ROLLIN HUNT DEARLY HONORABLE LISTENER (SELF-RELEASED)
This weekend the throngs will decamp for Lollapalooza to experience a vertiginous array of mediocre-to-terrible bands (and a couple good ones) in the company of tens of thousands of half-drunk strangers. Seeing a show outside in the Chicago summer dusk is a welcome reprieve from standing around in a smoky club, but the idea that mega-festivals somehow create ad hoc communities out of their mega-crowds–a meme we probably owe to Woodstock–is ridiculous. The only thing everybody at Lollapalooza has in common is the willingness to be painfully gouged for a ticket. Even crowds that might seem a bit more like-minded (at Pitchfork, para ejemplo) make for a grim and dystopian scene: mini mountains of litter, heinous security, sun-baked Porta-Johns. And when you see bands from hundreds of feet away, they seem unreal–specks on the horizon, or larger-than-life cartoons rendered in Jumbotron pixels and playing hard to the cameraman.
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The first time I saw local songwriter Rollin Hunt, he was wowing a crowd of a dozen or so at Ronny’s, trembling before the mike with his eyelids squeezed shut. “Wow. He’s really special,” I whispered to my friend. “Yes,” she said. “Very.” Hunt was in the middle of a song about going out for a walk and spying on a couple getting hot and heavy in their bedroom. Oh, and antelopes.
Hunt’s ambition as a performer nearly destroys his sweet, fragile little tunes, mostly because it completely outstrips his basic competence–but they end up amazing anyway. His lyrics are crowded with small scenes and unpredictable tangents: one song is about “juice in the air,” another about “George who runs the Holiday Inn.” His genius turn is “Pamphlet,” where he proposes a solution to his relationship problems in a romantic ditty that sounds like a cross between early Smog and a truly touched Frankie Lymon: “I need to make you / A pamphlet / That tells you everything you need to know / About my feelings.” It’s clunky, unpolished, and oddly intimate, and that’s what gives it its magic.
We’re supposed to believe that we’re enjoying some sort of meaningful collective experience at a big festival, with modern rock blaring from a bank of speakers the size of a condo complex. But such a grand scale actually tends to dissolve community–the anonymity and impersonality of an enormous event sometimes even encourages people to act shittier than they otherwise would, since they don’t feel accountable to anyone around them. At a basement show, though, where the bands aren’t whisked to the stage by golf carts to make a thousand dollars a minute, people are gonna get pissed if you leave your chewed-up corn cobs and beer cups lying around. You can smell the band. You can give them seven bucks for a T-shirt and know that the money is going to get them a tenth of the way to Iowa City. In the basement, you can feel the band’s humanity as well as your own.
