Just half an hour after Blink-182 said goodnight to Chicago and ended the final day of Lollapalooza, Atlanta-based nu-metal group Silly Goose was just getting started.
It’s not the musicians' first time in Chicago — in fact it was their fourth night in a row “crashing Lollapalooza” by playing pop-up shows around downtown.
They started playing in the parking lots of large tours and festivals years ago, or in their words, “fishing where the fish are.”
“We feel like everyone’s doing the same thing on social media, so this is how we’re separating ourselves from other people,” vocalist Jackson Foster said. “We’re just trying to take over the world.”
Deftones aside, there wasn’t much representation for their Limip Bizkit-inspired sound on the Lolla lineup, though that didn’t seem to matter to the crowds that swarmed and moshed as they started up. Thursday and Friday night, the band played at the 50 W. Ida B. Wells Dr. BP gas station, though after BP corporate caught wind of the shows, they had to move to an empty parking lot down the street for Saturday and Sunday.
Foster said their Friday night show at the BP was one of their best, describing the lighting and sound provided by the gas station’s roof, in addition to the exiting Lollapalooza crowd that reached out to the street, as “surreal.”
It was their first time playing on top of a van they just bought, fitted out with a generator and roof rack that holds the drums, amps and three of the four band members.
A manager at the gas station said the show wasn’t sanctioned. A corporate representative for the company didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
By Sunday, Silly Goose was able to draw a crowd of about 200 to the empty parking lot, making it through about half a dozen songs — including upcoming single “Tsunami” — before Chicago police arrived to shut it down. Foster told the Sun-Times that the shows have only ended with him in handcuffs once, albeit briefly, and “not as many” citations as expected.
“I like to think I’m good at talking my way out of things,” Foster said.
As friends Graeme Cuizon and Hannah Rose walked into the festival Friday, the band handed them slips of paper they said were reminiscent of the ones inside fortune cookies, though these foretold the future of a pop-up show later that night.
They joked that they would attend despite not knowing the band, but as they made their way to their train, they stumbled upon the show. Cuizon said it was cool to support a band doing what so many festival headliners said they had once done years before blowing up.
“There’s all these jokes that being a teenager in the '90s must have been so fun,” Rose, a New York resident, said. “That was the closest we’ve experienced to it, and it was fun to see.”
Silly Goose is booked on three festivals for the year and has “crashed” another three, with plans to do pop-up shows near at least three more by the end of the year as the stunt has been helping them book “real” tours and shows.
At the end of the Sunday set, Silly Goose made a vow to headline Lollapalooza in five years, then met with waiting fans to sell shirts and sign autographs.
Their advice to other up-and-coming bands? “Make people pay attention” until you get your footing.
“Start doing s- - - in the street,” Foster said. “It’s worked so far. … Pretty soon it’ll be a thing of the past. It’s not our legacy, it’s just how we started.”
