Lollapalooza Day Two With RATM

Lolla's hump day is often the toughest slog, but two things prevented that this year. First, the humidity held off for one afternoon, and a cool breeze from the lake was a welcome respite from Friday's heat assault. Second, there was nothing worth seeing before 2:30 p.m. — just an iPod commercial band, two kids who are friends with Karen O and a group who do offend me, yeah.

Shaving three hours off the schedule made it a little easier to walk at the end of the evening. A little. Here's a breakdown of day two:

2:40 p.m. Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli's The Gutter Twins were in full swing as I arrived at the park. I'm not a real fan of Screaming Trees or The Afghan Whigs, but this I like. While it's a little "bar rock" for me, Lanegan and Dulli's familiar strong vocals elevated the material and Lanegan's cool presence is a nice feather in the Twins' cap. It's not the same as watching him heroically stride on stage with Queens Of The Stone Age, but it's good to see Lanegan using his powerful vocal chords in a different way.

3:30 p.m. I was pretty sure I wouldn't like MGMT, but they came recommended by a friend of a friend. I should have trusted my gut on this one. I can understand why The Strokes wanted to sound like The Velvet Underground or why Jack White wanted to be Robert Plant and Jimmy Page at the same time. But I can't understand why a band would want to sound like a toothless Electric Light Orchestra. The first three songs took 16 or so minutes to perform, and I was gone before the third one ended.

3:45 p.m. Booka Shade sounded alright on the Citi stage, but I was interested to see what guests Perry Farrell had managed to snag for his 90-minute set.

3:55 p.m. Unsurprisingly, it was Satellite Party. Slash made an early appearance (that I missed), but by all accounts, sound issues hilariously rendered him inaudible. I realize there wouldn't be a Lollapalooza without Farrell, but I don't see why he feels compelled to play every year with everyone but Jane's Addiction or maybe Porno For Pyros (neither of whom I enjoy, but they'd be the least of Farrell's evils).

4:15 p.m. While waiting for Explosions In The Sky to start on the Bud Light Stage, Devotchka convinced me that I don't enjoy their music.

4:30 p.m. I don't own a single Explosions In The Sky album, but I've heard them enough to know what they're all about. EITS are the American Mogwai, but there are slight differences between these Texans and their Scottish counterparts. Mogwai's melodies are dark and their sound squalls are furious. Explosions' melodies are upbeat and their sound squalls are triumphant. Guess which one has less edge? If you guessed the one I was watching, you'd be correct. There's nothing wrong with EITS, except for the fact that every song sounds the same. Still, they put on a fairly dynamic instrumental show that 5,000 baked kids went crazy for, and I'll give them credit for moving around a lot more than Mogwai do.

5:30 p.m. I had a few already-seen-but-must-still-see bands at the festival, and Okkervil River were one of them. Their show at Lee's Palace last fall was one of the best I saw last year and their forthcoming LP, The Stand-Ins, promises to expand on The Stage Names' excellence. It's odd that they didn't play anything new, though the mix of Stage Names and Black Sheep Boy material was more than enough to satisfy a sizable crowd of diehard and casual fans. Will Sheff continues to grow as a frontman, and he seemed to be letting go a bit more since Jonathan Meiburg's departure from the group. He's quickly becoming one of the best singer-songwriters of his generation.

6:30 p.m. The last Broken Social Scene set I saw at Lollapalooza was my favourite BSS performance. This one ran a close second. They drew liberally from both of the full-band records and as Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning's solo albums. Canning was a real winner of the show; he's obviously been working on his vocals and came across a much stronger performer than in the past. The band did the best version of Drew's "Farewell To The Pressure Kids" I've heard to date, while "It's All Gonna Break" put a soaring exclamation point on a spectacular performance. Social Scene did everything to reinforce my feeling that festivals are the perfect forum for their sound.

7:30 p.m. Sharon Jones And The Dap Kings are great, and it's nice of the festival to cater to literally every demographic on Saturday (Dierks Bentley rocked the north end of Grant earlier in the day). But curiosity got the best of me. I had to see something on the other side of the park.

7:55 p.m. No, it wasn't the Toadies, who I heard from the MySpace stage as I arrived at Grant's south end. (Though I have to give them credit for one of the festival's best bits of banter: "This is probably a lot of your first times seeing us, right? Well, we're that band that plays this song," singer Todd Lewis joked before launching into the group's biggest hit, "Possum Kingdom." I know, I'm as perplexed as you.)

8:30 p.m. It was Rage Against The Machine that had me parked a "safe" distance from the AT&T stage. The crowd was already primed to explode. Every time the lights flashed above the group's sparsely arranged instruments, the audience erupted. When the air raid sirens announced the band's arrival, true chaos followed. A number of people from the street outside jumped the park's fences and a massive, extremely dangerous crush began at the front of the stage. Kids were being carted off out of the photo pit left and right. Rage plowed through "Testify" and "Bulls On Parade," but Zach De La Rocha put a stop to the music three-quarters of the way through "People Of The Sun." He pled for those at the front gate to "take five steps back" and asked a bunch of guys to help out some distressed girls. Rage collectively looked a bit worried about continuing. They did "Bombtrack," but I was done with them for myriad reasons.

First, I saw the group in 1999 at the peak of their popularity. They played all of the same songs, and have offered nothing new after eight years of individual artistic failure. Second, a move to the middle of the field proved disastrous; the festival organizers still hadn't turned up the volume on the mid-field speakers and people who didn't want to be trampled close to the stage were screaming for more volume. Third, it didn't matter what Rage played — these songs generally all sound the same and each elicits the same insane response. If every Rage song is a hit and every song sort of sounds the same, 20 minutes is enough. Four, Wilco were playing a hometown show on the other side of the field.

9:00 p.m. Even with 15,000 or so at the Bud Light stage to see the hometown alt.country heroes, it was a Buddhist temple compared to the scene at the AT&T Stage. There's something about seeing a band on home turf. They're looser, excited that everybody knows the words to every song and usually trying to put on career-best performances for friends and family. Wilco's performance fit that description to a T. I got there just in time for A Ghost Is Born standout "Handshake Drugs" and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's "Pot Kettle Black."

It was a perfect night for this performance. The group were wearing hilariously sequin-stitched suits and it felt like they were knowingly winking at a faithful audience for the next hour. Songs from 2007's less-than-spectacular Sky Blue Sky got the same rapturous applause as Being There's horn-augmented, set-closing "Monday" and "Outtasite (Outta Mind)."

Later, everyone found out that the Rage set had two more uncomfortable stoppages, including one where the band actually consulted with the on-site security. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured, but I'm more than happy to have missed the drama.

I couldn't think of a better way to get over the hump than that watching Wilco under the Chicago skyline at night.

Here was Wilco's set list:

"Misunderstood"
"I Am Trying To Break Your Heart"
"You Are My Face"
"Impossible Germany"
"It's Just That Simple"
"Stage Banter"
"Handshake Drugs"
"Pot Kettle Black"
"One Wing"
"Spiders (Kidsmoke)"
"A Shot In The Arm"
"Jesus, Etc."
"Hate It Here"
"Can't Stand It"
"Walken"
"Monday"
"Outtasite (Outta Mind)"