Summerfest Rocks

Summerfest is apparently the world's largest music festival. That means, 11 days of seven main stages and multiple minor stages of music. Each stage has a headliner, and one main stage has the festival headliner. Like, on last Friday, the festival headliner was Def Leppard, but another stage had Sum 41 as it's headliner. Anyways, we got hooked up as volunteers, which means we get to go to the festival on the day we volunteer for free, and then get tickets to come back another day for free ($15 otherwise). All this for like 3 hours of ridiculously easy work.

REO Speedwagon was the first band I saw. Actually, I only saw them sing "Take on the Run" (the one the goes, "Heard it from a friend who/heard from a friend who/heard from another you been messin' around..."). The mics were all f*ck*d up, so it didn't sound good, but I can now say I hear REO live. The rest of that night was pretty uneventful for me. Saw Wolfmother (pretty cool rock band) and Jacks Mannequin (from the guy who was in Something Corporate, alternative rockish). Nothing to write home about, but that might be cause I was tired.

The next day Rocked, though! I didn't see their whole set, but I saw Styx play "Come Sail Away", followed by "Renegade" (my favorite dueling piano bar song). Absolutely awesome! Then I saw Def Leppard for an hour or so, only recognizing like 2 songs (they saved the other ones for after I left), but it was still cool. Most of them are middle-aged looking foggies, but one of their guitarists was jacked. I mean, nevermind looking good for a 40-something year-old. Jacked. I left early, cause from there...

I went to see OAR. Actually, I went to the stage they were at, forced my way to the seat-part of a picnic table, and watched them play on a monitor cause that's as close as I was gonna get. Still, it was pretty sweet seeing them play. When the finished with "Craziest Game of Poker", everyone apparently brought a deck of cards and threw them into the air. Pretty funny stuff, I thought.


Two nights ago, I worked and went to see Lewis Black do a comedy skit. He was a pretty funny guy, as usual. Talking about Santa Claus and stupid politics. Good stuff. John Mayer with Ben Folds was the main main show, but I didn't have the money to see them. AFI was also there, as was Weird Al. I think I made a smart choice with Lewis Black, but there was no shortage of talent there that night.

Last night I saw Less than Jake, and Reel Big Fish. Less than Jake puts on a pretty good show, but I didn't know a single song they played. I attribute that to me overestimating what I knew of theirs. I think I only know one song, come to think about it. "Dope Man." Wasn't played, though. Reel Big Fish, on the other hand, rocked the house, and I knew a lot of their songs. They have tons of energy, and did this one really impressive thing where they took a song of theirs and played it in different styles: reggae, ska, punk, blues, hardcore metal, as a love song, and as an old-skool hip-hop song. Amazing!

What I'm looking forward to now is G. Love and Special Sauce on Sunday. I've never seen them live before, but I'm a fan.

I also missed some sweet groups, like Razhel, Arrested Development, the Fray, ASIA, Plain White T's, Rusted Root, Keller Williams, Ludacris, etc. What a festival!

Happy belated Fourth of July, everyone.