Sept. 14--Riot Fest weekend was once again about success and failure, great music and an event that could use some weather luck. The Douglas Park venue was new but the story was the same as last year, taking in tunes while ankle-deep in mud.
In Chicago's music festival landscape, Pitchfork is for the trendies, Lollapalooza for the kids and Riot Fest for the parents. It's a fest that reveres its elders in many ways, most notably onstage. The young'uns can come, but they'd better have a sense of rock 'n' roll history. Because although this event pays some service to modern times -- with performers such as Chicago's Psalm One, who was spectacular on Friday -- Riot Fest is about the past. It's CIV, Billy Idol, the Damned and an Ice Cube reunion, Motorhead and Iggy Pop, a music history lesson leavened with bridge acts such as No Doubt and System of a Down. This made it fitting that the set of the weekend came at the wizened claws of the oldest performer on the bill, Merle Haggard.
Haggard got claimed by the fast-and-loud crowd when he released a couple of albums on Anti, a division of famed punk label Epitaph. But only the most die-hard Haggard fans expected the gauntlet thrown down by the 78-year-old legend. From a fiddle shootout and pedal steel that dripped honey -- every now and again topped off by a brief solo by the man himself -- this was magic. Haggard's pure country sound is based in rhythm, a brawny thump that hits like a heartbeat, presided over by a time-worn, declamatory voice. You can't even say Haggard isn't the singer he once was, because croonin' was never his thing. But this set was the pinnacle of music-making at a fest that had many a high point. That it took an old country dude to make it happen, hot on the heels of an epic failure right next door, would be ironic if it wasn't such a bummer.
Just before Haggard, Bootsy's Rubber Band was a disjointed wreck of a set that shows what happens when an undeserving bit player gets the spotlight. This was sloppy, alleged funk from a performer who started his set late then phoned in the rest, at times holding the music hostage to demands for cheers and adulation. Maybe if Collins wasn't so awful, his wishes would have been granted. His shameless trading on the past glories of George Clinton's Mothership of the 1970s was reduced to song snippets, noodling, a blue-spangled suit, star-shaped bass and buffoonery.
But even Bootsy was better than trying to navigate the Riot Fest bog, as wet weather reared its head again. The new venue and new stage layout led to an improved experience, despite gates opening almost 90 minutes late on Friday as a storm rolled through. Gone were the congested hikes between stages at Humboldt Park, replaced by the open spaces at Douglas. But Riot Fest again lived up to its name if you are a landscaper, as rains on Friday and Saturday reduced the park to a muddy quagmire. This was a shame because the fest's new layout, with seven stages all in easy walking distance, was much better. Sound bleed was only a significant problem at the triangle formed by the Rock, Riot and Roots stages, and detracted from a wonderful Saturday showing by The Dear Hunter.
Another issue was less lighting in the giant, open field at Douglas, so that, after sundown, once away from the stages, concertgoers had to use mobile phone screens as flashlights to help navigate the fields of mud. This problem was exacerbated by programming featuring headliners that had everyone trying to be in the same spot at the same time. The most crowded sets were for Friday headliner No Doubt and Saturday main draw System of a Down. The corral effect of the fencing necessitated by neighboring stages meant a crowd constrained on two sides and a deeper, more difficult-to-traverse mass of bodies.
Huge crowds weren't a problem for headliner Motorhead, scene of the weekend's saddest moment in the diminished state of the once-mighty frontman Lemmy. His band has been stomping the terra for what seems like eons, laying waste to stages, bottles and eardrums. But on Friday the trio was fronted by a man who used to be the nasty, beating heart of rock 'n' roll -- now an old man slurring his words and forgetting what album a song came from. The volume was there but the snap and fire were absent, replaced by rote readings of familiar tunes. There was cheering aplenty, but the downcast faces of people wearing time-worn Motorhead tour shirts, tromping through the mud as they left early, spoke at a volume louder than the band's.
Sunday's rap-flavored lineup featured the likes of Cypress Hill, Snoop Dogg, Doomtree and De La Soul, whose afternoon set was a magical lesson in what rap is supposed to be. No violence, nonsense or gunshot samples.
Pos and Maseo traded raps like the lyrical titans they are, flowing over, through and around the beats of their longtime DJ, Dave.
Snoop Dogg was late, but once he showed up, he brought the party with him. Respect for the beats and rhymes was paramount, even if respect for the audience wasn't.
Earlier in the day, wonderful (also unabashedly profane) pure punk excellence was on tap when The Dwarves performed the group's iconic 1990 album, "Blood, Guts and ..." Loud and fast reigned as Riot Fest again reveled in the classics.
Psalm One showed that a rapper belongs at a punk rock festival by delivering a Friday set full of flair and invention, backed by a three-piece band that rocked harder than anything else going on at the time. She deserved a larger crowd, but that's the Riot Fest quandary: how to be a contemporary music festival that pays full tribute to the past. Sustained excellence from punk veterans such as Pennywise and Rancid helped a lot, but it was the big, dumb, ageless rock of Saturday headliner Iggy Pop that was all anyone needed to explain Riot Fest.
Pop did exactly what he's been doing for decades as he stalked the stage not like a man defying time but rather like one unaware of its existence. Song after song pulsated with menace, banged out by a sledgehammer of a band as tight as Pop's age-defying physique. The declamatory bellow is as it always was, the evil call of a snake charmer. The shtick works because it's brilliant, now as then. "This means everything to me," Pop insisted, something difficult to argue with as he stalked the stage like a lion. This act never gets old because it's always been timeless, more about unfettered hedonism than any sort of message. And that's Riot Fest. Old punkers don't die, nor do they fade away. They are instead honored by the folks who, when they were young, packed dark, fetid rooms to hear what was, then, the sound of the future.
Those folks are also all grown up, with jobs and kids and real lives, but as with Iggy Pop, that sound is still everything to them. Riot Fest meets that need, and through all the mud, muck and funky smell of decaying turf, beer and bad carnival food, the music becomes the thing that matters.
kmwilliams@tribpub.com
