Cage The Elephant and The O’My’s Among Highlight Performances On Rain-Shortened First Day of Lollapalooza

Day one of Lollapalooza ended early due to inclement and dangerous weather conditions in Grant Park. I luckily left early before the weather really hit, but was able to catch some pretty amazing sets from Cage The Elephant, Capital Cities and local Chicago-based fusion soul-rockers, The O’My’s, among others.

The O’My’s set was a funky and soulful energy based one that had the mostly slightly older crowd in a funky lovely good groove that was perfect for the mostly cool vibrant early afternoon time, which the group opened at on the Pepsi stage. Backed by a very mostly nine piece set, which included vocals, trumpet, bass, drums, keyboard, guitar and a trio of backup singers, it was the just perfect complement to frontman Maceo Haymes charming falsetto that he had for a majority of the set.

By far one of the best sets of the whole first day and probably one of the best live sets I may have ever seen, I really liked how Haymes used the Roger Troutman vocoder effect on his vocals. Playing a few new songs, as well as a lot of their older stuff, it was a very loud and heartfelt set that I’m sure grabbed a lot of people’s attention and even made a lot of new fans of the group, which ironically enough first met at Lolla and nearly a decade ago in 2007 talked about recording music for the first time. Which really brings things full circle for both Maceo and the other bandleader, who is also the keyboard player, Nick Hennesey.

You could never go wrong with Cage The Elephant playing at Lollapalooza either. Playing the Grant Park (formerly Samsung) stage for the second time in four years, the popular rock group always puts on one of the more well-rounded and best sounding of all the performances whenever they play the Lolla stage. This year was no different either, as lead singer Matt Schultz in a very interesting skirt like getup, opened with the opening track, Cry Baby, from the group’s Grammy Award-winning album, Tell Me I’m Pretty. Before then going into the opening track, Spiderhead of the group’s album, Melopbia. Schultz would then go back into records from the group’s Grammy Award-winning album with Too Late to Say Goodbye, Punchin’ Bag and their hit single chart-topping, Trouble.

Performing hit after hit of their many chart-toppers, which include Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked, Mess Around and Cold Cold Cold, Cage definitely kept the packed crowd in the set throughout. The packed crowd by the far south part of Grant Park singing along so passionately with Matt, as he kept going into these records that so many of us have grown up on and loved through the years with the group. Matt made things very intimate with the crowd by even going into the pit, right next to people in the head of the crowd too. Which is one of the things that always make their sets so great. Cage once again put on such a great performance as they always do and their performance just slightly beat out The O’My’s for my favorite sets from the first day of Lollapalooza 2017.