Peter, Bjorn and John @ Double Door

As we left Lollapalooza 2007 behind us, I said to Brad, “anyone who goes to an afterparty now is an idiot.” I suppose this makes me the biggest of idiots. I think this was an invite-only show or something, but I’m guessing if you happened to talk to the right people at the festival, you’d get a pass. I lucked my way onto the guestlist and was happy to be there. But in order to impress me at all, they were going to have to really pull out something great. I was totally spent after three days of Lolla-ing around in the sun.

Earlier in the day, the Citi stage lost power which cut into half of Peter, Bjorn & John's allotted time. Early in their Double Door set, one of them thanked the crowd for coming out and noted, “It’s been a long day.” The first half of their performance was very poppy and somewhat flat. Thax Douglas was there and bopping his head along, though he didn't recite a poem. I saw him only briefly at the festival, but he was there (not sure if recited anything before any band's performance there, either). They brought Nikki from Silversun Pickups on stage to sing their hit song, “Young Folks” with them. What can I say, the girl gets around... The whistling portion of the song was obviously on a loop, but they pretended to whistle into a microphone anyway. I can see why they have to do this – if they just danced around and the whistles just appeared out of the snowhere, people be put off, right? After “Young Folks,” they went to their more rockin’ selections and the whole scene changed. I was all prepared to slam them for a weak set (and partly blame my exhaustion), but every track after this was great. The crowd matched them, bouncing around to these tunes, particularly the encore, “Up Against the Wall.” I gotta hand it to them as well because I am fairly certain all of them were at Lollapalooza today and had to deal with the heat. Finishing on a high note was the way to go, and I left with the desire to see them again on a day where I'm not already rawked out. No photos on this one as I only took a couple horrendous ones before my camera ran out of juice. Those boys were right, it was a long day – even for machines.