B-52s Bring Unique, Bizarre Show to Ravinia

“We’ve just had a lot of sauerkraut nuggets so we’ll fit right in with Chicago!” screamed frontman Fred Schneider after opening with Planet Claire. The song was comprised of a mix of haunting vocals matching pitch with an organ, over the tune of Henry Mancini’s classic Peter Gunn riff.

The band played with a unique three-way call-and-response vocal arrangement between Schenider, Kate Pierson, and Cindy Wilson, over a dancy surfer-punk new-wave sound. Most songs tended to feature Pierson and Wilsons’ raw vocal talents intertwined with Schneider’s bizarre and off-pitch outbursts and exclamations throughout and between songs (“This is a song about my favorite cheese,” said Schneider before playing Dance This Mess Around).

Schneider, perhaps the most offbeat band member, would sing and dance erratically, occasionally playing with what appeared to be a childrens’ toy he had brought on stage while he sang. Pierson, wearing a lush red dress, which matched her hair, would occasionally dance in tandem with Schneider, while Wilson would sing as she played the bongo drums.

While to call a person weird is generally interpreted as an insult, from the obscure yet irresistible dance moves from the band, the strange song titles (The Girl From Ipanema Goes To Greenland, Love In The Year 3000), and the even stranger song lyrics (“Love in the year 3000, a love pulse is coming, lasers quasars, love pulses on the solar wind”), the B-52s gave the impression that ‘weird’ is exactly what they’re going for.

However odd the band may have seemed, it didn’t stop the audience from dancing like crazy at every song. The mostly middle-aged crowd was doing the twist from the opening songs until the last seconds of the closers. “The grass stopped growing beneath us because we were all dancing so hard on it,” said Peter Bogle of St. Charles Illinois, “we thoroughly enjoyed their performance.”

The band did take breaks from their eccentricities to play their more mainstream hits during the show, including a spirited crowd-awing performance of their 1989 hit Roam. The crowd was on their feet, singing with the band at every chorus with “Roam if you want to, roam around the world. Roam if you want to without anything but the love we feel.”

Despite their radical nature, the inevitable came when the band played their (slightly) less peculiar biggest hits, closing the set with Love Shack, and coming back for an encore of Party Out Of Bounds, and a ten minute rendition of the classic Rock Lobster. Due to the more sparsely spread Sunday night crowd, by the time the band played Rock Lobster, the aisles to walk up to the stage had been filled with fans wearing everything 80’s, from tight jeans to Hawaiian t-shirts to hoop earrings dancing their way towards the band.