ROTHBURY FESTIVAL POST 2

By caballero on Sat, Jul 4, 2009 5:41 pm

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The anticipation behind the opening notes of an STS9 set has to be seen to be believed. The crowd is literally bubbling with energy, mostly directing it towards keeping the entire zoo of inflatable animals afloat on the surface of an ocean of people. Set against the backdrop of Sherwood Forest, the wooded area that separates the Ranch Arena from the two bigger stages, this is the Rothbury Festival's chance to show off the expensive lights which your $280 ticket presumably helped pay for. This is the festival's big special effects showpiece, the one which justifies the trip to northern Michigan on an otherwise mild and overcast weekend.

Once they pop the clutch, all bets are off. STS9 blasts off into a two and half hour set which barely makes a dent in the crowd's collective energy once the stage finally clears at around 3:30 in the morning. All the zoo animals have been slaughtered, the contents of all the balloons sucked down hours ago and the path away is lit by the hundreds of glo-sticks remaining from the opening, when they collectively erupted from the crowd. A mob of staff members begins the thankless job of kicking everyone out of the festival area and back to the campground, literally throwing up fences around the forest and upheaving people out of hammocks hanging between trees. As we begin to walk away, we step around a girl curled up in the fetal position as security poke at her and shove a flashlight in her face. That kind of night.

Flash back to a couple hours prior. I'm just relishing my finest success of the weekend thus far—managing to use the clean, flushing bathroom that's reserved for people who spent over $1000 on VIP tickets. Having taken off to the media area for an informational meeting at 12 (which, naturally, I arrived at the end of), I'd been out of the loop with the rest of my campsite for the entire afternoon, which consisted of exploring, writing and boozing with the randos mulling around the open bar in the press area. In the meantime, I proceeded to knock two out of three cameras inoperable for reasons beyond my knowledge, leaving me only with an iPhone camera that chugged batteries like no other. The weather was still overcast and not out of the 60s until 2 PM, at which point I was still hours away from the Damian Marley & Nas show at 7, so I had time to kill (i.e. boozing and using rich people bathrooms) and more randos to meet.

The place to meet them is the Sherwood Forest. The atmosphere is enough to trip you out, regardless of what you're on. In between the two parallel paths that lead towards the Odeon and the Sherwood Court stages, there are sound vibration massage stations, fully stocked bars, and hammocks, lots of hammocks. Wandering deeper into the woods leads to the Speak EZ stage, in which the old tradition of listening to some plastered old guy ranting about society is held alive. At night, the place lights up like an oversize Christmas tree with huge hanging ornaments that change color, things that would wreak havoc on an already fragile mind, which is sort of the point.

As I came out on to the other side, G. Love and the Special Sauce were beginning their set on Rothbury's main stage, the Odeon. The sun had only just begun to grow in strength, and people were filling in along the back, staking their spots out for String Cheese Incident later that night. Considering the circumstances, I was in the perfect condition to actually suffer through G. Love's college bonfire love fest. But even that proved impossible. Worse than aversion, all G. Love could inspire was my deepest apathy towards anything he has and ever will have to sing about.

Damian Marley and Nas provided some much needed aggression to the proceedings after two hours of G. Love. It should be noted that this is a victory in itself just for getting Nas to actually commit to something, unlike planned albums with DJ Premier and a couple marriages. The Rothbury stop was concurrent with their gig headlining the Rock the Bells tour to help promote their forthcoming collab album with the 'J.R. Gong' “Distant Relatives,” but this crowd wasn't Rock the Bells. The hula hoop crowd doesn't really go for Nas, though he and Marley (naturally) have credibility with the pot heads.

But after the lull-inducing G. Love set, they did their best to revive things. Nas paid tribute to the hip-hop fans who came out by skipping through a verses from “Illmatic” before getting Marley joined him on stage. Nas and Marley (and the band the latter brought out, with two backup singers that would do Bob proud) shared a serious rapport on stage, rarely engaging one another perhaps out of too much respect. The few cuts they performed from their album were equally serious tracks, with Nas adapting his style to fit Marley's reggae.

They broke apart for individual sets halfway through, but neither were as effective as they were together. Nas was out there with no entourage (word to Joe Budden) and no hype man, just him and Green Lantern on the decks. His tracks alternately benefit from the live treatment; “One Mic” drags on too long and theatrical, while “Hate Me Now” is a near perfect anthem for the excesses of the weekend.

And how excessive it was, as evidenced by STS9. One song flowed into the next, with only the sporadic eruptions of glo-sticks to signal when one was starting up. The group tends to dig itself into its beats and then work their way out. “Instantly” begins with a synthetic bounce, building up around robotic vocal commands before plunging into a deep groove. Their songs aren't so much heard as absorbed, pulsing vibrations and warm tones making up for a lack of dynamism. Outside of context things might sound completely different.

STS9's bright shiny color and music show, impressive as it was, was also faceless. They're far away on stage, even then push back from the front, and prefer to keep the crowd interaction to a minimum. Even with only five guys on stage, the performance itself owed as much to the people working tech as the band.

For pure performance, Man Man was Friday's winner by far. The band packed itself onto the center of the Sherwood Court stage in the early afternoon. Even with all the space to utilize on the stage, they crammed together in a tight pocket of controlled chaos. The lead singer, who looks like Borat's over caffeinated cousin, leads the manic assault with an unpredictable sense of righteous fury worthy of a real rock star. He'd jump on the piano, bang out a verse and then rush out to attack the microphone just in time to catch the chorus. I couldn't tell you the name of any of his songs, or why the members of the band were wearing war-paint, but his performance was the best of the day.