PlanetFest 9

So I went to PlanetFest 9. Some cool astronomy gathering maybe? No. It’s a bunch of bands that I don’t like playing all day long out under the sun. I’m going because Becca wants to go to a concert and this is a perfect opportunity. She’ll have fun but I’ll be standing around all day surrounded by kids and assaulted with lame music. So are you ready for me to tear it to shreds?

It was fun. No, it was actually a lot of fun.

The day started with us getting there about an hour after they were supposed to open the gates and an hour before the first bands went on. The gates didn’t open on time and the line stretched on forever! Just when you thought you saw the end of the line, it turned a corner and went on for another forever! It moved pretty fast and we only stood in line for 30 minutes but it just looked like a three hour line from the outside…

The line up was Red, Rehab, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Shinedown, Puddle of Mudd and Hinder, interspersed with nine local bands playing on another stage.

The bands were better than I expected. I really can’t do a review on the music as it wasn’t my genre and I didn’t know much of it to begin with. I knew at least one song by each of them and when one of them did a cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” I started singing along. Becca thought I was crazy, but that was the only incidence of daddy embarrassing her. That’s not exactly true. I may have embarrassed her when I screamed like a little girl.

We were watching the people and I saw a kid that must have been five or six years old. He was wearing a baseball shirt and dancing with a crowd of people. (Presumably his mom and dad..) While he was dancing, this little kid threw out his hand and made the rock sign. I said, “Oh cool, check out that little ki… OH SHIT! IT’S A FUCKING LEPRECHAUN!!!” The little kid turned and he had a full beard and must have been 50 years old. It just took me by surprise and I was startled. I am really happy he was out of earshot. He was actually a nice old man. We saw a lot of him throughout the show. One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time was one of the guys went around the pit with him on his back. They bounced around and everyone had a good time.

The music was good. The stage sound was a little too bass heavy for me and that’s saying a lot. I like a loud thumping bass but this place was close to hitting “the brown note.” The drums were all set to triggers and didn’t need to be. But they used the triggers to drop the low bass note when they wanted it.

(Drummer rant: The only reason I think triggers are necessary is when you are going for speed and you can move your feet faster than the pedals or bass drum can respond. If you need triggers for this standard rock beat, you aren’t really a drummer…)

Becca made me smile big by something she said. She liked the bands but one of them was having a really rough time with the vocals. Becca looks up at me and says, “He must use ProTools a lot in the studio.” I love that kid.

We watched the first couple of bands from the back area enjoying the crowd and the scenery. The day was damn near perfect. The sun was out, plenty of shade if you wanted it and the river was gorgeous. We were sitting there between shows doing some people-watching and Becca waves at someone in the crowd. “Someone you know?” I ask. She looks at me like I’m stupid and says, “Um, yeah…” Coming right toward us were some friends we have known for years. I was looking right through them. Their kids were there to see the same bands Becca wanted to see.

I may have created a monster.

So we got up, found a drink and sauntered down to the front of the stage. Becca wanted to get closer to see this band. I warned her all about life up front at a show. Gave her the primer on how to survive and what to do. I told her all about the unwritten rules and how to make sure she came out alive. I basically tried to scare her out of going down front. She thought I was kidding. So we watched the band up close and were surrounded by a pseudo-mosh pit and plenty of crowd surfers kicking us in the face. The bottles flew and I got beer and Coke poured all over my shirt.  Becca took a face full of Coke when a drink flew by and I ducked just in time but it hit the guy beside us and splattered all over Becca.  By the time the band was finished I looked at Becca and was sure we’d finish watching the show from high on the hill.

