“Free Space: Weather Delay” is a four-word story I didn’t expect to write this past weekend, even though I’d put those words in the center square of a Pitchfork bingo card on my second trip to the festival as the Chicago Reader’s official bingo correspondent. Aside from a flurry of alarm that the dreadful Canadian wildfire smoke would return, throughout the week all signs had pointed toward near perfect weather for the fest. Not blistering heat, not smoke, not a drop of rain: even with our climate collapsing around us day by day, everything seemed to have lined up perfectly. Perhaps suspiciously so.
In the end, it was not meant to be. As the day began on Saturday, hints of rain lingered in warnings about Cubs weather delays and ominous satellite images on my phone, and a few drops of rain brought the real possibility of the day going sideways into view. The first casualty, even before the festival was evacuated, was Palm’s set, scheduled for 1:45 on the Red Stage—supposedly one of their last performances ever, and mercifully rescheduled for the following day.
At around 4:15 PM, when my friend Grant and I used our Guest Pass privileges to leave the fest and grab a quick snack from a 7/11 on South Racine about 20 minutes away, we had no idea that the fest would grind to a halt before we even got there. Light rain and momentary lightning had been enough to convince the organizers to send everyone packing.
When news of what would become a 90-minute suspension of the festival came to our phones, Grant and I were already elsewhere. As we ambled down Racine, in no hurry and eager to catch up after his early-morning Saturday flight from his home in New York, the two of us happened upon a giant green creature peering out through a window in a bright yellow oversize door, its fuzzy beard, curly horns, and generous underbite capturing our attention.
It was obvious to both of us, in the sense of festival unreality we shared, that the fearsome-looking creature had a kindly spirit. We lost track of time sheltering in that doorway, watched over by our new friend, who eavesdropped on our talk of relationship drama, broken connections, and moving along in spite of it all. As I would scream along with King Krule upon returning to the festival: “If you’re going through hell / You just keep going.”
Our monster guardian is, mercifully, not merely a hallucination shared by two tired friends but a wonderful creature well worth a visit. Our stay in that doorway, which seemed to stop time completely as it happened, was only a blip in the weekend—and my own idiosyncratic journey with a dear friend was just one of an uncountable profusion of narratives spun in those 90 minutes. “Free Space: Weather Delay” tells a far richer story than four words reasonably should.
For Grant and I, it’d been nearly two months—an eventful stretch in both of our lives—since we’d last been together at his New York apartment. Those perfect moments were vital for us both, cleaving the festival in half—just as Saturday rain in 2019 broke the oppressive heat and made the final day and a half a balmy, easeful affair.
I had a joyous time handing out bingo cards at Pitchfork last year, and this year proved even more beautiful, particularly with art by my friend Anna Claire White (which paid homage to the Reader’s Pitchfork covers of yore) adorning the card. It was a remarkable experience to slip through the lives of so many other festivalgoers this weekend, taking any little excuse to get a card in someone’s hands.
Because I’m someone who can subsist on the easy pleasure of fleeting conversations with curious strangers—all you need is a beautiful tattoo or a wacky Simpsons T-shirt, and I’ll want to know more about you—the experience of passing out bingo cards to hundreds of people was a gift in itself. I say this with my whole heart: every interaction facilitated by this silly project, whether we spoke for two minutes or danced and did poppers together at Axel Boman or Jockstrap or Ariel Zetina, made this weekend a dream that I’m still not prepared to awaken from.
Festivals are by nature impermanent. In my recap last year, I described the inevitable arrival of this recognition as “That moment on Sunday,” when you come to terms with the fact that you have an important meeting the next day and this thing won’t last much longer. If I talked to you for more than a couple minutes at the festival, I probably tried to describe to you the Japanese concept of mono no aware: an awareness of the ephemerality of the present moment, bringing with it a gratitude for the experience and an appreciation that good things cannot last.
It’s a hard feeling to escape in the magical three-day bubble, and it’s intensified whenever something goes right—a rain delay ends in time for you to see a beloved artist, for instance, or fortuitous scheduling lets you cut across the park to see every minute of two of your top-priority sets. And because your heightened attention to these circumstances lasts for just a few days, you can get a sense of generous blessing, an indication that this moment is there to be enjoyed for any and all.
