By Xinyu Liu

Grandaddy. Photo: Grandaddy’s facebook profile

The year 2000 was quite a crazy one for music, there was Radiohead’s Kid A, The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, Deftones’ White Pony, Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica, and that GY!BE album, and I’m not even trying to list everything. Among those was Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump, a heartbreaking masterpiece that tried to sound insignificant but could very well be every indie rock fan’s album of the year if it were released some other time. Indeed, this is very fitting for Grandaddy’s image as a band – some random guys from some random place in California, but 25 years later, The Sophtware Slump remains to be an indie rock classic. 

The October 9 Chicago stop of the 25th anniversary tour sold so well that they had to add an additional show on October 7. You can’t blame the excitement from Chicago fans—it has been 21 years since the last time they came here. The band split up in 2006 but reformed in the 2010s. Lytle attributed the reform to the financial incentives and guitarist Jim Fairchild who kept trying to convince him that it would be a good idea. Their last tour plan was for 2017’s Last Place, but this was cut short by the sudden death of founding bassist Kevin Garcia. 2024’s Blu Wav was not accompanied by any tours. Frontman Jason Lytle was famous for not liking touring, so when Grandaddy announced this tour it immediately felt like a now-or-never situation. The West Coast shows were opened by Pedro the Lion, while the rest of the tour has Greg Freeman as the opener.

Freeman kicked off the evening of October 9 with a pretty head-banging set, which hyped the audience up before we went into the very depressing Sophtware Slump. The Vermonter’s new album Burnover was listed by Pitchfork as one of its Best New Albums. The set ended with a melancholic song which set the stage very well for Grandaddy’s set.

By the time Grandaddy came on stage, I was already about to cry. The first Grandaddy set was them playing the entirety of The Sophtware Slump in order, for the simple reason that this album has to be heard from start to finish. The opening track “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot” felt like a meditation. The almost 9-minute song had Jason Lytle chanting “Are you giving in 2000 man” and “Did you love this world/ Did this world not love you” repeatedly for 5 minutes. For reference, to Grandaddy fans this is the equivalent of the “Karma Police” outro “For a minute there, I lost myself” to Radiohead fans. 

Then there were the two Jed songs, “Jed the Humanoid” and “Jed’s Other Poem”, which are basically about a robot drinking himself to death. The not-so-funny joke I like to tell is that the 90s indie rock frontmen can be sorted into two categories: the Jeffs and the Jasons. The Jeffs all have very distinct voices and the Jasons are all related to some major drinking issues. Lytle had cited his alcohol problems as one of the reasons for the disbandment in 2006. Unlike Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia) who died from alcoholism but almost never wrote about it in his songs and Jason Pierce (Spiritualized) who wrote about his own drinking all the time, Lytle didn’t write about his own drinking but Jed the drunk robot had become an iconic figure in Grandaddy’s songs. 

 The set closed with another meditation: “So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky” where he repeats “So you’ll aim toward the sky/ And you’ll rise high today/ Fly away/ Far away/ Far from pain”. This sounds comforting, but it’s not: at this stage of the album you already know it’s not possible to be “far from pain,” and if you did manage to be far from pain it’s likely that you just dissociated. I always thought the reason why this song was so good is the windy field recording sound in the background, but even without this it still worked surprisingly well in the live setting.

This was a sad, sad set for a sad, sad album. It’s not the heart-wretching sadness of Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co., not the hopeless depression of Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, not the pitch-black darkness of GY!BE’s F#A#∞. I did not exist when this album was released, but I do have the same feeling every now and then. This is the everyday, mundane, insignificant sadness of knowing that even though things are moving to a new stage, nothing would ever really change. In 2000 this was the anxiety of transitioning into the new century but knowing that everyone still has to deal with their same old problems. In 2025 this could very well be the post-COVID feeling that even though a pandemic is gone, we still have to deal with the same old problems and the world remains to be a shithole. 

The second set was way happier and, unsurprisingly, the crowd was way louder. It was heavy on songs from their third album Sumday, which was their most commercially successful record. It was not a happy album but was way more optimistic than The Sophtware Slump. In “Now It’s On” Lytle sings “I wouldn’t trade my place/ I got no reason to be/ Weathered and withering/ Like in the season of the old me”. By the time they played “Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake” the fans were seriously pogoing. There were, of course, also the concert staples “My Small Love” and “Levitz”, two songs that never were officially released on any of Grandaddy’s records but were played at almost every show. 

Being such a down-to-earth band like Grandaddy, the concert also had some funny little clumsy moments. Before they played “Miner at the Dial-a-View,” Lytle totally forgot he still needed his guitar for that song, and Jim Fairchild stared at him like “Bro, what are you doing?” When Lytle finally remembered to grab his guitar he said,  “What am I gonna do without you guys” (You’ll be surprised how old Lytle looks now, he does look like someone’s granddaddy). Lytle told a little story before “Laughing Stock” about how they turned a meth lab kind of place into a communal skater place and how they recorded the song at a place where a bunch of horses used to live. Before the last song of the night, Lytle was yapping about how long it’s been since they last came to Chicago but the keyboardist just cut him off and started playing “A.M. 180”. Halfway through the song, drummer Aaron Burtch stopped, stood up, opened a beer, drank it, sat down, and then continued. Again Grandaddy’s image is of some random guys from some random place in California, and combined with the rather intimate setting of Thalia Hall, their shows do bring a human touch.

I know that after the more upbeat songs in set 2 and the encore I’m supposed to go to sleep still banging my head. But The Sophtware Slump has a soft spot in my heart, and by the time I lay on my bed I still hear Lytle’s voice in my head singing “Don’t give in 2000 man”.

Don’t give in. That’s what I’m taking into my sleep.

Setlist:

Set 1 (The Sophtware Slump):

1. He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot
2. Hewlett’s Daughter
3. Jed the Humanoid
4. The Crystal Lake
5. Chartsengrafs
6. Underneath the Weeping Willow
7. Broken Household Appliance National Forest
8. Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)
9. E. Knievel Interlude (The Perils of Keeping It Real)
10. Miner at the Dial-a-View
11. So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky

Set 2:

12. Now It’s On
13. Lost on Yer Merry Way
14. Ghost of My Old Dog (Jason Lytle song)
15. Laughing Stock
16. Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake
17. El Caminos in the West
18. My Small Love
19. Levitz

Encore:

20. I’m on Standby
21. A.M. 180