I had to urinate like a bull, racehorse, or like someone who just downed half a gallon of coffee; but there were no escape routes out of the crowd, even twenty minutes before Rage Against the Machine began their set at Lollapalooza. I felt short for once in my life, necking random sweaty shoulders.
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Rage Against the Machine
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 Entertainment
Art
Grant Park
Chicago, Ill.
August 1, 2008
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The man behind me cleared a square foot of room in front of him, and began shouting: “$3! Prime location! I’m selling the spot in front of me for $3!” I negotiated for thirty percent of the profit, but he never sold the spot. Just as well, I was struggling not to burn people with my cigarette.
At 8:15, there was a mass rush to the stage, and I was swept in.
At 8:20, I was standing, ribs bending into my lungs, between my friend Ada and two football players from Tennessee, about forty feet from the stage. The guys promised us, 1. We would get right up to the stage; and, 2. They would look out for us. Promptly they used me as a human shield to part through the crowd.
“Are you ok?” Chuck, the caring one, kept asking.
“Yes, I’m fine!” After thirty more feet of having the air knocked out of me, they decided it was close enough. The lights fell, the air tensed, I held my breath, and with the first beats of “Testify,” I felt the tension reach a climactic pitch.
The crowd turned into an amorphous blob of circle pits, the bottom lined with bodies of those who had tripped in and had others fall on them. This is where I resided for the next thirty seconds, holding my glasses in my right hand, while pushing up the big dude that fell on me so he wouldn’t crush them. Now, I’ve been in some serious mosh-pits. But when you have the pressure of approximately thirty five thousand people pushing into a focal point, and you happen to be right in it, on your back, hoping that someone stops watching Zach De La Rocha long enough to give you a hand up, trying with all your strength to push the Chuck Taylors off your face…there’s not much you can do!
The performance became an appropriate soundtrack to the frenzy in the first rows. I’m pretty sure they played “Renegade of Funk” and “Bullet In the Head” during this time. After twenty minutes in the battlefield I began to collapse and I told Chuck, who had an arm each around Ada and I, attempting to keep the three of us in a horizontal position. “I want out,” I screamed.
In true Spartan spirit, our knight with shining upper body strength, cleaved a path (once again with me as a shield) through what must have been more than a hundred people, holding us in his arms. I was exhausted, semi-conscious, and only aware of the confused faces that I smashed into on my way out.
I had lost a shoe and my notebook, but my phone and my glasses were intact.
We thanked Chuck, and he disappeared back into the crowd.
“Brothers and sisters,” De La Rocha said. “Please, please take five to ten steps back. We want to play our entire set tonight.” The music had now stopped.
From stage left, I observed the multitudes of stumbling fans emerging from the crowd, some with bloody bandages around their heads, one on a stretcher. A group of 100 to 500 people broke into the festival through the gate on Balbo and Columbus to see RATM, and were intercepted by the cavalry of the Chi-town PD.
After two more interruptions, some pleading words from De La Rocha and more terse tones from the head of security, the crowd cooled and the set continued with soul-shaking lyrics of Rage’s top hits over the past fifteen years. Despite the violence, the show was elating, and I jumped back into the crowd for “Wake Up” and “Killing In The Name.” Judging by the number of fists that flew in my face, the approval rating was still strong for the classics.
Rage included a warning to “Brother Obama,” which sounded more like an ultimatum. The Democratic presidential candidate was rumored to be scheduled to make an appearance Saturday night at Lollapalooza, but ended up a no-show. Raging will continue at the Republic National Convention, according to MTV.com: “Band will play Minneapolis, while GOP gathering happens across the river in St. Paul, Minnesota.” And so continues the message of bi-partisan obliteration the band’s been preaching for almost two decades; with plenty of material to tackle after their reunion.
For all their incendiary words, when it comes to fans being crushed in a pit, Rage will stop a show three times to yell out things like: “Brothers, help your sister out up here!”
Adrenalin’s a hard substance to steer, but there are only a few that can pump it as hard as Rage.
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