By: Brady Lavin
Experiments can sometimes go horribly wrong. Beakers can boil over, frogs can mutate, and people can accidentally create unstable explosives when they are just trying to make a precipitate form in a solution. The Chicago edition of Dave Matthews Band Caravan was definitely an experiment, and although no unstable explosives killed anyone, not everything was peachy and wonderful.
Fans camping at the main stage, waiting for Dave
DMB Caravan was the guinea pig for Chicago’s new South Side venue, Lakeside, which is located at the former site of a steel manufacturing facility that shut down in 1992. Right on the lake, the site would seem perfect for a festival. It is a wide area of unused land, parking is free, there are no curfew restrictions like there are downtown, and there is plenty of space for Dave fans to camp out before and in-between days.
Wait a second, there’s no camping allowed. Anybody from out of town has to get a hotel downtown. How do people get to and from Lakeside and their hotels/homes? Well, in the absence of a motorized vehicle, fans can spend a small fortune on cabs back and forth, spend a couple hours waiting for a train to get to the shuttles, which they will also wait a while for, or hitchhike, which some actually tried (unsuccessfully) to do.
Of course, the clusterfuck that was public transportation to and from Lakeside did get better from the first to the third day of the festival, but only marginally. There is a glass ceiling to how fast thousands and thousands of people can get out of a secluded corner of Chicago’s South Side. In order to not sit in an interminably long line of cars/buses/cabs on South Shore Drive, you would’ve had to have left in the middle of Dave Matthews Band’s set each night, and that was NOT an option for the vast majority of people in attendance.
Also, it is such a good thing that the skies did not part and shower the Caravan with rain. While that would have made the heat more bearable on the ever-muggy third day, but it would’ve turned the festival grounds into a quagmire of mud. Not the good kind of Woodstock mud where hippies can have fun on natural Slip ‘N Slides, but mud and rocks and a 50/50 combination. And the wood chips. Oh, the wood chips. They love to get stuck in shoes, don’t they.
Green Man made an appearance at the Flaming Lips' set
Because Dave Matthews is committed to environmentalism, and possibly to atone for the whole “bridge poop” incident, Caravan is supposed to be a “green festival”. This means that all the beer cups are 100% compostable and made from corn syrup, outside reusable water bottles are encouraged, the carbon footprint caused by the traveling fest is offest, and carpooling is encouraged. This also meant that they didn’t have any pamphlets with the lineup, though, which made seeing the right bands that much more difficult. One would think that they would have posters with the lineup in more places than at the entrance of the festival, but that is apparently another way they cut back to be green. While a phone with a good camera alleviates that problem, not everyone has a smart phone. Or a good enough memory to remember to take a picture of the lineup upon entry.
All these factors could have made for a really terrible experience, but the truth is that DMB Caravan was a blast. Lakeside itself was a disappointment, but the bands were exceptional. Hand-picked by Dave Matthews himself, the Chicago Caravan included great performances by Flaming Lips (playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon), Kid Cudi, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Soja, Mariachi El Bronx, The Wailers, Yonder Mountain String Band, and, of course, three full sets by Dave Matthews Band.
Stay tuned for our highlights of the festival, including reviews and plenty of photographs of the artists mentioned above and more.
