Lollapalooza is riding high. On top of last year’s sell-out of Grant Park for the three-day festival, Texas-based promoters C3 Presents signed a 10-year deal with the city that will keep the festival on the lakefront through 2018 and guarantee the city at least $13 million in revenue.

    This year, promoters are projecting another capacity audience at the fifth annual festival Aug. 7-9 in Grant Park, with a 225,000 ticket sell-out expected.

    “I’m surprised that even in this economy we seem to be doing well,” says Charles Attal, one of C3’s three principle executives.

    But questions remain about how fully Lollapalooza has embraced and been embraced by Chicago beyond the considerable revenue it brings to the local economy. In staging the biggest annual rock festival in the city’s history on Chicago’s showcase property, C3 is held to a particularly high standard. So far it has executed a hugely successful festival with few hitches. But the organization remains at arm’s length from the city’s music community – more of a formidable interloper than a trusted accomplice.

    Between Lollapalooza and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park (which staged its fourth annual sold-out event two weeks ago), Chicago has become one of the key summer destinations for rock music in North America. Both festivals have become signature events on the city’s musical landscape, albeit from opposite perspectives. Pitchfork is smaller both in terms of size and budget, with a focus on underground bands and an independent spirit that sometimes leads to less-than-ideal logistics (amenities, restroom facilities and sound all could stand beefing up). Lollapalooza is far bigger and pricier, with tickets ($80) more than double the price of Pitchfork ($35). It offers more and more widely known bands, and it is more efficiently run, with plenty of vendors and portable toilets, and enough sound to rattle high-rise windows across Michigan Avenue.

    But Lollapalooza still feels like it’s adapting to Chicago, still trying to figure out an identity, besides just being a big musical equivalent of DisneyWorld on the lakefront and a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours business opportunity for C3 and the city. Whereas Pitchfork mirrors the do-it-yourself music scene in Chicago, focusing on independent bands and community, Lollapalooza’s promoters have difficulty identifying exactly what their festival is or wants to be. Lollapalooza’s reputation is less based on music or aesthetic vision than a concept real-estate brokers know well: location, location, location.

    “The identity is the site and the city,” Attal says. “It’s about Chicago.”

    Attal’s partner Charlie Jones says, “The emails I get from England and Australia, from promoters and agents, Lollapalooza is the one they all want to come and see. The location is second to none.”

    But the festival doesn’t boost a particularly Chicago-centric vibe. Each year, the lineup includes a handful of Chicago acts, and on occasion those artists can provide stirring theater, as when Kanye West shared the stage with fellow Chicago hip-hoppers Common, Twista and Lupe Fiasco in 2006. But for the most part, the Lollapalooza lineup is interchangeable with that of any other big festival in America. In contrast, Pitchfork is steeped in Chicago. Its namesake is the Wicker Park-based Internet music magazine, and promoter Mike Reed is a fixture on the local jazz scene as a drummer, activist and independent promoter. In addition, he’s working with the Department of Cultural Affairs to bring in  top-flight bookings at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park this summer, including sets by the legendary if little-seen Feelies, Red Red Meat and Shellac.

    Lollapalooza’s organizers, meanwhile, maintain their year-round offices in Austin, Texas (they have a small office in Chicago) and have little direct contact with the Chicago music scene and its key players. But they do pour money into city coffers (after last year’s festival, C3 contributed $1.6 million to the park district for improvements). They have become active in the city’s After School Matters program and are playing an increasingly high-profile a role in Chicago’s efforts to secure the 2016 Summer Olympics. This year, Lollapalooza turned over naming rights to one of its biggest stages (at the south end of Hutchinson Field) to the Chicago 2016 organization for free.

        Jones has made no secret of his desire to be involved in helping Chicago stage the Olympics: “We’re happy to help the city put the Olympic effort front and center,” he says.

    But the inroads he has made with the park district and City Hall (in part due to C3’s legal representative, Mark Vanecko, Daley’s nephew) has rankled some of the city’s club owners and promoters. Some of the ill-will is born of jealousy, more of it from economic distress. One promoter estimates that the festival deprives Chicago clubs of at least 25 substantial summer shows.

        C3 still includes “radius clauses” in all its contracts with bands that  play Lollapalooza, restricting them from playing local venues 90 days before or after the festival. The restrictions are commonplace in all festival contracts nationwide, and C3 says they can’t risk doing business without them.

        C3 has reached out by co-promoting after-party concerts with Lollapalooza bands at clubs such as Metro, House of Blues and the Empty Bottle in and around festival weekend. Tom Windish, whose Chicago-based booking agency represents 200 bands, asserts that Lollapalooza is good for artists, because it gets them in front of an audience that otherwise would not normally see them, and can increase the number of people who will pay to see the band’s next show in Chicago. “That way, the clubs benefit too,” Windish says.

