Lollapalooza just released their lineup for this summer. So did Bonnaroo. Whatever happened to artists playing indoor venues during the summer? It seems like nowadays, if you want to see anybody whose anybody between the months of May and August you have to catch them at a festival.
I blame jazz. Jazz festivals have been going on since the beginning of time, but somewhere along the way everyone else decided these festivals were a good idea, too. Maybe I'm just a big grouch (very possible, I'm accused of it all the time), but I tend to dislike festivals. Here's why:
For starters, no matter what the weather report says, it's always something like 102 degrees outside and bottled water costs as much as a really fancy drink at Crave bar. And of course you're not allowed to bring bottled water—hydration might make people lucid enough to notice that their favorite band is only playing for 12.5 minutes. Or that two bands they came to see are scheduled to play at the same time on two different stages, conveniently located six and a half miles from each other. Or that two stages are so close that the drum solo from one is drowning out the acoustic guitar of another. Or that every 10 minutes someone offers to sell them some ""primo weed,"" which always, always, always turns out to be Zip-Locked oregano. Or that the types of people who tend to visit festivals are always recently-escaped-from-the-asylum type freakazoids that run around pulling out clumps of their hair, and waving their arms and hollering and hooting like possessed Voodoo priests. Or the inevitable class warfare that comes from watching the people in the fenced-off $300-ticket VIP area. Worst, lucid people might realize they paid $75 to put up with all of this.
Think of a good indoor concert: you, generally, have seats, which is nice. You have booze, which is always nice—real booze, not the Miller Lite in a plastic cup that attracts ants if you set it down on the ground (which you're always doing at a festival—sitting on a dirty ground, warding off insects [and sometimes bears and wolves]. And as long as we're on the subject of alcohol—not only does it cost the same as a movie ticket and popcorn in the real world, but you have to get those awful bracelets that are always over-glued and end up sticking to your arm and you have to rip them off when the festival's over in a painful and band-aid-like fashion that leaves you with a strip of hairless arm). You have air-conditioning indoors, too.
You have restrooms—and Lord, oh Lord, who doesn't love a good restroom? Particularly when compared with the generic festival's Port-o-Pottys that generally smell like the part of a farm that any sane person steers clear of.
And, of course, there's generally a line that reaches past the beer tent and into the parking lot (which also costs the price of admission to a movie, and you probably had to park so far away from the land the festival is on you might as well be in an adjoining state) where you can't even hear the music anymore. And the best part about indoor concerts: when they end, you get to go home.
Think about those multi-day festivals; they're the worst. Aside from having to camp out in a field with people who clearly don't know and have never heard of sleep, and from the squirrels and raccoons and other vermin that you wake up at 3 a.m. to find gnawing at your pant leg, you have to live in a field with hundreds or even thousands of people that haven't showered since the last time they tricked their parents into letting them into their house so that they could steal the fine china and good bottles of scotch. It's the pits.
That being said, I hear The White Stripes and The Flaming Lips are at Bonnaroo this year. Who's coming with me?
