Article published May 09, 2007
SOUND BARGAIN
Big summer festivals offer lots of music for the money
By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
A July night, and a beach ball to the back of the head. A warm breeze across a glade of treated grass, and a $7 cup of beer. Sunscreen, and an old beach towel, and a girl who dances to everything (even the new songs, from the reunion album), and a security guard with a garden hose spritzing the first 10 rows.
Ah, summer concert season.
Let's do the math.
Concertgoer A says he's skipping concerts this summer. He spent the winter and spring catching up with indoor shows. Plus, he sunburns easily and hates crowds. He paid $70 for a Vince Gill ticket, $80 for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, $60 for John Mayer, and the one summer show he will see, the Police reunion tour - he dropped $700 for three tickets.
| LOCAL FESTIVAL SAMPLER |
• Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Festival, June 16-17, Toledo
• Detroit Jazz Festival, Labor Day weekend, Detroit
• Black Swamp Arts Festival, Sept. 7-9, Bowling Green |
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Total cost: $910, four shows.
Concertgoer B prefers smaller shows. An indie-music stalwart, he sees a lot of concerts and can hit three for the price of one Eagles encore. He, too, spent winter in cramped venues, clubs mostly. His splurge was $45 to the Stooges reunion, but the others, though reasonable, added up: $30 for Lucinda Williams, $16 for LCD Soundsystem, $25 for Kings of Leon, $25 for Clipse, $12 for the Hold Steady, $25 for Cat Power, $19 for TV on the Radio, $33 for Modest Mouse, $20 for the Roots, $8 for Deerhunter, and, on an expensive lark, $80 for two tickets to Cheap Trick.Total cost: $338, 12 shows.
Now you see why the all-day, all-weekend concert extravaganza - the destination festival, in industry parlance - has exploded over the past few summers. When big arena shows average $80 a ticket, it's simple finances.
Who got the best deal?
Concertgoer C, who paid $195 for Lollapalooza (now a Chicago-based, three-day festival); $200 for Bonnaroo (four days, in Tennessee), and $85 for Live Earth (one day, in New Jersey).
Total cost: $480, 200 bands.
Not cheap, but in pure band-for-your-buck, that's a steal; for instance, if you did attend each of the above festivals, you would see the Police two times - not to mention Kanye West, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Stooges, Alicia Keys, Patti Smith, the White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Spoon, Bon Jovi, Roger Waters, and Wilco.
There are trade-offs: sometimes eclecticism means no one act lingers long before another act intrudes, and there are travel expenses, and not everyone's idea of a show includes camping for three days without a shower.
But, hey, that's memorable.
Last summer, the destination festival caught on to the tune of millions. According to the industry trade magazine Pollstar, the five-year old Bonnaroo brought in $15 million in 2006; Lollapalooza took in more than $8 million, and Coachella, in California, grossed another $9 million. Which suggests music fans seem to prefer spending money for a memory and a concert; and if they can get a year's worth of shows out of the way in one lump, what's a five-hour drive?
The United States virtually defined the contemporary destination festival in the 1960s with Woodstock and Monterey Pop. But in decades since, Europe's hosted the real slobber-inducing festivals, notably Glastonbury and All Tomorrow's Parties, both in England. But the best of the new American festivals (Coachella, Seattle's Sasquatch) are just as well programmed. And good for Midwesterners, the hub of the destination festival has become Chicago, which, this summer alone, will host Lollapalooza, Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival, and for a second year, Pitchfork, named for the taste-making Web site and dedicated to a certain hip indie aesthetic.
Indeed, it's gotten harder to book name acts because so many all-day festivals are competing, said Mike Reed, a Chicago concert promoter who produces the three-day, 46-band Pitchfork festival. As a way to differentiate itself from Lollapalooza and Crossroads, Pitchfork added a night dedicated to bands playing complete albums, from start to finish, including Sonic Youth and a reunited Wu-Tang Clan.
"The thing to remember," Reed said, "is a lot of these shows get packaged by the same people, like [mammoth concert promoter] Live Nation and the William Morris Agency, who did traveling festivals like Lollapalooza and Ozzfest in the '90s. But those got oversaturated and now destination festivals, which have a different vibe, are becoming oversaturated. In three years, there'll be a handful left, I bet."
For the time being, the pickings are overwhelming: There's Rock The Bells in Manhattan (July 28, Rage Against the Machine, Wu-Tang Clan, Mos Def); the Virgin Festival in Baltimore (Aug. 4-5, Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkins); Wakarusa in Kansas (June 7-10, Widespread Panic, Galactic); Bumbershoot in Seattle (Sept. 1-3, The Shins, Panic! At the Disco); and the eighth Coachella, which ended Sunday with headliners Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bjork, Rage Against the Machine, and Arcade Fire. In the immediate area, there's Toledo's Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Festival (June 16-17), and Detroit's electronic festival Movement (May 26-28), Hookahville near Columbus (May 25-27) and free Comerica CityFest (July 4-8), which this year, so far, is boasting Spoon and Weird Al Yankovic.
