ShakySecondhandKnees

Luka Tenderoni drops by with a spicy meatball...

I went to a three day music festival in my 30s.  It was fun and this is the running journal I wrote afterwards...

So far, everything about planning this trip has swayed between questionable decisions and borderline nightmares.  

Waiting for airfare to drop seemed smart until the company selling my plane tickets tried to railroad me. Here I was trying to find a cheap deal through Priceline’s nonrefundable name your own price option (a deal with the devil that I soon found out was one of the internet's most notoriously hard binds to break), only to realize after misreading fine print that my original flight times had me missing all of the first day.  So, there was that.  Luckily, I avoided having to eat a full price ticket and rebooking by playing the customer service game for 2 days, and boy was it a tense 2 days.  I was already having second thoughts about how I underestimated the overall cost of this trip - when in the blink of an eye I almost had to fork over a grand for airfare.  Having escaped that fiasco by the skin of my ass, and only really losing about 40 bucks in the rebooking process, it seemed my trips course had been righted.  (If you’re interested in beating the system - here’s the trick: call to complain, they will tell you basically to eat your own shit, ask to speak to Julio’s manager anyway, then tell them you put the wrong dates in - wala, ticket canceled, and almost fully-refunded if you buy new tickets through priceline with slightly different dates. Now ya know.)  

I got you Shatner, you smug motherfucker

I mentioned to my wife that I was an idiot for planning to attend a festival that was scheduled for Mother’s day weekend because that was clearly the factor driving plane ticket prices through the roof (or not, I don’t know, no one knows how that works), only to have my wife inform me I had already RSVPed to a friend’s wedding. Dammit, I suck at this.  And it gets worse.  A week before my flight, I get a frantic call from my compadre informing me our AirBnB reservation (some crazy new age hotel-work around that young hip people supposedly use) has been canceled and now that there is only a week until showtime, all these hip-Atlanta renta-pads are all booked solid.  So that's cool.  We take a day’s worth of emails to hash out new digs between the 6 of us when remarkably, and suspiciously, the overall cost for our lodgings drops... like a lot, like through the floor.  We're each going to save $100, which seems odd. Flying out on Thursday means making the Mother's Day rounds early that Wednesday, only to show up at my parents house, on my Dad’s birthday with only Mother's Day flowers in hand, having confused my days again... holy shit-tits I suck at this.  

Work on Thursday sucked, no news there. I woke up extra early, got into work early, left early.  During work I made the mistake of looking up where the most dangerous neighborhoods in Atlanta were... Why is this hotel so cheap again?

Apparently the Bluff is a little rough around the edges

Fast forward to my flight to Charlotte... It's so god damn hot in this airport - but what's this, a dog! Solid 2 year old therapy beagle named Karma came by to kill time at my gate.  This had me missing my own guy (read: sweet ass dog or male escort, you pick) back home - the wife was sending me pictures of him loving life, and then when boarding got announced - holy shit it's Stephon Gilmore?! I wasn’t wearing any Bills stuff yet (I’ve got plenty packed for the ATL), having come directly from work... so I decided not to say anything, and just took a suuuuper shitty creeper picture of him from the back of the plane... Go Bills!

The Charlotte airport is nice.  It was lonely traveling solo, and people were being dickholes about the charging stations/wall outlets. My window seat was rendered useless when the asshole two seats over needed to to close the shutter because he couldn't read his newspaper for the 3rd time today with the glare In his eyes.  Whatever bro. Flight got in @ 11:40... My buddy, Weekend Dad, was there to pick me up in the mini city that is the ATLanta airport, and it's nothing short of a small miracle that I can both locate my checked luggage and connect with him for a pickup. We got beer for the weekend at a gas station in the dark, there’s some sketchy guy hanging out outside. I'm over tired and on edge already, my group has had a day to get situated, I have no idea what to expect at our super discounted hotel... and holy mother of crack-dens, this place is in rough shape.  It worked out well for the weekend, but one room had AC and mold, the other was mold free but cooking at a ripe 120 degrees fahrenheit because the ACs broke. Plus NBC is only showing us a frozen screen from a hockey game that happened weeks prior, but at least I’m slated for the cooler room.  Atlanta is stupid hot.  Three dudes made short time of turning the A/C-less room into the world's largest Dutch oven via a brisk morning scout/jog.  If you don’t already know, you get really smelly and sweaty at a multi-day summer festival like this, but this room hit max stink before we even got our initial wristbands.   Turned out we missed a crazy last minute Derek Rose buzzer beater that night...