    The festival has opened up a broader presence for C3 in Chicago. The company now also handles booking for the Congress Theatre and Soldier Field, but has been slow in making its mark at those venues. “We’ve done a few things at the Congress, but the economy has been slow,” Attal says.

    Their primary focus remains Lollapalooza. If the festival continues to keep the parks awash in revenue without any major gaffes, it certainly will help keep C3 at the forefront for the 2016 games, should the city secure the International Olympic Committee’s approval in October.

    Jones says he’s not thinking ahead about what kind of events C3 would stage should an Olympic opportunity come its way. But he did say that  Lollapalooza would go on hiatus for 2016. “The city,” he says, “will have enough on its plate that year.”

    greg@gregkot.com

    It’s all or nothing lately with the Decemberists. The Portland quintet debuted their latest album, “The Hazards of Love,” by playing it in its entirety last March at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas. They were playing in front of several thousand people, many of whom probably showed up expecting to be treated to a few of the band’s past favorites. Instead, they got a full-on dose of an album most of them had not heard yet.

    But for the Decemberists, there was no other choice. “The Hazards of Love” was designed as a 17-song (take your pick) rock opera, folk musical, concept album, and it was meant to be heard as a whole – so why not go for broke? (The band will perform the album in its entirety at their Lollapalooza appearance Aug. 7; they’re also playing Aug. 6 at Metro, with a set list chosen by the fans.)

    “I was pretty nervous about doing it,” says singer Colin Meloy of the work’s Austin debut. “When I finally got over my jitters enough to look out at the audience about three-quarters through the concert, I noticed a lot of baffled looks.”

    But when guest singer Shara Worden popped out for one of her cameo vocals on the album’s centerpiece, “The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid,” she provided a grand moment of rock theater straight out of the Who doing “Tommy.” The rock opera may be a relic of the ‘70s, but on this night it had an undeniable power.

    Meloy said the idea grew out of a rock musical he has been working on. “It changed direction once I got into it,” he says. “I had a hard time giving up songs for a stage production that I could see the band playing.”

    The singer’s instincts were correct. Though the Decemberists once came off  as overly precious, the band lately has become a force in its own right, particularly keyboardist Jenny Conlee. When Meloy introduced his songs about a forest queen, a shape-shifting predator and a fatalistic romance to the band, they jumped at the opportunity to indulge their progressive-rock fantasies.

    “This kind of music is in Jenny’s bones,” Meloy says. “She gets to rock that big Hammond [organ]. She’s a dedicated Jethro Tull fan, so she’s really in her element on this tour.”

    The band’s ability to range across a wide range of textures, from acoustic reveries to knock-down-the-doors crescendos, matches the twists and turns in the “Hazards of Love” narrative. To fill all the singing roles, Meloy brought in several ringers, including Worden of My Brightest Diamond and Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond, putting him just a step or two away from casting a full-on stage adaptation. The singer maintains that he’s still hard at work at a musical that could play Broadway, and is intent upon writing one with a story that actually rocks.

    “Most rock musicals don’t work because of the music,” he says. “The Broadway musical used to be an art form that was financially viable even on the margins, and there were more people practicing it, more people invested in making it great. Now the musical is a niche that’s only really happening in New York, at least the financially viable stuff, and it’s run by huge corporations catering to tourists. It panders to the lowest common denominator, with schlock music that just gets worse and worse.

        “I’m not pretending I can single-handedly change that, because there might not be an audience for it,” he says. “But I’ve never pursued anything by first judging how cool it is. I’m just trying to follow my whims to the best of my ability, and create something that’s true to my voice.”

    greg@gregkot.com

The Decemberists
    (Play the hits) 9 p.m. Aug. 6 at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., $35 (sold out); etix.com.
     (Play “Hazards of Love”) 6 p.m. Aug. 7, Budweiser Stage at Lollapalooza in Grant Park, $80; lollapalooza.com.

Sponsored Link: Amazon's The Decemberists Store

As punk bands come and go, this bicontinental collective of art students, rabble-rousers and comedians has endured for more than 30 years. Their music continues to bridge chasms between country, rock, reggae, folk, electronica and the avant-garde with heart and humor. A new album is being cooked up as they convene in Chicago for a rare gig, 8 p.m. Thursday at Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $20; schubas.com.

greg@gregkot.com

Sponsored Link: Amazon's The Mekons Store

    Another year, another band. So it goes for Jack White, guitarist-singer-songwriter and one-man force of retro-rock nature as he introduced his latest creation, the Dead Weather, on Tuesday in the first of two sold-out concerts at the Vic Theatre.

