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Lollapalooza set the road-show festival standard. That's not necessarily a good thing, since Lollapalooza was originally intended to be a status quo-smashing event. The festival made its name by booking bands from a wide array of alternative genres, deliberately forcing often parochial rock audiences to expand their musical horizons. Past participants have ranged from Ice Cube to Sinead O'Connor.
This year, however, Lollapalooza is as insular as a humidor at a men's club. Each of the main-stage acts on the bill (which includes Screaming Trees and Psychotica) plays hard rock or punk; each is led by a white male. Given all that testosterone, Lollapalooza feels less like an alternative-rock concert and more like an N.H.L. locker room. In fact, the moshing during Metallica's focused, fierce set last week in New York City was like an N.H.L. game. Still, Rancid's set at the same stopover was gleefully uncontrolled, and a few acts on the second stage, like the soulful Beth Hart Band, were compelling. But the Ramones were the most apt symbols of this year's fest--a bunch of guys set in their ways, one pretty much indistinguishable from the next.
The H.O.R.D.E. festival features a more diverse lineup, including (for eight dates) singer Natalie Merchant on the main stage and the Native American band Red Thunder on the second stage. At last week's stop in Somerset, Wisconsin, crowd members danced and twirled around Deadhead style, even during the obligatory rock-festival thunderstorm. "To me, sleeping in a tent and watching rock bands in the rain doesn't seem like that great a time," says Merchant. "But the kids seem to enjoy it." Actually she seemed to revel in it too, turning in a sexy, hip-swaying, strong-voiced set. She also admonished moshers to cool it and just listen to the music. Most did.
She was joined for an onstage jam by John Popper, lead singer of Blues Traveler and founder of H.O.R.D.E. He says the festival's appeal lies in its emphasis on performance, improvisation and musicianship, an aesthetic the Grateful Dead helped champion, which now lives on in H.O.R.D.E. "People have called us hippie music and all of that," says Popper, "and we've had to live with it because the kind of music we play is older than us and it's going to go on after us. It's something that's real. Lollapalooza deals very much with what is popular. The music we play will always be in and out of vogue."
This year's Warped fest, by contrast, latches firmly onto a hot trend: ska. At the tour's San Francisco show, the pop-ska band Dance Hall Crashers turned in an ebullient set on the second stage, as did Goldfinger, a ska-punk group. On the main stage, another ska-punk band, NOFX, got the crowd kicking up dust, and Fishbone--a pioneering ska-punk band--played a set so raucous and dissonant, even members of this hard-core crowd seemed put off. Warped easily lived up to its reputation as the youngest and edgiest of the major fests.