Riot Fest – a punk shindig so alluring that even boring Pink Floyd fans like me yearn to go!

There’s a reason why every festival lineup looks essentially the same these days.

It’s because most festivals are booked by the same handful of promoters.

In America, Live Nation and AEG seem to run the show. The latter controls Coachella, which is presumably why the organisers now obsess over social media metrics when compiling their lineups. Why make memories when you can make money?

Once such titanic promoters get involved, your beloved festival will quickly start to look and feel different. At first, the bland lineups will simply leave you feeling alienated and dispirited. But eventually it will feel like they’re sending a clear message: That you are not invited, and that you are certainly not welcome. Dare to attend and you will feel like an interloping pervert among the influencers, an unsightly human stain lurking in the background of their perfect selfies.

But some festivals manage to retain their independence. And when they retain their independence, they retain their dignity and identity. They still feel like something or somewhere, rather than just another fatberg glistening in a turgid river of grey sludge.

Yes, I am getting old.

Chicago’s Riot Fest is such an independent festival. Every year my brother and I send pictures of the lineup to each other, usually accompanied with such words as “Jesus Christ” or “for God’s sake”. It always looks good, you see. They always manage to put something special together.

My opinion on Riot Fest is NOT to be trusted!

Today we’re talking about Riot Fest. But before we begin, some caveats. There are three things that should preclude me from talking about Riot Fest.

First, I have never been to Riot Fest. I do not know what it’s like. From where I’m sat it looks wonderful. But on the ground, it might be hideous.

Second, I am not American. I see the world through Unamerican eyes, and I hear the world through Unamerican ears. I do not have an American brain, so I do not think American thoughts. This could be important.

But the most important reason why I may not be the best person to comment on Riot Fest is that I am not in the slightest bit punk.

I prefer Lou Reed’s solo career to his work with The Velvet Underground. I have Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd stickers on my car. I have seen The Australian Pink Floyd show three times, Steve Hackett twice, and I paid a lot of money to watch an orchestral performance of Tubular Bells. Shivers ran down my spine when they played Moonlight Shadow. I write about New Age albums on the internet. Every day, I burn more incense than calories. I have seen Rick Wakeman play his synths in his cape, and unless somebody stops me, I will do so again.

If everyone in the UK were asked to stand in a line and rank themselves in order of PUNK, with the least punk on the left and the punkiest on the right, I would stand somewhere to the left of Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg.

I nearly fell asleep on my feet while watching Idles. Once, at a Future of the Left gig, I found that running the tip of my index finger over the ridges of my thumbnail was a lot more diverting than watching the bands.

Don’t get me wrong: Despite having strong opinions about dragons, and despite listening to thousands of hours of Phish every year (I got into them through the ice cream), I’m not anti-punk. In small doses, I can appreciate how thrilling, uplifting, and empowering it can be. But there is limited appeal in songs that have already shown you everything they’re going to do by the end of the first chorus.

So why would I, who is more Hobbit than punk, possibly want to write about Riot Fest? Why have I spent much of the past two weeks listening to countless punk acts as I work my way through every Chicago Riot Fest lineup in chronological order?

Because pain builds character. And besides, what else am I going to do with my Spotify subscription?

2005: The Year It All Went Wrong

Something happened in 2005.

In 2005, the rot set in at festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. This was the last year the Reading Festival provided a truly nourishing lineup, and this was the year when the good ship Coachella first started to drift towards the mainstream.

But Riot Fest started in 2005. As other festivals began their slow decline, they were still limbering up at the starting line. They’ve been at it for 20 years now. How did they manage to weather the tedious storms that tore other beloved institutions to shreds?

It’s simple really: Like the UK’s Download Festival, they’ve never lost sight of who they are. Yes, their lineups have diversified over the years, but they’ve never strayed too far from where they started. If the festival has changed at all, it’s only to have evolved from a no-nonsense punk festival to a more colourful “alternative” festival.

This has resulted in the usual grumblings about repetitive lineups, and the occasional lament about risk-averse headliner bookings. But Redditors are going to Reddit. Allowing Weezer to headline four times in 20 years is a small price to pay if it means one of the few remaining independent alternative rock festivals can continue to thrive.

Mike and His Mechanics

We have a man called Mike Petryshyn to thank for Riot Fest. To many, he is known as Riot Mike. He is Riot. He is Mike.

One day in 2005, while working at a law firm in Chicago, Mike was idly scribbling possible festival names in his notebook, presumably along with a few band names too. He wrote “Riot Fest”, which sounded good. So he decided to make it happen.

That’s it. That’s all it took. Like Waynestock, it just took the slightest hint of an idea, and a conviction to make it happen. And Mike did make it happen, despite not knowing what a backline is (though he did promise agents he could provide one). You can just do things.

The very first Riot Fest took place at Chicago’s Congress Theatre across two days in November 2005. It billed itself as “the only show that matters!”, and its lineup featured some punk legends (some appearing without their original singers, but still), along with a number of veterans and knaves from the city’s punk underground.

(“Punk underground.” Listen to me. As if I have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. The only “underground” I’m even vaguely qualified to talk about is Caravan’s Nine Feet Underground. And even then, I’d talk with the bogus authority of a life coach who hired a man in a shipping container to print his fake diploma.)

