Twisted 5 alternative-rock festival at Rosemnot Horizon

Beck--the headliner at Q101's Twisted 5 alternative-rock festival Friday at the Rosemont Horizon--was asked a few weeks ago if this was an exciting time for music.

"The best times in music," he replied, "are when each band is upping the ante and inspiring other bands to outdo themselves. If anything, it's been at least 15 to 20 years since there were at least 25 amazing bands out at the same time."

Why is that?

"There's just a lack of desire to stand out," he said. "It's so much easier to blend."

Blend, bland, blah. One had to wonder what Beck would have said about the bands that preceded him onstage at the Horizon: Third Eye Blind, Garbage, the Goo Goo Dolls, Soul Coughing, Cake and Everlast. Was the ante being raised? Were people being inspired to take risks? Or is that asking too much of any band in these self-satisfied times?

The only real drama at radio festivals such as Twisted 5 goes on behind the scenes, as stations call in favors and assemble lineups of artists that have enjoyed heavy airplay that year. WMAQ-FM (101.1) is one of the most powerful "modern rock" stations in the country, its clout measured by the number of albums and concert tickets its mostly teenage audience buys, which is lots. Eager to curry favor, record companies and managers offer up their brightest stars to fly halfway across the country just to play a 25-minute mini-set.

These annual shows also become a convenient way of looking back at the year's most commercially successful rock acts.

Q101 has in previous years pulled in some big names, from Alanis Morissette to Korn. Of course, it also has played host to--hold on to your nose rings--Tripping Daisy, Chumbawamba, Sugar Ray and Weezer. Where are they now? In the modern-rock dust bin, their careers either over or on life-support.

How history will judge this year's lineup is impossible to predict. But Twisted 5 wasn't about raising the ante. It was about keeping the money machine greased and the customers--who came to hear the hits and nothing but the hits--satisfied. No band better exemplifies the price of playing by those rules than the Goo Goo Dolls. They're a richer band for it, but not a better one.

Third Eye Blind is a California quartet that is beginning where the Goo Goo Dolls have ended up, by piling up more than two million in sales of their wildly uneven, self-titled debut album. The band focused on its uptempo songs, particularly "Semi-Charmed Life," which became a bombastic backdrop for singer Stephan Jenkins' insufferable shtick: full-of-himself patter ("Sometimes ya gotta let the beast go free"), whip-wielding "Clockwork Orange" poses, even a down-with-the-'hood quote from Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day."

~Greg Kot

I don't necessarially agree with the "full of himself" refrence to Stephan but I added this article to excentuate the complete concert aura.