“We’re going to have a Ferris wheel, a Tilt-a-Whirl, a Yoyo. Carnival games like throwing darts at balloons,” says Riot Fest founder Mike Petryshyn. “Just picture a state fair—that’s kind of what we’re doing.” As he describes this year’s version of the annual punk-and-proud music festival, I’m able to picture it pretty clearly—right up until I remember that this particular state fair will feature four stages of bands, including the Stooges and the Jesus & Mary Chain, playing smack in the middle of Humboldt Park. That’s when things get blurry.
Though Petryshyn and McKeough have been discussing taking Riot Fest outside since 2009, they were hesitant—but then the Chicago version (it exists in four cities now) got too big for its britches and forced their hands. “We always kind of knew we were cannibalizing our audience in that they had to make tough choices,” he says. “Do I go see Circle Jerks or Articles of Faith?” A multivenue approach made it almost impossible to fix that problem.
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This year’s lineup, 51 bands strong, includes plenty of the usual old farts playing the classic punk they wrote decades ago. But parts of it look a bit like Warped Tour lite: A Day to Remember, August Burns Red, A Wilhelm Scream, et cetera. “Sean and I were both kind of biting our nails,” Petryshyn says. “By having some Warped bands on there, we didn’t know how our base was going to react. But at the same time, I don’t want to be that 34-year-old guy pointing the finger and being like, ‘That’s not punk rock—that’s not hardcore. Our scene was better.’”
“It doesn’t have to be gloss and glitz like Electric Daisy or anything,” he explains. “It just has to be something different and something cool. I think with the bands, we achieved that, but we wanted to add other elements—hence the carnival. No one else is really doing it in Chicago proper. We just want people to have fun at our fest. As innocent and naive as that sounds, that’s really the goal.”
Descendents7:45 PMRoots Stage I really couldn’t have felt cooler standing three feet from Milo Aukerman and Bill Stevenson at last year’s Riot Fest as they discussed the feasibility of a third encore. Just being there made me feel in with the in crowd—I was one of the too-cool kids the Descendents had grumbled about on their pioneering pop-punk albums (especially 1982’s Milo Goes to College and 1985’s I Don’t Want to Grow Up). The band made their mark in the early and mid-80s, when the west-coast hardcore of Black Flag was on the way up, but the Descendents play punk for quirky spazzes and dorks in thick-rimmed glasses who have no problem throwing an elbow but also get down with fart noises and cheesy love songs for silly girls. It’s got to be surreal for these guys to play the same chords and sing the same lyrics they wrote when they were 19 years old, but unless I’m misunderstanding the whole kid-at-heart thing, that’s exactly what they’ve always wanted. —Kevin Warwick
Elvis Costello & the Imposters5:25 PMRoots StageElvis Costello the punk icon, as opposed to Elvis Costello the 58-year-old husband of a jazz pianist, is forever sharp and snappily dressed, with a smart new-wave bite and songs full of big Fender hooks and infectious organ lines. There’s always been an iconoclastic side to Costello: in his early catalog, you can hear it in singles like the untouchable “Radio Radio,” but deeper into his career it resulted in other kinds of risk taking as he tooled around with R&B, country, and even chamber music (in 1993 he collaborated with the Brodsky Quartet on The Juliet Letters). Still, it’s those first few albums, most notably 1977’s My Aim Is True and 1978’s This Year’s Model, that got him invited to Riot Fest in 2012, and I’d be surprised if he and the Imposters (aka the Attractions minus the estranged Bruce Thomas) didn’t blow the dust off a few oldies. —Kevin Warwick
Frank Turner Fri 9/14, 10 PM, Cobra Lounge, sold out, 21+
Fri 9/14, 6 PM, Congress Theater, sold out. A Sat 9/15 and Sun 9/16, 11:30 AM, Humboldt Park, Sacramento and Division, $45 per day, $99 VIP pass per day, $79.98 two-day Humboldt Park pass, $175 two-day Humboldt Park VIP pass, all three-day passes sold out, all ages.