The inaugural Riot Fest was a family affair. Mike enlisted his sister to fill riders, scrub toilets, and to give the bum rush to backstage drunks. And the two siblings enlisted their mum to bake cookies and brownies for the band. She would apparently continue to send Pat Smear birthday brownies in subsequent years.

It was a lot of work, and it took its toll on Mike. He vowed to never do anything of the sort ever again. Riot Fest was to be a one-off. But then he did it again.

The second Riot Fest was just a one-day affair, but it marked the first of many times the organisers would convince a defunct band to reform just for the festival. That’s Naked Raygun, the “gold standard” of Chicago punk, who I had never heard of before starting this journey. As Mike tells it, getting them to reform was simply a case of sending a message on MySpace. You can just do things.

Hey! Want to see loads of photos from Riot Fest 2006? You can!

Riot Fest would remain in the Congress Theatre for the next few years. The fifth festival branched out into a number of Chicago venues, like a snotty SXSW.

For the first five years, the lineup was strictly punk – hardcore punk, pop punk, ska punk, skinhead nonsense, OI!. That sort of thing. Things started to diversify a little in 2010, when a few metal bands joined the jamboree – Corrosion of Conformity and High on Fire! – and in 2012, the riot finally spilled out onto the streets and into a nearby park.

Yes, Riot Fest 2012 was the first outdoor event. Taking place at Chicago’s Humboldt park, it was billed as the “Riot Fest and Carnival”, and apparently featured clowns, carnies, firebreathers, sideshows, Mexican wrestlers, and a tilt-a-whirl. Don’t want to watch NOFX? Then grab a candyfloss and head for the ghost train!

Apparently the move outside was necessary to attract bigger names. They wanted Rise Against, who were starting to fill arenas.

Fellow director Sean McKeough was also pushing for expansion. Sean is another main character in the Riot Fest story. He was a hotshot stockbroker who managed punk venues in his spare time. It seems he was instrumental in helping Riot Fest to grow from an indoor shindig into the multi-day outdoor festival many know and love today. Sean sadly passed away in 2016.

Do what you love and you’ll still have to work hard, but great things may happen

In time Riot Fest would spread to a number of other cities, but it’s not strayed from Chicago since 2016.

Over the years the organisers have convinced a number bands who would “never reunite” to reunite, including The Replacements, Jawbreaker, and The Misfits. Why play for Riot Fest, and for nobody else? Because bands respect Riot Fest. They know that it’s all done for the love of music.

Talking about Mike, Danzig said:

“He was more than just a promoter. He was somebody that I thought knew about the music and really cared about the music—and who cared about doing cool stuff, as opposed to just business.”

Hear that, kids? Do something you love because you love doing it, and it will show. And this apparently creates the sort of energy that’s needed to make impossible things happen – such as reuniting the original Misfits.

Here come the indie rockers!

In 2013, Public Enemy became the first hip-hop act to play Riot Fest. Wu-Tang Clan would follow in 2014, as part of a lineup that was a lot more indie than previous years, with the likes of The Cure, The National, The Flaming Lips, and The Dandy Warhols joining the party.

But don’t worry, punks. Riot Fest was still very, very punk:

Yep, even as Riot Fest broadened its church, there was always room for those veteran punks to sit comfortably in the pews. Almost every year you’ll see some of the names that have been there from the start: 7 Seconds, Naked Raygun, Deals Gone Bad, and so on. The festival has grown and evolved without mutating. It’s nice.

The words are coming out all weird…

Fans have lots of ideas for where Riot Fest could go from here.

Year after year the punks cry out for an Operation Ivy reunion. I don’t know who they are, but I know it’s going to happen someday.

Plus, there’s a long list of acts who are yet to headline, or even play, Riot Fest. Some of these are the sort who you really would have thought might have headlined by now, such as Muse, The Killers, and Pearl Jam.

Now, these are great bands. But they’re all reliable festival mainstays. It would not be a major coup for Riot Fest to book any of these acts, as it was when they convinced The Replacements to reform – which apparently made the national news!

And yet, all of these acts still scan as “alternative”. They are still “punk adjacent”, if you will. They could headline Riot Fest, and so long as the organisers pack the undercard with punks and other loud, fast, and shouty bands, it would still feel like Riot Fest.

It seems special. I’d love to go one year. And maybe when I do so, it will be to watch an impossibly reformed Smiths, and an implausibly reformed Talking Heads, or R.E.M., and maybe Phish. Why not. Why not.

I’ll see you on the dark side of the Moon.

Take the riot home with you!

Behold, a playlist featuring one song from almost every band that played almost every iteration of Riot Fest Chicago:

At the time of writing, this is still a work in progress. I have made it as far as the 2013 festival. Maybe I’ll eventually make it to 2025. But right now, I feel the Carpet Crawlers calling to me, and those Tales From Topographic Oceans yearn to be told again.

You won’t find every act on here. Some I refused to include for personal reasons. Some were not on Spotify. Some just sounded so awful that I knew I’d never want to hear them again.

Yes, at numerous points the tendrils of tedium have slithered menacingly at the fringes of the Riot Fest lineup. Some of them even breached the perimeter. But they never managed to infect the whole festival, as they have infected so many others.

Rock solid self belief, and a steadfast commitment to doing what you love, can help you withstand the forces that would destroy you. Be true to yourself and you get to retain your integrity, your identity, and your sanity.