Sumerian Side Stage

Outdoor music festivals are a great place to get your money's worth out of a ticket.  At this year's Rockstar Mayhem Festival, I saw 15 bands for 30 dollars; that's two bucks a band.   You're not going to find a deal like that at smaller indoor venues. However, what you make up for in quantity, you often lose in quality.  The Sumerian Records side stage is working hard to change that.

Here's my view from the second stage:

The blurry-ness captures my actual view.

Pretty crap-tastic right?  I'd love to tell you who that is on stage.  I want to say it's Whitechapel, but from two miles away, I'm not entirely sure.  Most of the bands I cared about seeing played this stage, unfortunately, seeing them was the problem.  

I'm not one of those "get in the pit and try to love someone" concert-goers.  I'm one of those "stand back and let my face get melted" kind of guys that might nod his head a bit in approval of odd-time signatures and abrupt time changes.  I like to watch the band interact with each other and the fans; I'm a heavy metal voyeur and it's hard to voy from this far away.  Here's my view of the main stage:

This picture looks fairly close compared to where I was actually standing.  It's amazing how well the zoom works on my camera.  To give you a clue about how far away I actually was, take notice of the giant t.v. screen on the right side of the photo.  That's what those of us on the lawn were expected to watch the show through.  To put it another way, if I was playing golf and Tim Lambesis was the hole, this would be a 5 par round.  Not a great view for the voyeur.

As you can see, the quality of this concert so far is pretty lame.  I can barely make out the guitarists, I can't tell if anybody is even sitting behind the drums, and the bass players...well bassists don't really count.  Now here's the Sumerian Records Side Stage:

Now that's close.  If it wasn't for the huge security guard in front of me, I could have been on stage.  This is how metal shows should be seen.  It's easier to have your face melted when you can see the carnage up close and personal.  This can be accomplished at the other stages, but it's far harder.  You have to show up early, stand in the crowd all day, and slowly weasel your way to the front as others leave for drinks, bathroom breaks, and medical attention.  Even if you do make it to the front of one of the larger stages, the band is three to five feet above your head and you're still not going to see this:

I, The Breather

This is what metal shows are all about - holding the vocalist above your head while he screams unintelligibly into the microphone.

Upon A Burning Body

Metal shows are about one thing, i.e., interaction.  Personally, I flushed all the moshing, yelling, and crowd participation out of my system in my younger days, back when I could afford to go to five or six shows a year.  Now I'm lucky to get out of the house once a year for a concert, but when I do, I love watching the other metal-heads tearing it up in the pit.  It's not a concert until somebody is bleeding and the only blood I saw was at the Sumerian Records side-stage.