stride like such a mishap could have. I don't hesitate in claiming that it was my favorite performance of the weekend, but that is not to say that what followed was not spectacular. Battles are just surpassingly good live.

Iron & Wine preceded Mastodon, and the juxtaposition of genre was nothing compared to the Battle of the Beards I witnessed. Sam Beam boasted his formidable facial hair like the soft-spoken pro he is, but he really had no hope against Mastodon, who were the next band within whose listening range I found myself. Armed to the chin with beard to spare, Troy Sanders and friends did exactly what they were hired to do: leap from the speakers and gore us all on their tusks as they stampeded up and down the streets of Chicago. Mastodon ended their set with "Blood and Thunder," Leviathan's quickest-killer, creating a not un-graceful transition into the unrelenting urban morbidity of Clipse's performance across the way.

Unfortunately I spent most of Clipse's set caught in a high-pressure limbo between stages. The crush around the tiny Balance Stage in anticipation of Dan Deacon was impressive, although I have suspicions that much of the peripheral flooding (that kept me from getting more than a hundred feet from the stage) was merely fans stationing themselves for Girl Talk, who was slotted immediately after Deacon. I disentangled myself from the mess, and later heard that I had not missed much: both Dan Deacon and Girl Talk purportedly suffered from severely low volumes that prevented any but the farthest forward in the crowd from fully enjoying the show. Having seen both acts in small, much less-pushy clubs, I elected to head back to shade and Chan Marshall.

Miss Cat Power and her Dirty Delta Blues band, comprised of members of Dirty Three, Blues Explosion and the Delta 72) sang down the sun and buoyed the crowd into dusk. It was an extended moment of serenity in an otherwise satisfyingly hectic day, a moment made even more precious by the foreknowledge that Yoko Ono was going to do something weird next. Marshall's voice was soft and southern, and a friend who drove with me from North Carolina remarked that hers was the first accent other than our own with which we felt we could commune since arriving in Chicago.

It was with this unexpected sense of being in a familiar place, without which it is not certain I would have survived what lay ahead, that I walked towards Yoko Ono's closing number at the Aluminum Stage. I do not meant to say that I did not enjoy what I heard. I did. Yoko Ono and her backing band, after a lengthy and mostly silly video about flashlights and global love, delivered the most impassioned performance of the evening. I confess to never having listened to anything Yoko has recorded before, so I don't know if I was supposed to expect unhinged caterwauling from the petite septuagenarian, but that is what she gave us, in spades, supported in turn by up-tempo hand-beaten drums and rock guitar, slowly magnificent keyboard and, eventually, Thurston Moore's "surprise" infusion of squawk rawk. Yoko and Thurston shared the stage with no one but each other for nearly 15 minutes of uncontrolled guitar maiming and vocals like a fireworks factory exploding next to a duck pond. The two presences, both casting nets of sound over the audience, somehow remained distinct from each other while still sounding interlocked. It was great. The piece, "Mulberry," supposedly recreates the effect of picking berries on a Japanese hill while the U.S.'s nuclear bomb detonated within hearing distance. The looks of many of the faces that were shuffling backwards past me out of the crowd told me that I might have been in the minority in actually wanting to hear what this sounded like, but nonetheless it was fascinating to watch a 74-year-old woman out-avant-garde a crowd of 14,000 kids who pretend they don't care about that sorta thing.

Next: Sunday. Until then, a simple light-up message;

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or something like that.