Fuji Rock Report...

Oh my god. It's 11 PM on Sunday night. Returned from Fuji Rock about 8 AM today. It was very wild, very wet...it's a huge festival an hour from here in Niigata, at a ski area that is taken over by...I dunno...my guess was 60,000 people. There was a camping village up on the golf course and about 10 different stages down below. I scalped a Saturday ticket from a guy out front for the same price as I would have found it at Lawsons!

Within the last 48 hours encompassing my trip to Naeba...
-I've had 2 hours sleep, in a freezing tent turned to human oven...
-There were maybe 7 or 8 torrential downpours.
-I've seen insanely great live music. The most memorable were:

-Cake...pretty good set, first thing we saw. Immediately as we arrived, the skies opened
-Kaiser Chiefs...really upbeat british rock band
-Coldplay...very, very impressive show. really added a lot of respect for that band...very memorable times seeing them play
-Foo Fighters. Best rock show of my entire life. I've never seen such pure ROCK.
-DJ Madlib...the craziest beats I've ever heard.
-DJ Kentaro...did lots of visual scratching and video stuff.
-The Black Velvets...sort of a smaller Black Crowes...pretty good
-Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra...good ska! Never seen a crowd so into a ska band...
-The Bravery...up front center for this band from New York...sort of synthesizered- Ramones type rock feel, lots of fun
- Asian Dub Foundation...super high energy, funnest to dance to and the source of some good stories
-Beck....up front in the middle, really good show, pretty mellow following Asian Dub but really good. The band played the new stuff from the new CD too slowly, but it was very cool and creative...
-Fatboy Slim...oh my lord, not even a music concert...more like an audio/visual feast.
-Laurent Garnier. Only saw the end of it, but the crowd liked it....

So overall it was good. It was frustrating cuz my cell phone didn't have reception (even though Anna got through to me, thanks for calling!) and I was wanting to take a call from my family so I was worried about that a lot, and no one in the group here could reach me either...I spent the most time just back and forth between groups of people...like Liz, Tiff, Ryan, Martin (who gets extra credit for setting everyone up ahead of time and being cool about everything), Kat, Mel, Debs, Kate, Deet, and Alice, helped look after her when she wasn't with Debs...

Just feeling good about having a weekend like that, as wet and strange as it was sometimes and as distracted as I was...listening to live music reminded me that I haven't done anywhere near enough of that in my life. You can get kind of lazy listening to good music on your stereo all the time without appreciating the human hands that actually create it.

Good stuff. Not looking forward to life at my desk...