June 2, 2008

As I prepared to head over to Terminal 5 to catch a jaw-dropping performance by The Raconteurs on Saturday night I got a text message from HT contributor Halpua: “about to watch STP at the Arts Center. 14 years since the last time. Kinda giddy.” For those of you who suck at acronyms, Hal was at the PNC Bank Arts Center where the Stone Temple Pilots were slated to headline the K-Rock Return of Rock show.

Well, Hal’s enthusiasm was short lived. An hour later I got another text message from him: “Shitshow here. Taking an eternity to get on stage. Crowd booing.” STP finally took the stage about twenty minutes later, and Scott Weiland incoherantly babbled an apology onstage. At the time no one knew exactly what was going on, but K-Rock DJ’s Opie and Anthony filled us in on the shitshow this morning. We especially love the part where one of the DeLeo brothers started shouting “Axl” at Weiland’s tour bus. You gotta listen to this after the jump:

You should have seen this one coming. With gigantic festivals of 40,000+ capacity crowds popping up more often than Willie “Mays” Hayes, the little ones are going to get some praise. Well, the Summer Camp Music Festival in Chillicothe, IL earned plenty of it over this past Memorial Day weekend from the 12,000 attendees who experienced a pretty flawless execution.

[All Photos by Joel Berk]

The wait to get both in and out of the festival totaled – I kid you not – zero seconds, the food and drink vendors were plentiful and delicious (cheers to that veggie pizza stand over by the Sunshine Stage), meeting up with people was a breeze and the bands threw the shit down. Over the course of four days and nights, the weather spanned a range of about forty degrees, the tornado sirens went off, the mud came and went (twice), the sunburn was everywhere and nobody seemed inconvenienced. Why? Because, festivals are pretty easy when there aren’t too many people.

That and the music was really, really fun. READ ON for more from Rupert…

We’d like to take a moment to recognize the life and music of Bo Diddley, who passed away this morning at his home in Florida. Bo was a true musical

Between all the jam and the indie we cover around here it’s quick to forget about all the classic rock bands that got us to this point. Well that’s going

Maybe I’m a little skeptical about the validity of the story because it comes from something called News Of The World – which has a supermarket tabloid ring to it,

With all the buzz going ’round about Trey’s hints at a Phish reunion – which was reported here significantly earlier than other sources of jam news, by the way –

While the attendees of this year’s Mountain Jam didn’t fully escape the rain, thanks to a brief shower on Saturday, they avoided the weekend-long storms that put a damper on