    White’s had quite a decade. He took the bluesy stomp of his duo the White Stripes to international fame, then split off to form the Raconteurs with his old Detroit-scene peer Brendan Benson. With those two bands briefly on hiatus, he’s now teaming with Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart, Raconteurs bassist Jack Lawrence and Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Dean Fertita in Dead Weather.

    Rather than strutting out front with his guitar, White primarily devotes himself to drums in Dead Weather. But he’s still clearly the band’s guiding force; the band’s spacious arrangements flow from his loose, orchestral flair for percussion. He embroiders the beat with fills, rim shots, jazzy splashes on his crash cymbals, and orchestrates the dynamics from near-silence to thundering crescendos.

    It takes a strong personality to fill his shoes as the primary vocalist, and Mosshart is up to the task; she brings a femme-fatale sullenness to the job and plenty of bravado. She perched herself atop the stage monitors during the menacing “60 Feet Tall” as if to prove she measured up, and the pumped-up audience roared its approval.  

     As with everything White does, the band is steeped in no-frills style. If the recorded versions of the songs rely too much on attitude to get across, the quartet milked those possibilities for drama on stage. They echoed all sorts of raunchy predecessors, turning the devil-met-me-at-the-crossroads tropes of the blues into tales both erotic and Gothic, a twist of the stake away from the imaginary soundtrack to an Anne Rice novel.

    Fans of the blues-sex-death unholy trinity have seen this sort of thing before, of course, notably in Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s Gun Club and Royal Trux’s seedy testimonials. Then PJ Harvey practically reinvented the vocabulary in the ‘90s. The Dead Weather knows the language, and though there were a few slack moments on some of the less vibrant tunes, the peaks were mighty promising. Call-and-response vocal patterns turned one of Bob Dylan’s slightest songs, “New Pony,” into a roar. And Mosshart and White raised the temperature in the already swampy room when they went nose-to-nose for “Will There Be Enough Water?”

    The band worked through its debut album and tossed in a couple of obscure covers (by Irish garage-soul progenitors Them and ‘60s psychedelic rockers the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band), and were still barely on stage for an hour. It was a short but intense set, from a band that should be even better in a year or so – that is, if the ever-restless White hasn’t moved on to another project by then.

       Perhaps White could find time to write a few tunes with Marissa Paternoster, the singer-guitarist in opening band Screaming Females. Dressed in a drab granny dress and hiding behind black bangs, Paternoster showed astonishing dexterity on guitar, with short, frantic bursts of virtuosity that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Slayer album.

    At times, she sounded as if she were trying to play lead and rhythm simultaneously, creating overtones that made the New Jersey basement-rock trio sound far bigger than it actually was. Her singing was equally commanding, a deep alto voice punctuated by harrowing screams. Her rhythm section did a solid job, if only to prove they could keep up with their dynamite-tossing guitarist.

     greg@gregkot.com

Sponsored Link: Amazon's The Dead Weather Store

    On Monday, it was Bruce Springsteen announcing that he would perform a revered album (“Born to Run”) in its entirety in Chicago. On Tuesday, it was the Pixies’ turn.

    The  quartet announced that it would play its 1989 classic “Doolittle” front to back in two shows Nov. 20 and 21 at the Aragon Ballroom. The shows will be part of a nine-city tour in which the band will look back on an album that ushered in the alternative-rock ‘90s, with a profound influence on Nirvana and others.

    The band (Black Francis, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering) said the shows will include rarely performed B sides from the era as well, including  "Weird at My School," "Dancing the Manta Ray," and "Bailey's Walk,” besides better-known tracks from the album ("Debaser," "Wave of Mutilation," "Here Comes Your Man," "Hey,"  "Gouge Away").

    Tickets for the Aragon shows will go on sale Sept. 12, with price details to come.

    greg@gregkot.com

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Pixies Store

    Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are returning to play the United Center on Sept. 20, but this time with a twist: They’ll perform his 1975 album “Born to Run” in its entirety (plus other songs from throughout Springsteen's career).

    Tickets ($98 and $65 plus service fees) go on sale at 11 a.m. Saturday through Ticketmaster, concert promoters Jam Productions announced Monday. Springsteen headlined the venue last May as part of a world tour.

    “Born to Run” is Springsteen’s breakthrough album. Its release was heralded by simultaneous cover stories in Time and Newsweek. Though it produced only one top-40 single (the iconic title song), many tracks have long been concert staples, including “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Backstreets,” “She’s the One” and “Jungleland.”

    The gambit makes Springsteen the latest artist to jump on the trend of playing a classic album from start to finish in concert. Other performers who have done it in recent years or are about to do it are Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, the Pixies, Judas Priest, Aerosmith, Genesis, Brian Wilson, Van Morrison and Steely Dan.

