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Lollapalooza ‘07: You Can’t Make This Kind Of Spectacle With Only 28 Members

August 4, 2007 - Grant Park, Chicago, IL

Posted by Gil Kaufman (MTV News), Cincinnati, OH, at 4:55 pm EST on Saturday, August 4th, 2007

Power trios? They make money on the road. Bands with 20 or more members? Better get that calculator out, dude, and figure out how many rolls of quarters it takes to buy a microwave cheeseburger. I imagine that’s the kind of conversation that takes place on the tour bus, or buses, that haul around 29-member Swedish band I’m From Barcelona.

Only 20 of them were onstage for their early morning set Saturday, but they rivaled Friday’s musical mob, the Polyphonic Spree, for wacky instruments, enthusiasm and crowd-participation jams. There was the dude in furry bear costume, the woman in hot pink tights playing Day-of-the-Dead-shaped skull maracas, the bro with the dreadlocks and some kind of an ankle-length tunic playing tuba (at least I thought it was a dude; hard to say), the woman shaking a banana-shaped maraca, and about half a dozen guys whose only jobs seemed to be jumping around and looking really Swedishly excited.

Their names were Micke, or Johan, or Mattias, or maybe Tobias. There was definitely an Olaf in there somewhere, or maybe it was Rikard. You gotta hand it to them, either way, though — having that much enthusiasm at 11:30 on a Saturday morning is impressive.

Nobody was more psyched, though, than singer Emanuel Lundgren, who apologized for not actually having any cassettes (”remember them?”) to toss out to the audience during a song about cassettes. Thankfully, he didn’t have any pox to pass out during the polka pop anthem “Chicken Pox,” which includes my favorite lyrics of the weekend so far: “You can’t have it once you’ve had it, no.”

Mostly, though, the way-too-blissed-out members danced around like they were in an aerobics class from 1985. I have no idea if the guy with bright red hair wearing cat makeup and holding a green balloon with an R painted on it, or his buddy in the devil mask wearing baggy Charlie Chaplin pants, suspenders and swinging around a cane, were part of the Barcelona show, but they definitely upped the freak factor. So, thanks guys, I’m officially afraid to go back to that beer-sponsored stage today.

Read more about I’m From Barcelona and all of Saturday’s performances on MTVNews.com …

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