Tommy Grivaldi in happier times.
Chicago music critic Tommy Grivaldi narrowly avoided a complete existential collapse on Thursday when he discovered that the organizers of the Lollapalooza music festival are padding this year’s lineup with obscure-sounding bands that don’t actually exist.
“As a professional music reviewer, it’s my job to be able to delineate the subtle differences between the dance punk of Death From Above 1979 and the psychedelic punk of The Chain Gang of 1974,” Grivaldi later explained. “And I thought I recognized most of the names announced last week, but when I started getting down to bands like Oh Land and Lia Ices, I started to feel dizzy. Suddenly, I couldn’t recall whether Boy & Bear included members of Panda Bear, or Grizzly Bear, or Bear Hands, Minus The Bear, Sunbears or Bear In Heaven … and then everything went black.”
When he came to, Grivaldi found himself sitting in a pool of urine while listening to a recording of “Ice, Ice, Baby” play repeatedly on his iPod. He still doesn’t remember how it got there.
“I grabbed a soiled copy of the band list that was somehow glued to my ass and instantly felt a wave of nausea sweep over me,” Grivaldi explained. “Here I was, seeing names like ‘Pussy Snatch’ and ‘Weeble, The Terrible Dust Bunny’ and thinking to myself, ‘How did I miss these acts?’ I dreaded that someone would ask me whether I was looking forward to the opening performance by The Larry Dittmeyer Experience. Who the hell is that?”
Uncertain about how his place in the universe, Grivaldi reached out to a close friend in a desperately-needed act of affirmation.
“After I stopped crying, I called my friend Mark at Pitchfork Media, and asked him what he thought about one of the bands appearing on August 5th called Wolf Lick. He first started to mumble something about how he preferred the music of Wolf Gang, Wolf People, and Wolf Parade over Wolf Lick, but I could tell he was pretty unsure about who they were. I then asked him to name his favorite Wolf Lick song and after a few moments of silence, the phone went dead. His parents reported him missing yesterday.”
A forty-five minute search through MySpace, Google and Facebook turned up no reference to any musical act named Wolf Lick. Inspired by this finding, Grivaldi continued to verify each of the bands on the festival roster and found that, along with Wolf Lick, Fuzzy Dildo, The Constantly Bemused, and The Dick Dailys, almost half of the listed performers are complete works of fiction.
“Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me,” said Grivaldi. “When it started out in 1991, Lollapalooza was the only place where you could listen to Rollins Band play alongside Ice-T while sipping on a $5 bottle of water. Now they have to compete with the likes of Coachella, Bonnaroo and The Nike-Tampax-Jiffy Lube Music Express. It’s a very competitive field and, like any business, they have to get an edge … but how? With Coldplay? The Foo Fighters? No, they have to deliver cutting-edge bands that no one else has, even if those bands don’t exist.”
Grivaldi contacted the festival organizers for an explanation, but only received an envelope stuffed with coupons from State Farm, Citibank and Toyota. However, subsequent advertisements to the festival now contain no references to the bands that Grivaldi identified. While the Columbia College grad hopes that he can put this ugly episode behind him, Grivaldi recently learned that The North Coast Music Festival is featuring Wolf Lick as one of their opening acts.
“And guess who they’re opening up for? Fuzzy Dildo. It should be a hell of a show.”
Mitchell Snyder is a fully-licensed and bonded International Man of Parody. He's also the alter-ego for a business professional who can't stop listening to the funny voices in his head. He became a card-carrying member of Chicago's comedy-industrial complex when he started performing stand-up early in 2009, and has since branched out into writing satire articles.
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