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Music

Storm Delays Couldn't Extinguish the Spirit of Lollapalooza Day Three

When the sun came back out, Skylar Spence, Florence + the Machine and FKA Twigs sparkled.

Photos by Daniel Patlán

I’m standing in the lavish lobby of the Palmer House hotel, a block and a half from Grant Park, and I’m soaked. Skylar Spence is just tired. His set was supposed to start at 2:50 PM on the Pepsi stage; at 2:40, a Lollapalooza official came bounding out from the loading dock to announce that the festival was suspended, effective immediately. The “extreme weather” we were warned about seemed pretty tame at the time, but by 3:15 or so, the huddled Palmer masses are chilled to the bone, and the paramedics are, for once, attending to a slip-and-fall and not an overdose.

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Spence, the pop-disco artist from New York formerly known as Saint Pepsi (currently shivering in his red Coca-Cola t-shirt) had just played in Boston on Thursday, driven through the night to do Osheaga in Montreal on Friday, sleepwalked to Ohio, slept, and soldiered on to Chicago. With his manager and the three other pieces of his live band in tow, this is supposed to be the last stop on a string of summer dates, the climax of a year and a half of critical and commercial breakthrough. “I was gonna get all emotional on stage,” he tells me. “‘I can’t believe we made it.’ ‘Thank you.' Stuff like that.”

For the moment, it seems unlikely. Dripping halter tops and redundant Camelbacks shuffle off to bathrooms, definitely not to do coke. Spence’s booking agent works a cracked iPhone, pressing promoters for a late-night DJ set to save the schedule. A seventy-something man leans on the deserted concierge desk wearing a Cubs shirt that says “IT’S GONNA HAPPEN.”

All of a sudden, we’re moving. One of the chosen few with wireless coverage had seen the organizers’ tweet announcing that gates would re-open at 3:30, with music to follow a half-hour after. The word isn’t so much passed on as spread through osmosis, as if everyone knows within three minutes of each other. What isn’t communicated is the schedule for the rest of the day—the break was short enough that the festival could choose not to reschedule the acts who were rained out and proceed, more or less, as planned. So as the hordes of fans march back toward Lake Michigan, Spence and his camp still don’t know if their tour has been cut short.

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Sunday’s bigger acts didn’t face quite as much uncertainty, though even the headliners played truncated sets. Florence + the Machine were set to close the night from the Samsung stage, and did it in superb fashion, despite running through only nine songs. (If you’re going to depart early due to an August thunderstorm in the Midwest, there are worse songs to end on than “Dog Days Are Over.”) The cuts from this year’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful—“Ship to Wreck,” “Delilah,” “St. Jude,” "What the Water Gave Me”—were especially energetic. At the end of her set, Florence ripped off her top and ran through the pit in a bra, which is the fastest anyone was able to move through the park all night.

If you talk to commercial airline pilots, they’ll tell you that you should never be worried on a plane, simply because so many things have to go wrong at the same time for the passengers to be in any real danger. A$AP Rocky is the opposite of an airplane. The Harlemite with the Memphis flows and the Houston everything else can be engaging, but a whole host of factors have to conspire to make him so. A live, outdoor setting is not his wheelhouse. Rocky debuted “Superheroes” from Chief Keef’s excellent, just-released Bang 3; that and a few other songs (“Pretty Flacko Jodye 2,” “Goldie”) aside, the set was dead in the water. Vic Mensa came out to perform “U Mad,” his Kanye West collaboration from this spring, but the hometowner’s duet was followed by back-to-back covers of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Jump Around,” either one of which screams “I HAVE NO MORE IDEAS FOR MY LIVE SHOW.”

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The day’s best performer was almost definitely FKA Twigs, who brought unsettling vulnerability to a damp stage in the middle of a hectic, twice-rescheduled night. If LP1 didn’t convince you of her incisiveness as a writer and vocalist, maybe seeing her crumple herself into a ball during “Water Me” will. Bully was nearly as great, with lead singer Alicia Bognanno somehow wrangling the sound system to make her growling voice one of the clearest of the whole weekend.

“Talent show” is a pejorative term in live music, but it applies to Twenty One Pilots' extracurriculars more than their musicianship. I can count on one hand the number of artists who could climb ladders and have drum kits crowd surf the way the Ohio duo did. (Yes, I’m thinking of Gunplay.) If anything, the weather delays and general up-in-the-air sense of Sunday loosened tension and allowed performers to let down their guard, lower the stakes. Before last night, I’d never heard Kygo’s “Sexual Healing” flip, but when you see thousands of still-dripping people diving fully into the record, you get it.

As for Skylar Spence, the tour wasn’t over after all. With the reshuffling of all the acts, the (formerly known as Saint) Pepsi stage was out. Instead, the show shifted over to the smaller but more scenic BMI stage, right on the harbor, and 2:50 became 5:45, a start time that came with at least a few hundred extra fans. Spence and the band ran through his catalog, from old cuts like “Private Caller” to “Can’t You See,” the single from this September’s Prom King. It was loose. It was preposterously fun. And the heartfelt monologue never happened: Spence just laughed, said “Thanks,” and walked off.

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