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Whichever patch of grass you happen to stand on, you can see the mammoth stages built in Douglass Park. Behind them, grand deciduous foliage forms the base of the skyline. Behind that, the ebony prepuce of the Willis Tower extends into the atmosphere to remind us that we aren’t in Idaho any more. It is with this view in mind that I’d like to broadcast my sincere gratitude to the Riot Fest press team for inviting a lowly potato farmer like myself to Chicago, Illinois, for a weekend of punk rock mayhem.

Riot Fest 2023 took place on September 15-17 in Douglass Park, Chicago. 107 bands came from all parts of the world to shred, sway and sing to an audience of 45,000 people per day, who themselves traveled from everywhere you could imagine.  For me, it was a 1,700 mile trip from the City of Trees to the City of Wind.

I love buildings. I was so excited to see buildings again, and the whole trip to Chicago was a tease. Even my connecting stop in Seattle was obfuscated by fog. On our landing approach to O’Hare International Airport, I found that I was sitting on the wrong side of the plane to see the city. Then, the Blue Line train is underground, so my first time seeing a skyscraper on this trip was from the sidewalk outside the Clark/Lake station. I looked up, and the kind art deco monolith seemed to look back with a welcoming smile. Between the buildings, the scaffolding tunnels, the honking traffic, the impenetrable herds of pedestrians and the smell of pigeons on the air, a homesickness that I didn’t know I had faded away.

Checking into my hotel and in desperate need of a burger and a beer, I hit the streets of Chicago’s downtown area (called “The Loop”) for a smelly dive bar. I found a place that was packed wall to wall for the football game, no seating anywhere. I ordered a drink and some chow and the bartender told me to “stand by that pole. If you move, you don’t get food.” My standing space became coveted real estate as the night went on. 12 oz solo cups of beer were $8. Cigarettes at the 7-Eleven next door were $14. The city streets were alive with wacked out tweakers and chubby yuppies alike. This is just a regular Thursday night in a big city. I love it so much.

I digress- you didn’t come here to read about my alcoholism or my erection for erections, so let’s get to the festival already. The Pink Line train drops you off right at Douglass Park in Chicago’s west side, but it’s still a twenty minute walk to the entrance on the opposite corner. The southern 1/3 of the park was closed off by security barricades and a million miles worth of fence. The sidewalks were alive with the long caterpillar of people heading to the gate and the bustling street vendors, which you can read about in Spud Takes Chicago: Part II.

I collected my pass and went inside to catch Parliament Funkadelic, a big funk project consisting of about 12 people either playing music or dancing. I caught only the final ten-minute groove of their set, which got heavier and heavier until it abruptly ended.

After that was more beer and some wandering, checking out the carnival rides and drifting towards any distant thump of music, which brought me to a metalcore band from Pittsburgh called Code Orange. They had a wide range of sounds going on which included male/female vocal harmonies and a keyboard rig. They relied a lot on ambient background tracks which seems like a waste of perfectly good keyboards to me, but that’s none of my business.

Screaming Females is a name I’ve heard many times in my musical travels. The band is only 1/3 female, although she did do all the screaming. Not my bag, but not far from that, I caught Ani DiFranco, who has a very interesting country/indie mashup sound. You may have seen her at Treefort earlier this year. That was a fun set with a slide guitar, some powerful acoustic strumming, and brilliant lyrics that I really enjoyed. Congratulations to Ani for the 25^th anniversary of her album Little Plastic Castle, by the way.

Nothing much grabbed my attention after that so I had a non-Chicago but very large pizza and watched garbage, literally, while The Breeders played on a distant stage. Riot Fest staff were trying their damnedest to keep the place clean, but with tens of thousands of punks getting hammered on Goose Island beer, you can only do so much. There’s something so funny to me about a trash can spilling over, because people get so confused. Most tried to do the right thing and stuff their empty Riot Pops into the overflowing dumpster, unaware that they were pushing four other pieces of trash out the other side. A few people had the good sense to just throw it on the pile.

Coming up on the end of night one, I saw Turnstile, a Grammy-nominated hardcore band formed in Baltimore in 2010 that I’ve heard a lot about. They were a lot of fun and are definitely worth investigating if you haven’t already. Their songs are uplifting and the singer had loads of charisma and energy. They turned out to be the source of the “THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME SEE MYSELF” merch I saw floating around beforehand.

As the sun went down during Turnstile’s set, I was unaware of the huge crowd that had formed around me. The main stage is split into two halves- Riot Stage and Roots Stage, to alternate the  headliners. As soon as Turnstile was done on the Roots stage, I had about five minutes to join the mass shuffle to the Riot Stage for the darlings of Riot Fest Day 1: Foo Fighters. I got about 50 feet before the crowd was too dense to move any further, and I stepped on some poor girl in the process. My shoeprint wasn’t the only one on her back, so maybe don’t lie in the grass after dark at a festival?

Dave Grohl has a global reputation for a stage presence nonpareil, as well as generally being a saint among men. I’m not even a huge fan of Foo Fighters’ radio pop style, but when they started their set, I felt the Earth move. I could tell that I was in the presence of something amazing. Grohl and the gang put the “play” into playing their set, teasing their way through their opening hits, and turning “The Pretender” into a nearly 8 minute-long goof. Dave, and I feel like I can call him Dave, gave no inclination that he was “above” the audience in the literal or metaphorical sense, rather that he was simply part of the crowd as much as I was. He’s just a regular guy who happened to be blessed by Apollo with the privilege of bringing paradigm shifting music into the world for the good of humanity.

It’s important to have icons. Icons show the common man what is possible. A healthy society has great and powerful icons that have achieved something amazing; a sick one celebrates the lazy, the dishonest, and the self-serving. For the most part, we are the latter. So much of our cultural attention is focused on shit, like YouTube streamers, or TikTok influencers, or God forbid, politicians. Our culture is so obsessed with gossiping about horrible people that we forget that there are still great and accomplished icons who are creating art, shifting culture, and building something incredible that will survive the decay of time. Dave Grohl is one of those icons. He reminds us of the beauty and the passion of rock n’ roll, and proves that the spirit is still alive.

In fact, I’d say that this whole trip has been a reminder that there is still beauty in our culture. From the buildings greeting me as I arrived from Boise, to the awesome power of Foo Fighters on stage, I find myself inspired and delighted. As we go about our lives and get locked into routines, our attitudes grow stale and we forget that there is more to the world than the day-in-day-out. There is beauty everywhere, but sometimes you have to shake yourself out of the normal in order to see it.