Day 2: Saturday, August 7, 2010
I had a very clear plan for Saturday. There’s a spot to the right side of the “PlayStation” stage (actually called the Petrillo Music Shell) that’s always been easy to worm your way into. You can get really close to the stage if you just slide right along the wall, so I had told my entire posse to meet there three songs into the XX‘s set. But once we made it inside, it was obvious this was not going to happen.
At three o’clock in the afternoon the entire north side of the park was filled to capacity. To make matters worse, the entrance from Columbus into the stage area was a parking lot of people. It should’ve been a walkway but nobody was moving. Everybody was just standing there, blocking the path, not moving. I’m assuming Against Me must not have any fans because there were at least 80,000 people crammed into the cement lot that surrounds the stage, packed tight as far back as the second set of light poles. If you’ve been to Grant Park, you know what I’m talking about, and you know how bad that must’ve sucked. It was worse.