anglo-audiophile:The Reviews

Festivals
My only experience with festivals was from this past summer when I went to the Virgin Festival to see the Fratellis and Amy Winehouse. I had been longing to go to a festival since the summer of 2005 when I learned that Europe (aka England/Scotland/Ireland) had all these really great festivals that my newly found favourite bands were playing at. Virgin Fest was something of a bust for me though because I got sun poisoning and so I didn’t stay the whole day. I did get to see the Fratellis and Amy Winehouse, but I felt like crap most of the time, which ruined the overall experience. Despite this, I’ve read a lot about festivals, particularly the ones happening in places I can’t get to (Seattle, California, Texas, England, England, England, Ireland, England, Scotland, England.) From all this reading, the description Mr. Miller gave of what was going at the Monterey International Pop Festival all seemed fairly familiar.
Since 1967, rock festivals have become a mainstay of the summer season. For die-hard rock followers, summer really begins when the first festival happens. This season usually starts around late March/early April, depending on when SXSW (South by Southwest) happens. Oddly enough the season also ends in Texas with Austin City Limits, which is known for being the place where all the really famous bands played when they were absolute nobodies. In between you have a whole bunch of festivals, nearly one or two every weekend, all over the world, though I mostly hear about the ones in Europe (blame the anglophilia.) The States don’t seem to have as many major festivals as the UK does, but there are a few. Lollapalooza, Ozzfest, Virgin Festival, SXSW, Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo (which I really wanted to go to), Coachella, and Pitchfork are some of the more well known festivals, if only for the media coverage they garner. Most of these festivals though haven’t been around for as long as some of the European festivals, the youngest of these being Pitchfork and V Fest and the oldest being Ozzfest which started in 1996. Europe on the other hand…you could spend your whole summer at festivals and still not have gone to all of them.
In the UK the two most famous festivals are Carling Weekend (Reading and Leeds Festivals to be more exact) and Glastonbury festival. The official Reading Festival started in 1971 while the official Leeds Festival began only in 1999. The two festivals have since combined to create Carling Weekend (Carling being a brand of beer) and is held every year over the August bank holiday. Glastonbury, which started in 1970, is held during the last weekend of June every year in the outskirts of the city of Glastonbury, specifically Worthy Farm. The festival was created by Michael Eavis who got the idea after seeing Led Zeppelin. So, besides Glasto (as all the cool kids call it) and Carling weekend you have the Isle of Wight festival, O2 festival in Ireland, T in the Park in Edinburgh, Scotland (another festival sponsored by a beer company), Download festival (which might be coming to the States), Bestival, Isle of Skye festival, Latitude Festival, and Ibiza Rocks festival (though technically Ibiza isn’t a part of the UK, it’s actually Spanish.) There are more festivals, both in the States and in Europe, but I do want to talk about “Sympathy for the Devil”, so just remember: It’s better to go to festivals in Europe because the weather’s a lot cooler there, and if you’re in the right part of the UK it usually rains.

Sympathies
A year or so ago I “discovered” a really cool band called OK Go. The lead singer (Damian Kulash) was cute and tall and from DC. I liked the blog they kept (which has since gone the way of most band blogs and barely ever updates) and so decided to give their music a try. I was impressed, if only because they played the kind of music I liked and were American, which doesn’t happen that often. In my search for information about the band (a ritual which has since gone the way of band blogs, and rarely ever happens) I found out that a track on their latest album, “Oh No”, called “A Good Idea at the Time” was an almost complete line for line response to the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” I’m not a huge fan of the Rolling Stones and so I just tucked that little nugget of info away in my brain for possible later use in impressing my less musically literate friends. After sometime though, and many, many listenings to OK Go, I decided to actually compare these two tracks to see if the claim was true.
“A Good Idea at the Time” mostly deals with the first two verses of “Sympathy for the Devil”, though OK Go switches the first and second verse of “Sympathy” in “Good Idea”. The later verse in “Sympathy” are answered for in “Good Idea” with the last verse: “True about my wealth/True about my taste/But you don’t need no help from me, you’ll lay yourself to waste.” In this line, both the songs are the same. The voice of songs may be different, but each band blames us, the listener (and world by proxy) for the ruin and destruction that’s happened in our times. As such, not much has changed in the past forty or so years.

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