Of course, we still live in a pandemic. Despite every signal we get from seemingly every government official, COVID-19 rages on. Our fundamental drive toward sociability and human connection, especially as mediated through music, leaves us vulnerable to a potentially life-altering viral illness. That reality came crashing into my festival weekend plans on Friday morning, as I awoke to a miserable text message: my friend Sasha Geffen, a key companion at three previous Pitchforks, had tested positive that morning before their flight, infected again just two weeks after they’d gotten COVID traveling abroad.
In an instant, a vision of the three days before me vanished—I’d been looking forward to sharing time with a dear friend, helping them have fun after they’d dealt with getting sick in another country, and commiserating together and licking our wounds over our messy recent pasts. We were ready to stretch the 72 hours as far as we could manage.
Largely alone on the first day of the festival for the first time in many years, I was repeatedly caught unprepared by an immense sadness, which first struck when Grace Ives’s Laurie Anderson-esque vocals made me think about Sasha’s writing and its emphasis on vocal modulation. Then my friend Ramona arrived to spend the weekend as my festival plus-one, and we got to take in Perfume Genius—which reminded me that Sasha and I had seen him open for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs just eight weeks earlier at Red Rocks in Colorado. Sobs wracked my body as I grieved for the chance to watch this set by Sasha’s side. All I could do was appreciate the aftershocks of our shared experience from June still reverberating within me, the body memory enough to return their presence to my side.
As Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul insisted in their performance of the standout track “Haha”: “Guess you had to be there.” At its best, life is a series of fortunate coincidences: the universe delivers you to the precise place you were meant to be, precisely when you were meant to be there. As Saturday came to a close, I watched Weyes Blood sing “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” in which she pondered our crumbling shared reality, offering a few small words of kindness: “Living in the wake of overwhelming changes / We’ve all become strangers / Even to ourselves.”
I left her set soon thereafter, my body commanding me to dance at the Blue Stage with Adigéry and Pupul. Another Adigéry lyric—“Let go of this mental interpretation / Your body knows what to do”—nudged me to stop thinking and just let things run their course. Meanwhile, back in the bleachers, Ramona and her partner Patrick sat in the drizzle, joined by Archy Marshall—also known as King Krule, one of my favorite performers of the entire festival. Rather than feel jealousy that I wasn’t there, I knew that we were each where we were meant to be, sent by some unseen force in an infinite choose-your-own-adventure story.
To become a stranger, even to oneself, can feel terrifying. But all weekend, I felt the kindness of others: a man named Isaac, for instance, asked for a bingo card and then shared a 20-minute conversation about our mutual love of Kraftwerk and dancing at music festivals. It’s a rare privilege to glimpse the basic goodness of another human being right in front of you, and it obliges you to do your best to reflect that goodness back into the world. I think of a card that my friend Julia sent me in October 2020, reflecting on the upheavals of a long summer of pandemic and protest: “Funny how we become strangers to ourselves at times,” she wrote. “Funnier still how it feels on the other side.”
Throughout the weekend, I felt most content whenever “I” was furthest away from my ego, that complicated narrating force that compels all the little stories I tell myself. At those times, what felt most palpable was instead the company of those I love, the memory of others unable to be there, the warmth of new people, and the joyous release of seeing excellent live music. Whoever “I” was this weekend is only a fraction of the story: I feel much more bound to everything that I can’t write about this experience. These words are just a facsimile of my time, whether I’d spent it in Union Park, at Ariel’s Party at the Hideout on Friday night, or anywhere else, especially that journey to the big yellow door.
I stayed for a few moments of Bon Iver’s festival-closing set on Sunday. He played the For Emma, Forever Ago track “Lump Sum” early enough that I could get in one last cathartic cry before departing. As I made my way back home to my partner Elise, listening to Julia Jacklin’s “Pressure to Party” and Sen Morimoto’s “People Watching” in my headphones, I paid a visit to a new but dear friend, the South Racine monster. I felt like we’d known each other much longer than a day or so, and I was sure its goofy green presence would take care of me anytime I found myself biking that way.
Festivals are supposed to bring people together, and they have many ways to do it, whether we seek them out or not—an extended catch-up with a close friend, for instance, or the fleeting high of a passed poppers bottle and a silly conversation about the Denver Nuggets. “Free Space: Weather Delay” can’t capture all those feelings, of course, but those four words now stand for all the many worlds that passed through me this weekend, never to be seen again.
