With the 25th anniversary Lollapalooza set to get underway tomorrow in Chicago's Grant Park, so begins four days of more sun, fun and music than most folks see in one lifetime, much less a single weekend. Thursday alone will see 45 artists hit the stage. Thankfully, not all at once, but, due to the many competing stages located strategically throughout Grant Park, it may only seem as if every band is playing at once.
To help you make sense of this cacophony of sensory stimulation, we're offering four suggestions:
1. Skip Day 1 entirely.
As much as we may enjoy some of the recorded output by many of the artists performing on Thursday, very few bring that same "awesome sauce" to their live performance. Unless, of course, your idea of a great live performance is seeing millennials push the PLAY button on their Ableton Live 9 Suite. Trust us, you'll want to save that energy for the festival's remaining three BIG days of music.
2. Leave before Lana Del Rey starts performing.
As much as we love the ethereal goddess of L.A., once folks who have been sitting in the sun all day listening to 44 different bands get a load of Del Rey's decidedly down-tempo live set, they'll start heading for the exits in droves. What you wanna do is beat those people out of Grant park or else there will be no getting home before midnight.
3. See ONLY 3 or 4 bands worth seeing (if you can find that many).
If you insist on attending Day One, then conserve your energies by focusing on ONLY those bands worth seeing and then getting the hell out of dodge. Those bands worth seeing: Kurt Vile & The Violators, Autolux, Wavves, and The 1975.
4. If you only see one act, may we humbly suggest Danny Brown.
. I know, it sounds crazy, but, truth be told, there really is only one act worth seeing on Day One and that act is Danny Brown, who festival organizers were able to bring back from the dead to entertain the fine folks at Lollapalooza on the event of the festival's 25th anniversary.
Brown, of course, fronted Molly Hatchet and sang on their biggest hit "Flirting With Disaster" before embarking on a solo career. Sadly, he passed away in 2005 from complications of diabetes, but that won't stop him from delivering a smoking set of southern boogie-rock to the Grant Park faithful come Thursday night.
Oh, hey, my bad,
Turns out this Danny Brown is a Detroit rapper whose real name isn't even Danny Brown. That's right, ladies and gents, he changed his name to Danny Brown, as if completely ignorant to the fact that he was taking the name of perhaps the single greatest diabetic lead singer of a southern rock band ever.