But in the spirit of the all-day, all-weekend concert, what follows are five destination festivals within a day's drive of Northwest Ohio. As these weekends tend to go, rock and pop is the focus. Tickets are bound to sell-out for most, and area hotels are certain to fill up - so plan accordingly.Lollapalooza
General Info:
Chicago, Grant Park; Aug. 3-5; $195 a ticket; for more details, www.lollapalooza.com.
Selected line-up: More than 100 bands, including the Stooges, Pearl Jam, Ben Harper, Interpol, Snow Patrol, My Morning Jacket, Lupe Fiasco, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio, Modest Mouse, Yo La Tengo, Amy Winehouse, Patti Smith, The Roots, and Daft Punk.
General Vibe: Teenagers, hipsters, college students, thirtysomethings with their kids, and the downtown setting and a slightly-older leaning band line-up ensuring a fair share of well-to-do aficionados.
Reason to Go:
It's a sprawling, surprisingly thoughtful representative assortment of what the iPod generation is listening to in 2007, with a dose of history.Rock on the Range
General Info:
Columbus, Crew Stadium; May 19; Tickets are $49.50; for more information: www.rockontherange.com
Selected Line-Up:
ZZ Top, Velvet Revolver, Puddle of Mudd, Evanescence, Hinder, Breaking Benjamin, Papa Roach, and Buckcherry.
General Vibe:
Break out the leopard-print Lycra. A tattoo convention. Tailgating in the parking lot, tons of bandanas, and refugees from the '80s hair-metal scene. A modern hard rock OzzFest without the Ozz or the tradition. (WHOOO!)
Reason to Go:
You still listen to rock radio, you can't get excited by the other festivals, and you can tell the difference between these acts. But no, seriously, ZZ Top aside, here's a deceptively ambitious attempt at defining what mainstream heavy metal sounds like in 2007.
•Bonnaroo
General Info:
Manchester, Tenn., an hour south of Nashville; June 14-17; $214.50 for tickets, includes camping fee and four-day pass; for more details: www.bonnaroo.com
Selected Line-up:
About 100 bands, including the Decemberists, the Police, the White Stripes, the Roots, Tool, Widespread Panic, Richard Thompson, Ralph Stanley, Mavis Staples, Franz Ferdinand, Ornette Coleman, Gov't Mule, the Flaming Lips, and DJ Shadow.
General Vibe:
In keeping with Bonnaroo's jam-band roots, expect a fair amount of hippies born in 1986, and a fair sampling of the real thing. Big-name additions in recent years (last year's headliner was Radiohead) and a wise appreciation for iconoclastic legends (note Ornette Coleman) have changed the mix to more general music obsessives and a hip-family-with-an-RV demo.
Reason to Go:
If you have the money and the time (and the air mattress), it's a bona fide happening. For maximum results, don't shower. Without a city to lure you away, the focus is on the music and the art. With a shrewd mix of country and jazz and hard rock, the idea is to encourage discoveries. (Incidentally, with the music industry more decentralized and singles-based than it's been since the '60s, discovery is the reason so many acts hit these festivals.)
•Pitchfork Music Festival
General Info:
Chicago, Union Park; July 13-15; Tickets are a bargain, $35 for Saturday and Sunday, $50 for all three days; for more details: www.pitchforkmusicfestival.com
Selected Line-up:
At least 46 bands, including Cat Power, The New Pornographers, De La Soul, Grizzly Bear, Of Montreal, Sonic Youth, Clipse, Iron and Wine, Girl Talk, and Stephen Malkmus, and Yoko Ono.
General Vibe:
Hipper than thou, young-ish, lots of young men with lots of patience who love their record collections more than their parents - and thrilling if you want a bead on acts that everyone else will be listening to in a couple of years. (Last year's festival included Tapes N' Tapes, Spoon, Mission of Burma, and Mr. Lif.)
Reason to Go:
A weekend here is equivalent to a couple of months worth of club shows - and in Toledo, a dozen tanks worth of gas for the drive to St. Andrews Hall in Detroit. Pitchfork, as with many of these festivals, is a far more engaging way of planning your CD buying than surfing at iTunes.
•Crossroads Guitar Festival
General Info:
Chicago, Toyota Park (on the south side); July 28; Tickets are $90. For more details: www.ticketmaster.com
Selected Line-up:
Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Robert Cray, Sheryl Crow, Vince Gill, Buddy Guy, Los Lobos, John Mayer, Alison Krauss, Willie Nelson, and Steve Winwood.
General Vibe:
The gray pony-tail brigade; fortysomethings (and older) busing in from the suburbs with their kids and their sunscreen; a handful of Mayer fans and more corporate sponsorship than a NASCAR championship (but not that other festivals are immune to it). If the last CD you bought is Norah Jones, you must be here.
Reason to Go:
Guitar solos don't bore you. Records made before 1975 make you nervous - and you still call them records. That said, Clapton is never looser than at a festival, and for $90, you could tune out every single indulgent faux-blues number and still get your money's worth off Alison Krauss, Los Lobos, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Albert Lee, and Willie Nelson.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.
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