SO - about the actual festival..

Day one.  We needed supplies... Luckily the gas station had bananas.  The young guns see their first taste of old man wisdom when we buy a full gallon of water.  There's a massive statue of a buffalo, and it's packing heat - it's decided we need to molest it at some point in the weekend, but that plan never proves never to come to fruition.  Chipotle for breakfast/lunch, and I guess we start drinking? Why not, this is how we would roll 10 years ago.  One of the young guys were hanging with has elected to wear jeans - a bold choice to say the least for our 85 degree day in the sun. We grab 2 ubers to shuttle us to the venue - which is my first time ubering and all I can think is, how in the hell does this service work? No tips, money never exchanges hands, and the cars we get picked up in are crazy nice...it’s very cool to say the least. I was starting to feel like maybe things were turning around, and just maybe I was done sifting through regrets and getting blindsided by bullshit.  The driver was a nice dude, easy to talk to, par for the course with the uber experience I'm told.  We arrived, got in line in the already murderously scorching noonday sun, saw a giant thing (?) that ended up being an 11ft man-driven Zeus costume only to realize I had selected the e-ticket option and couldn’t remember my ticketmaster info, the kind of mistake that you just know is going to turn into an overstressed shitshow.  I tried the "forgot my password" routine which almost seems like it should replace the standard login process, guessed the wrong credit card number and wala, my account was frozen for 24 fucking hours. I've opened the door to customer service hell. Trying to access internet links, logins, and temporary passwords while simultaneously being on a call is actually physically impossible on my old iPhone and I decided my best bet was to try something shifty.  When I had initially purchased the ticket to this venue forever ago, I excitedly took a screenshot of my computer with my phone, because I'm old enough to only kind of know how to leverage technology correctly (the pro-tip here is that you shouldn't have to ever really take a God Damn picture of a computer with a phone - but whatever. I know what a screen shot is. It just so happens I’m pretty lazy) but I DID have a pretty decent picture of my ticket. By this time I was already separated from my group...a feat that took under 0 seconds, thank you Ticketmaster. I showed it, they scanned it, nothing.  Rescan it, nothing... can you imagine if after all of this fucking rigamarole and run around I still end up missing the first day? Is that like the bizarro-world version of serendipity? Why wouldn't this happen?  All of these issues were 100% user error stupidity on my own part...and then that sweet sweet motherfucker chimes.  It worked! I'm in. Time to go let the food trucks and beer vendors have their way with my wallet while the Atlanta sun beats me into submission for the next three days.

First band we saw was Surfer Blood. The music was great, our spot in the crowd was great, the double of jack on ice I got undercharged for was great, and the Atlanta sun was a miserable unholy God Damn succubus.  "What a nice day," I thought to myself and then immediately became drenched in sweat.  