    I think it’s a great idea to hear a truly great album played live, especially because it gives the fans a chance to hear tracks that have rarely, if ever, been performed. But what do you think? Is the prospect of Springsteen playing “Born to Run” a reason to see him, or a reason to stay away because you might not hear some of his better-known songs from other albums?

    greg@gregkot.com    

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Bruce Springsteen Store

     The Hideout’s annual end-of-summer block party will be devoted to Chicago-based Bloodshot Records on its 15th anniversary, the label announced Monday.

       The Sept. 12 festival will feature some of Bloodshot’s finest artists, past and present: Alejandro Escovedo, the Waco Brothers, Bobby Bare Jr., the Deadstring Brothers, Scott Biram, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, and reunions of the Blacks and Moonshine Willy.

       A $10 donation to benefit charities is requested. Reservations can be made through bloodshotrecords.com.

       In other concert news Monday, Wilco added a second Chicago date on Oct. 19 at the UIC Pavilion after selling out the Oct. 18  concert. Tickets ($39.50 plus service fees) are on sale now through Ticketmaster or at the Pavilion box office.

    greg@gregkot.com

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Wilco Store

Rating: 2 stars

One of the stars of the “High School Musical” Disney franchise, Ashley Tisdale is striving to establish a pop persona apart from that juggernaut. She’s also trying to distinguish herself from a parade of perky divas trying to make the transition from teen queens into full-blown pop stars (Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, Avril Lavigne). The CD cover of "Guilty Pleasure" (Warner Bros.) finds Tisdale in makeover mode, her blond cheerleader look axed in favor of something a bit more dark and sensual, with a touch of Goth. The music tries to follow suit. At the outset of her second solo album, the 24-year-old singer promises “a new beginning” and announces it’s time to “get dirty,” as if to live up to her sorta, kinda bad-girl cover image.

But Tisdale doesn’t really deliver, even as she dials down the puppy-love schmaltz of her 2007 debut. She deals with some heavier subjects (a divorce in “How Do You Love Someone”) and more risqué relationships (she feels naughty swooning over a biker in “Hot Mess”), while slightly toughening up her sound to embrace rock-lite guitars. But mostly this is assembly-line pop: Plug in a pretty but relatively undistinguished voice amid a bunch of air-tight pop tunes written by such brand names as Kara DioGuardi (who has authored hits for Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood), Billy Steinberg (Madonna), Toby Gad (Beyonce, Fergie) and Diane Warren (who hasn’t she written for?).

Unfortunately, “Guilty Pleasure” isn’t one, in part because it plays it so safe. The only glimmer of personality is glimpsed in “Hair,” where Tisdale discourses for three minutes on the joys of having her tresses turned inside out by her boyfriend. Outside of that sure-fire slumber-party hit, she sounds like a perfectly shampooed showbiz product.

greg@gregkot.com

The Wanton Looks: Though they have only about eight songs written, this Chicago quartet shows enough promise to make me hope they stick around long enough to write a bunch more. They specialize in massive choruses over heavy, fuzz-tone guitars. Nothing chintzy or undernourished about this sound.  Bassist Traci Trouble, drummer Meg Thomas and guitarists Inga Olson and Susie Q simply bring the rock, 9 p.m. Friday with the equally terrific Dials at the Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee, $8; ticketmaster.com.

greg@gregkot.com

     Lollapalooza headliners are having a rough week. Jane’s Addiction, scheduled to perform Aug. 7 at the Grant Park festival, reported Thursday that drummer Stephen Perkins has been admitted to a Los Angeles hospital to treat an elbow infection.

       Jane’s canceled its forthcoming Australian tour, scheduled to begin Saturday and run through Aug. 1, so that Perkins could spend a few days in the hospital to undergo anti-biotic treatments. But the band’s publicist said Perkins’ condition is “not expected to impact Lollapalooza in any way.” The band’s Web site has erased the Australian dates from the tour schedule, but still lists its Aug. 7 Lollapalooza appearance.

       Earlier this week, the Beastie Boys canceled their Aug. 8 headlining appearance at the festival so that Adam Yauch could undergo cancer surgery next week.  They were replaced in the lineup the next day by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

       In related news, the Beastie Boys were replaced by Jay-Z as July 31 headliners at another major festival, All Points West in New Jersey. The Goldenvoice promoters of the three-day festival offered refunds to anyone who bought an $80 single-day ticket for the Beastie Boys performance, Billboard magazine reported Thursday. In contrast, Texas-based promoters C3 Presents are not offering refunds for the Beastie Boys’ Lollapalooza cancellation, saying, “C3 Presents’ policy is that cancellation by individual bands does not entitle a ticket holder to a refund. With over 100 acts, the fans are still receiving a tremendous value.”

        greg@gregkot.com

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Jane’s Addiction Store