Virgin Festival Photos, Roundup

(This post has very little to do with blogs or blogging. It's
just meant to be entertaining.)

Man, I don't
know how y'all feel about great big rock concerts, but they make me feel pretty
much awesome all the way around. There's something about standing up and
sweating for 12 hours with 40, 000 other people that puts a smile in my soul.

It may sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm seriously
not. Loud, amazing music + a wide swath of humanity's excitement = one of the
best things about being alive, if you ask me. And my friends, this weekend's
Virgin Festival was up
there with eating homemade blueberry pie and free pit passes to NASCAR as one of
the best things a human could experience in late summer.

Multibillionaire Richard
Branson put the festival on for no purpose other than to
create a music festival starring some of his favorite contemporary bands like
The Who, Gnarls
Barkley, The Red Hot Chili Peppers,
The Flaming Lips, Carl
Cox, 2 Many DJs and
more.

I was lucky enough to score photo credentials at the
show for AOL, meaning that I got to go right up to the front of the stage for
the first three songs of each band's act and snap like a maniac. Here's a few
shots, in no particular order, with some accompanying descriptive text.

This is Chris Ross and Myles Haskett of
Wolfmother,
heir apparent to AC/DC's spot on the throne as Australia's heavy rock kings.
They had an unfortunate time slot, playing at 1:30 p.m. -- well in advance of
rock 'n roll's waking hour -- but made up for it with a grinding, sweaty energy.
You could actually feel the air move in front of the speakers every time the
band slammed a note in unison.







Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is the
kind of band that you're either into, or you're just not. They've got an indie
hipster vibe, and it's true that they hail from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, ground
zero for the vintage t-shirt set. One of those dudes lives in my good friend's
building, as it turns out. I've seen him in the lobby on and off over the years,
and then I'll be damned if I'm not shooting photos of him playing the keyboard
this weekend.




Live
hip-hop -- or really, any form of sample-based music perforemd live --
is really hit-or-miss. Sometimes it's just some bozo standing behind a
microphone, and other times it's a vibrant art form that really draws
on the crowd's energy. Gnarls Barkley was definitely the latter this
weekend, performing music made on a keyboard and sampler with a full
live band, including a string section. Dressed in faux Roman apparel,
singer Cee-Lo announced that Gnarls Barkley's new name was 'Chariots of
Fire." I was hoping they'd cover the 'Chariots of Fire' theme, but no
dice. Other than that tiny disappointment, the show was a jam.

 



When it comes to The Who's
performance this Saturday evening, the blogosphere reverberates with the hum of
universal truth: They've still got it. I
can't even get my arm to do that windmill move of Pete Townshend's and I'm only
30. They mercifully went easy on the new material and pushed out hit after hit
for the better part of an hour and a half -- and it was so awesome to see a sea
of faces rocking out -- all of whom were born after these songs had come and
gone from the charts.







If
psychedelic love were spread through amps like fire from flamethrowers,
The Flaming Lips would rule a scorched and empty
earth. Sort of. Maybe that metaphor needs work. What I am trying to say is that
no band could possibly match the giddy, tripped-out ecstasy that The Flaming
Lips mustered that night.

What you see above is an image
of Wayne Coyne, the band's guitarist, singer, and spiritural leader surfing the
crowd in a giant plastic bubble. Stage hands dressed in brilliantly colored
superhero costumes inflated the bubble and passed him over the photo pit, into
the crowd. Click the image above to see a video of Coyne bobbing around an
electrified audience.

The Lips played songs from their
past three albums, joyously exhorting the crowd to sing as loudly as possible.
"We want you to sing so loud that the Red Hot Chili Peppers (playing across the
field) say '[pl]uck it' and lay down their instruments," Coyne told the crowd.
We gave it a shot, man. This morning, former Journals Editor
Joe (who was also in attendance) asked me "Was that a band or a
cult?"

Coyne blasted the crowd with confetti, inflated a giant
balloon filled with more confetti with a leafblower (you could hear the pop over
the band) and led sing-alongs with a rubber nun puppet on his hand. Saucy ladies
in alien costumes gyrated alongside the stage while dancers in Santa suits
mirrored them across the stage. I keep coming back to 'electric' and 'magical'
as metaphors, but that's just what the show was. It was a birthday party on Mars
...

But enough of my perceptions. What kind of fun have
you had en masse recently? How have you aligned with thousands of strangers and
made your molecules vibrate in unison? Or, apart from all that -- what did you
do last that blew your mind?

Tags: Virgin, Virgin Festival, Wolfmother, Flaming Lips, The Who, Gnarls Barkley, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah