The grass was still wet at seven from a sprinkler cycle nobody had thought to cancel, and the people on it were in folding chairs with wine, which is not the standing posture this music was written for. Billy Idol played Ravinia on Sunday July 12th, the night after the same stage had hosted Ravel, with a seven-piece ensemble led by Steve Stevens.

Stevens has been playing the guitar parts on these records since 1981 and is the reason they still function live. Nobody on the lawn needed that explained.

Lawn admission ran around $40, pavilion seats $45 to $80. The crowd skewed considerably older than the records do, and dressed for a picnic rather than a club, which produced the summer's most entertaining mismatch between an audience and its own soundtrack.

The Band Did The Work

A seven-piece is a large ensemble for this catalogue and the size is the point — it lets Stevens play lead without the rhythm collapsing, which on a lawn with the low end leaking into the trees is the difference between a show and a nostalgia exercise.

"Rebel Yell" arrived with more guitar in it than the record has, and it is a better song for the surplus. "White Wedding" is built on a figure anybody can hum and got the full lawn treatment, folding chairs and all. Idol's voice has lost range and gained grain, and he sings around the gaps rather than through them, which is the correct instinct at sixty-nine.

The audience was the oldest of any show in this package and the most committed. Four people near me had driven in from Indiana and had seen the same pairing in 2019, and said so twice. Nobody under thirty was visible within fifty feet, which for a catalogue that was marketed as a youth product in 1983 is the correct and slightly melancholy arithmetic.

A Lawn Is Not A Pit

Ravinia was built in 1904 as a trolley park with a music pavilion, which is to say as a destination the streetcar company could sell tickets to, and the lawn has been a lawn ever since. Music that depends on a crowd pressing forward cannot get that here. What it gets instead is a thousand people standing up from their chairs at roughly the same moment, which is a slower and funnier form of the same release.

THBand opened, fronted by Tom Hamilton Jr, who documented the day as a career milestone and was right to.

Two rows of camp chairs stayed occupied through the encore and their owners sang every word sitting down. Steve Stevens is why this still works.

Cover image: Ravinia Festival grand entrance / Wikimedia Commons