On my way to a conference in Salt Lake City, I was fortunate enough to stop over in Chicago where I had a bit of a hurried catch up with several people before making my onward journey to the conference. It just so happened that the weekend I stayed in Chicago also happened to be the weekend on of their largest musical festivals, Lollapalooza was playing. Featuring three days of plenty of amazing bands, I was a little disappointed I didn’t get a ticket. Until I found out a couple of other friends that Ajit had visiting also happened to be going, and one of them happened to be one of the festival’s stage producers. What this meant was a free pass that I was able to use on the last day of the festival.

Lollapalooza draws plenty of crowds, one of the big reasons is that it takes up the city’s amazing Grant Park – a wide open space that runs alongside almost of the down town area, and where you can see the great skyline from all parts of the festival.

Not only did I get a pass to the festival, the pass that I was given also happened to grant access to the “Artist’s Lounge”, a backstage area right behind the largest main stages. I arrived there quite late, with only three or four other acts left to play. I can’t say that the “Artists’ Lounge” had any of the other acts – looking like it was also filled with people who knew people. Benefits of this were tremendous however, with a private bar, easily accessed and a side entrance to the main stage.

For the most part, the weekend seemed to be pretty nice given the time of year however heavy storms had been forecast for this weekend. It came down almost as soon as I made my way into the Artists Lounge, and also happened to cut into half of the one hour set of the Arctic Monkeys. We tried sheltering under one of the large umbrellas towering over the table making some new friends and great conversation. The result didn’t really work with the “windy city” having its way and me almost entirely drenched. Fortunately I had brought some shorts and a fairly thin shirt that dried out rather quickly.

As you can imagine with torrential rains and a festival like atmosphere, a rather predictable and terribly muddy result ruled.

Fields of mud pretty much everywhere. I ended up walking around mostly barefoot given that flip flops only served to really throw up even more of a mess into the air and I didn’t really want to be covered from head to toe in mud, just as some people obviously had been.

The Arctic Monkey’s admirably finished their half hour set, joking about the weather and being back home putting on a great show in the short time.

With evening starting to set, we headed out to another stage to catch Explosions in the Sky whose dreamy music and fairly chilled out set served to prepare the crowd for the two big headliners of the night, Deadmau5 heading up the cavernous tented, though just as muddy Perry stage, and the Foo Fighters who I really wanted to see live.

As soon as the other set finished, we darted, just like everyone else, towards the main stage. Using our Artists Lounge pass, we went around the back and popped up with almost a perfect side-view vantage point of the band playing.

The heavens opened up once again, this time with hugely torrential rain. Kudos to the band, who became just as drenched as we were and didn’t miss a beat, simply swearing at the crowd about how, “At least all you *** dirty people got a shower now.”

An amazing two hour set that simply flew by, they whipped the crowd into a frenzy with many of their classic songs and a few different ones. A completely serendipitous weekend that turned out to be one of the most fun in quite some time.