Lollapalooza 2010: Day One

But it wasn’t all blues, as the Staples also brought joyous energy to I’ll Take You There and Freedom Highway. The band of drums, guitar and bass played with grit and fire in a partnership with the deep singing, as opposed to just backing it up. Mavis even gave the crowd a quick lesson about Highway during her set.

“That song was written for the march from Selma to Montgomery.”

This is the set to beat the rest of the weekend. And with that bar set to such a height, Drive-By Truckers were a lukewarm follow. Mood-wise the Southern fried rock made sense after Staples, but it seemed every time the band got a push behind their blend of distorted guitar and rolling organs, they drifted back into ballad land. Like with many festival sets, it might’ve been a better felt performance in a different setting.

Cymbals Eat Guitars played at the BMI stage, a nice retreat nestled in the woods as part of the fest’s newly added grounds. The droning guitars with synth touches and yelping vocals kept our attention for a few songs, but clearly it was time to eat a lobster corn dog and hear Devo. With a vitality that seemed to be beamed straight from the ’80s, the band plowed through big hits like Whip It and other lesser-known tunes to the masses like Don’t Shoot (I’m a man). The group got the midday crowd moving to several songs folks probably had never heard before.

Chicago chef Graham Elliot served as food planner for Lolla’s gourmet take on fest food, and brought his own battered lobster on a stick with aioli and truffle oil popcorn to the festival. They both were delicious, and made picnicking during Devo that much more bizarre.

Next came the Fuck Buttons with a fun set of pulsating drones that built and built to great peaking waves of sound. At times, the beats seemed absent from this electro duo’s effort, but when the peaks came it became clear that any space left in their sound was all a part of the build. The duo continued with fuzzed peaks and valleys, peppered with real drums during a few songs during the rest of their great set.

The Black Keys followed on the fest’s northern massive stage, which was an interesting surrounding for a duo. But guitarist/singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have honed an energetic, soulful and downright nasty live show with their meat grinder rock and blues. Despite some volume issues toward their start, Auerbach put his entire body into the performance and Carney’s bashing still came through. Adding a keyboardist and bassist for the band’s denser tunes off of Brothers, such as the ode to moving on quickly called Next Girl, the band seemed to hit a stronger stride for the rest of their set.

After a brief interlude of Chromeo’s dance pop, it was time to go Gaga. But it didn’t seem like too many people actually went gaga for Gaga. With expectations running excruciatingly high for Lady Gaga’s stage spectacle, there was little chance the singer would meet such hype. Whether from our own unfair expectations, or the inevitable after-birth of being as ubiquitous as she is for over the top everything, her show just didn’t dazzle.

The big stage set up seemed out of place in front of roughly 70,000 people in a field, mainly because it has a lot of small detail, like vehicles and neon signs, that are completely lost among such a spread out crowd. But also her performance had a jerky pace: five minutes of flailing dancers in costumes and her screaming vocals were cut by monologues. She encouraged fans to “whip out” their genitalia, and spat a rather bitter dig on anyone who didn’t fall in love with her 2007 Lolla set on one of the smaller stages.

It simply made no sense for a big star who has very apparent talent past the costumes and antics to waste performing time in this manner. People gathered at the end of a day in the sun should be pumped up, not lectured to. Apparently after a few solo songs on the piano, and a dance number with her old partner Lady Starlight, the set kicked back into gear, but I didn’t stay.

Halfway through her set, before she got to her big hits like Poker Face and Bad Romance I left for The Strokes. I’m not much of a Strokes fan, but I was far more entertained by their simple rock than by Gaga’s pontifications. The New York quintet has been low key for the last three years, but it didn’t show during their set. While singer Julian Casablancas took a few rock star moments to say nonsensical things about Lolla being the place “where dreams came true for Pearl Jam and Nirvana,” the rest of the band was in fine form. Guitarist Nick Valensi’s solos added sharp color to the punctuated rapid chords played by Albert Hammond Jr. Casablancas himself sounded clear even when yelling, and the band seemed comfortable taking their now old tunes out in front of the crowd.

But still Mavis won the day.

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