Entertainment

Hatch: Festival has morphed into a whole Lolla hassle

Is Lollapalooza a victim of its own success?

Years ago the event fizzled out for lack of interest. But this year, it was the music festival of the summer, as 225,000 people streamed into Grant Park in Chicago for the three-day event. And if you didn’t purchase a ticket in advance or get in line fairly early on Friday, you were out of luck.

Promoters were only allowed to sell 75,000 tickets a day, per instructions from the city of Chicago. With big-name headliners such as Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails and Kanye West, music fans came streaming in from all over the world. I was told that when the gates opened at 11 a.m. on Friday, several hundred people rushed to the stage that Radiohead would be playing to stake out a spot for the band’s 8 p.m. performance. Tickets for Friday sold out fairly early, and by the end of the first day, Saturday and Sunday’s tickets were sold out, too – a first for Lollapalooza.

It wasn’t just a zoo on the inside of the festival, as tens of thousands of Lollapalosers emitted clouds of smoke, overflowed recycling receptacles with plastic bottles and bumped their sweaty appendages into whomever was in their way. Not everybody was rude, but some people certainly lacked basic courtesy. Outside was crazy, too. People walked around like zombies, trying to find scalpers. A twenty-something man sat in the shade with a sign that read "I need a miracle. I’ve never been to Lollapalooza." Good luck, buddy.

I was supposed to meet a bunch of friends for Radiohead’s performance after I had completed my journalistic duties on Friday, but found out that half my group had given up and went to the bars after trying unsuccessfully to get tickets. The other half was somewhere in the crowd of 75,000. With spotty cell phone service and knowing there was no way I’d come across them, I decided to watch the show from the sidelines with the other media schmucks. You’d think that would be a perk, but Thom Yorke was just an ant from where I stood.

When I left the festival, I walked by lines of people who had set up camp on Columbus Drive across the street from Grant Park. With thousands of Porta Potties lining the perimeter, they couldn’t see Yorke at all. But at least they didn’t drop $80 to strain for a glimpse or to wait in ridiculously long food lines for overpriced "gourmet" turkey sandwiches or to meander from one corporate signage-topped stage to the next – the AT&T stage to the MySpace stage to the Bud Light stage to the Citi stage and on and on…

Maybe the extreme heat and humidity was making me cranky, but I felt none of the love that revelers must have felt at Woodstock when the outdoor concert festival was born. Is it possible that Lollapalooza – which began as a celebration of creativity, unsigned bands and general alternativeness – has become so mainstream and corporate that it has bumped itself out of fashion?

In my opinion, yes. I’ll take Summer Camp over Lollapalooza any day. Let’s just hope that the Chillicothe event never morphs into the monster that Lollapalooza has.

Sportscaster hits the big time

If you’ve gone to see the political comedy "Swing Vote," which stars Kevin Costner and is in theaters now, you may notice a familiar face. Former WEEK-TV sports director Les Shapiro, who worked at the Peoria network from 1981 to 1984, has a brief role as a reporter in the film.

Shapiro now is a freelance sportscaster in Denver, and his agent found him the role.

"They liked the fact that I was a real, live reporter," Shapiro said by telephone from Seattle, where he was on assignment.

Shapiro has a scene in which he peppers a political strategist (Nathan Lane) with questions about a presidential candidate’s (Dennis Hopper) photos from a nudist colony. After the back-and-forth, Shapiro and a pack of pesky reporters run after Lane as he exits.

Shapiro spends about 45 seconds on screen and has about three lines.

"There won’t be any Academy Awards in my future," Shapiro said with a laugh, although he does now have an entry on Internet Movie Database, which can’t hurt his chances of future gigs.

DANIELLE HATCH is the Journal Star’s entertainment editor. She can be reached at 686-3262, by e-mail at moc.ratsjpnull@hctahd or at 1 News Plaza, Peoria, IL 61643