When it was time for the next band, she wanted to go back to the front. She said that’s where all the fun is. I reminded her about getting kicked and squashed, she was excited to get back to the fun. So we spent the rest of the night up front. Right on the front lines and as the night progressed to more popular bands, the activities up front got more intense. I spent almost the entire show turned around looking for crowd surfers, Frisbees and drink bottles and trying to shoot them down before they hit us. I also spent all day playing shock absorber. She got jostled around but I took all the hits first. We were on the wall of the pit a few times and she learned all about the etiquette of moshing. She watched grown people beat the crap out of each other and when one hit the ground, everyone stopped to help them up and then they resumed the chaos. We may be stupid metalheads, but we have rules…

I only had to go into “protect mode” once or twice. That’s why I was always a popular date at concerts back in the day. I knew how to plant my feet, use my elbows and give the look to keep people from running into my friend. I kept people off of Becca and she had a great time. She got hit a few times but only because I took a bigger hit. My neck actually hurts from all the impacts I took. It was like a bit of the old days. When I came home from a show, shirt torn, bloody lip and a black eye, I knew it was a good show. I had forgotten how much fun this was.  She loved every second of it. One time a crowd surfer came down on top of us and started to smother her. I picked the dude up with one hand and pushed him on his way. No one hurts my baby!

The only time I really had to exert any real force was when we were trying to leave. Things got real rough during the last band and about four songs in, Becca looks up at me and says she’s done, time to get some air. I turn, we grab each other and I make my way to the back. When you’re leaving, people are supposed to let you out and for the most part they did. When we hit the fence separating the “orchestra area” from the main field, people didn’t let us move so easily but we were still at crush point with the bodies. So when people stopped letting us pass, I made a path. I grabbed Becca’s arm and I leaned. I explained to her that 10% of how to move through a crowd is planting your feet the right way and leaning, another 10% is proper use of elbows and knuckles. The most important 80% is the look on your face. When a guy like me gives you the look that says, “I WILL be standing where you currently stand in less than two seconds. I hope for your sake that you are not still there when I get there”, people tend to move out of your way. When even the look failed, brute force is always acceptable. Maybe not always acceptable but when your little girl wants out, EVERYTHING is acceptable. I made a path and we had about ten people following us out.

We got out of there and headed home. Becca finally saw her first concert and she had a good one. It was full of the standard concert clichés and some of them were so lame they were a parody of themselves. The drunk girl throwing up on my shoes, the drunk guy peeing in the empty Coke bottle. The drunk girls riding on shoulders and flashing their boobs, the constant barrage of people smelling like stale cigarettes. Everything was there and everything was laughable.

These people are living the stereotype and Becca saw it all. Isn’t that a bad thing? How could I expose my child to a life of debauchery like that? Because she’s a smart kid. She sees boobs all the time at festival so that was nothing new, but she recognized the difference between simple nudity and dirty nudity. When the ladies go topless at festival, it is a beautiful, empowering thing. When these girls flash their boobs at a show, they are somehow doing something dirty, something shameful.

When Becca saw all of these drunks gathered around and acting like assholes, she put it together and recognized that drunk people act stupid, drunk mobs act dangerously stupid. When Becca saw all the “cool smoker kids” she pointed out that almost all of them had brown, rotting teeth.

Nothing gets past that kid. She had fun and all of that “dangerous stuff” she was exposed to was a learning experience for her. Besides, she had her daddy there to protect her.

Something I noticed while we did all of our people watching was uniforms. Every one of these kids was wearing a uniform. They try to be different and they all look alike. The mall exists solely to provide these kids with the illusion that they are so edgy and different, all the while wearing the same thing as the kid sitting next to them in class. I can’t really say much on this because I was guilty of the same thing when I was younger. My uniform was black jeans with the holes shredded at the knees, the black concert shirt with the sleeves torn off and a denim jacket, band logo patches optional. One day I decide to stop fitting in and just be myself. I never fit in before, I just stopped trying. I’m a lot more comfortable just being myself and not trying to dress up for the crowd. I’m me because I choose to be this way, not because “Hot Topic” told me to dress this way. Am I just too old to understand youth anymore? I used to understand it, back when I was part of them. But now I’m an old man. I see these kids in their red and black baggy bondage pants and I want to tell them that they wasted the $150 on a uniform. If you really want to be different, don’t conform to their standard! But I’d just be a creepy old man butting in where I didn’t belong.

All told, the show was a lot of fun. I wasn’t the oldest person there, I wasn’t out of place, I wasn’t bored with the music. Some of it was actually pretty good. I’ll probably buy one or two of their CDs. Becca got to see her first show and she got to see why it might be the last show for a while. There’s no way she’s going to go to a show without daddy for a long, long time.