Gallagher Way is a paved plaza with a lawn in the middle, wedged between Wrigley Field and Clark Street, and on a June evening it holds the day's heat in the concrete long after the sun has gone behind the grandstand. OK Go played there on Saturday June 13th as part of the plaza's summer concert series.
They are a Chicago band — formed here in 1998 — who became internationally famous for choreography rather than for records, which is a strange inheritance to carry onto a stage where nothing can be edited.
Which is the interesting part. A band known for one-take video precision has to do something different live, and what Damian Kulash does instead is talk to people — direct address, by name where he can manage it, between songs.
The Confetti Is The Production
There is no screen and no staging to speak of on this plaza, so the show's visual argument is delivered by cannon: showers of yellow confetti first, then red, cut into heart shapes. That is the whole effect and it is deployed twice, which is exactly the right number of times.
"Here It Goes Again" is the song attached to the treadmill video and the crowd response to it has almost nothing to do with the music, which the band has clearly made peace with. They play it hard and fast and let the recognition do the rest. The rest of the set is better and gets less, which is the permanent condition of a band with a viral artefact in its past.
A Plaza Is Not A Venue
Gallagher Way was built in 2015 on land the Cubs cleared beside the ballpark — a triangle of surface parking turned into a programmable public space with a stage at one end, which the team uses for films, markets and this concert series. It is open to the street, which means the sound spills down Clark and the bars get a free version.
Acoustically it is a hard box with one side missing. Guitar bands do fine. The handclap-and-shout parts of an OK Go song, which depend on a crowd hearing itself, work better here than in a shed.
The confetti was still on the plaza the following morning, in the gutters along Clark. A Chicago band came home and brought a cannon.
Cover image: Wrigley Field marquee / Wikimedia Commons