Riot Fest is a multi-day music festival founded 20 years ago in Chicago. It is ostensibly a punk rock festival, but the lineups also bleed into rock, alternative, metal and hip-hop. It is about as far from the Chicago Blues Festival held each year in downtown Chicago’s Millenium Park as you can get. Or is it? Ok, it is.
But for those who are willing to extend the branches of their musical tastes from the traditional American roots music of blues and folk – without going too far out on a limb (e.g., hardcore metal, pop punk, etc.) – there is a path from the American Blues Scene to many of the bands who took to the stages over three days in Douglass Park on Chicago’s West Side this September.
One of this year’s biggest headliners would certainly agree.
In a 2014 interview with Dan Rather, Jack White, who played the Roots Stage on Saturday night, drew a notable parallel between Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line” and The Stooges’ “No Fun.” As he showed, the blues rhythms are the same, but The Stooges simply played it with a harsher “rock and roll” attitude – an attitude which then extended the branches of that root sound to “all the punk bands in England and on and on…”
It’s an extension from the American blues that is no different from that which led us to the British blues rock of the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and Cream, the heavier blues rock of Led Zeppelin, and the more modern garage rock of The White Stripes and The Black Keys. Blues with attitude. Like White mentioned to Rather, no one does it quite like The Stooges. Or White himself for that matter.
For an hour on the Roots Stage, White played a blistering set that, fittingly enough, began with a cover of The Stooges’ “TV Eye.” He then jumped into “Old Scratch Blues” and “That’s How I’m Feeling” from his latest release (No Name) before digging into his White Stripes’ and Raconteurs’ catalogs with such burners like “Black Math,” “Broken Boy Soldier,” “Cannon,” “Ball and Biscuit” and “Icky Thump” before closing with his solo hit “Lazaretto,” followed by “Steady, as She Goes” and “Seven Nation Army.”
For fans of White and The Stooges – a raw, industrial, blue-collar, garage rock sound owing its roots to the legend himself, John Lee Hooker – there was plenty to like over the three days of Riot Fest, highlighted by the Bristol, UK band IDLES. The band, led by singer Joe Talbot, rejects the notion that they are “punk.” He views the label as too restrictive, inhibiting a band’s evolution and ignoring genre-defying messages of their lyrics that address positivity, inclusivity, and mental health. On the surface, these might seem unpunk—but in today’s world, they’re some of the most punk messages of all.
Regardless of how you define them, IDLES fit the raw, industrial, rock sound of Detroit. A connection so fitting, in fact, that White himself made a surprise appearance during their set on Sunday night to play “Never Fight a Man with a Perm,” a song from the band’s 2018 sophomore release Joy as an Act of Resistance.
Continuing the aforementioned connections, it is not too difficult to get from The Stooges to The Ramones, who were represented by their second drummer, Marky Ramone. With Marky behind the kit and singer Iñaki “Pela” Urbizu – who perfectly captures the essence of Joey Ramone – at the mic, the band played a Ramones-dedicated set of such classics as “Do You Wanna Dance?,” “Teenage Lobotomy,” “Beat on the Brat,” “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” “Rockaway Beach,” “Cretin Hop,” “Judy Is a Punk,” “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” “I Wanna Be Sedated,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment,” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.”
Other highlights from the weekend, for fans willing to trace the late-70s/early-80s blues-punk connections, included Stiff Little Fingers, the Northern Irish punk band formed in 1977; Bad Religion, the LA punk band formed in 1979; and Didjits, a Central Illinois punk band formed in 1981.
For those fans whose musical tastes are rooted more in folk, indie rock is obviously a much closer walk. Those fans were treated to such indie rock stalwarts as Camper Van Beethoven, The Hold Steady, and Superchunk.
Finally, for those fans across the pond, there was the Celtic/folk punk of The Tossers (who actually hail from Chicago) and The Pogues, the renowned English band hailing from London, as well as the indie/alternative rock of Inhaler, the Irish rock band hailing from Dublin.
Overall, there was a little bit of everything for every ear at Riot Fest; it was only a question of how far you were willing to branch out from your roots.
