I took Cody to the Amtrak station Thursday evening for his sendoff to the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, with a trip out to Portland to see my mom/visit a couple of colleges to follow. We lugged his stuff - he packed light on clothes but heavy on technology - to the ticket window and found out the train was running late. I’ll hang out until 8, I said. That’s fine, he replied.

So I did. I hung out until 8. They have a flat panel teevee in the station now; some of the people waiting for the train to Chicago sat slackjawed watching CNN. Others played with their phones. Cody and I played with our phones and talked about the rather offensive “health care” ads CNN was running. It was the ads, actually, that drove me out of the station at 8, but I could also see out of the corner of my eye that a couple other festival-goers Cody knew had spotted him and, you know, why get in the way?

In keeping with the festival theme, Jim and I watched Woodstock: The Director’s Cut over the weekend. I’d never seen it (I know!), but I’ve seen so much performance footage from Woodstock that I wasn’t sure I’d been missing anything. Turns out I was pretty wrong. Canned Heat! The Who! Santana! Richie Havens looking/sounding like a giant Jose Gonzalez crossed with Tom Jones!

So. Cody has Pitchfork (hardly capturing the zeitgeist [is there even such a thing any more? Can you have a zeitgeist to capture when everything is in your face at all times?], but still a return to non-traveling festivals); my parents had Woodstock (they didn’t go, but that whole generation claims it, I grew up on the music and its influence AND it really did capture the zeitgeist of that approximate moment in time). That leaves me with early 90s Lollapalooza, which was nothing like either of these festivals.

1994 was a weird time for formerly-small/indie-in-spirit music, having lost Kurt Cobain just a few months prior. You could definitely sense things shifting and changing, though into what was anyone’s guess. No one was giving much thought to the internet except for Courtney Love’s ramblings in the Velvet Rope folder on AOL. (I didn’t find an archive after a cursory search, but back then a friend in California had access to this mysterious AOL and would fax - FAX! - me pages of Ms. Love’s postings. I’m sure I still have them)

I went to Lollapalooza that year representing a Chicago magazine, though obviously not as a photographer:

Flaming Lips played the second stage, did an amazing cover of Queen’s “Under Pressure” (I’d link you, but I can’t find any good audio), and had a plain old bubble machine instead of putting Wayne in a bubble.

Cody, who was not with me that day, had just turned two.