(approximation)

Mac Demarco poked out from the crowd to take pictures with fans.  Friday ended up basically being all about him in various ways. The set was decent, and then we traversed on to Black Pistol Fire, (some guy has a remarkably obscure yet amazing t-shirt of a silhouette of the Georgia State men's basketball coach falling out of his rollie-chair that he ended up in after he blew his achilles celebrating their March Madness birth, and then preceded to over celebrate their round 1 upset.) different stage, awesome tunes, brutal pavement.  The following time slot had nothing anyone was interested in so we dicked around at the Dos Equis bar and one of our young guns earned himself VIP passes through some shoulder bucket challenge after watching a lesser version of Ryan Fitzpatrick get emasculated by being given a do-over (seriously guy?) 
Afterwards we went to see a band called Tennis.  I'm brand new to these guys, but the shaded pavilion there playing in mades them a must.  Plenty of shade ended up also including an over abundance of sideboob. Two very big thumbs up there.  The music was good, but if I'm being 100% honest I would have enjoyed her banging a gong and making wookie noises for an hour.  Our next set was a short walk to the fourth of five possible stages, and it was to see the band Wavves.  Out of our two young cohorts, only 50% was ready for what was about to happen.  The singer looked like a dick (turned out he is), eventually their set started, and the sea of youth began beating the crap out each other. I dug the intensity, but it turned out to be a little much for the majority of our group.  Big props to the guy crowd surfing while simultaneously absolutely nailing the high hat air drum beats.  Holy mother of ball bags was it hot out. Mac Demarco was next, and he was close, and everyone was pretty excited for it (including Demarco himself it seemed) but we made the adult decision to not all die on our first of three days, and watched from a little ways out in the Dos Equis bar.  Props to a random Californication cover and Demarco bassist (I think) just playing Coldplay's "Yellow" because..... why not, and also to the band singing happy birthday to their tech guy.  Did I mention it was the drummer AND tech guys’ birthdays in Tennis as well? Does that seem suspicious to anyone else, or am I just an asshole? 
Some dinner decisions were made, food trucks held us all upside down and shook us until there wasn't any more change in our pockets, our group splintered, and I ended up at Manchester Orchestra at the main stage.  Thanks to the efficiency of food truck lines - I missed about 60% of the set, but these guys rocked the main stage pretty well. I left on my own a little early to catch what might have been the set I'd been anticipating the most this entire weekend... As I approached the very toasty Death From Above 1979 stage, I could hear the Kaiser Chiefs covering The Who - which I feel like more bands should do because it always plays well to a large crowd because if you don't like The Who you can go fuck yourself. I waited for two of my friends (the same two who felt Wavves was a little too aggressive for their taste) to meet me for Death From Above and...talk about whiskey dick.  These guys were terrible.  Pace was faster than the already fast album tempos, the drummer and bassist seemed to need to sound check between each song, and the only real positives I ended up getting were a little Freddy Mercury impersonation, and the world's greatest joke: Q: How do you turn a duck into a soul singer? A: Put it in the oven until it's Bill Withers.  The crowd didn't like it, but I'll be telling it every time I get drunk for the next 6 months. Other than that, I was back to regretting my decisions in attending this event.  There was plenty more on the way, but there was potential that everything I came to jam to would end up like this, not to mention I skipped Mountain Goats AND T.V. On The Radio for this...both of which would have been super enjoyable.  
 Next, after a pitch, we head to see the band American Football.  There's a cool story behind how they came back from oblivion for their fans, but having never heard them before it didn't really do it for my one friend and I, so we decided to see what kind of destruction the band Mastodon was doing to the main stage, and we did so from a considerable distance.  Giant mosh pits swirled like people are trying to actively open pits to various hells we could never imagine, and these guys killed it. Afterwards, as night was falling, the Pixies went on, Frank fucked a song up, they did some new stuff - but it was unreal just that I get to see this happen.  Huge check on my bucket list.  Almost single handedly made up for that DFA1979 trainwreck.  Last show of the night was the Strokes and it was amazing from top to bottom. Hands down the best act of the weekend.  Biggest crowd with the most pop.  Julian nonchalantly trotted around stage, acting a like a jerk while the rest of the band casually ignored him.  He minimally gargled banter at the crowd that seemed like it was part of the how-to-be-a-rock-star training manual and the crowd ate it up.  It was almost like it was all pre-planned but really who gives that much of a shit, it worked, and the rest of the band did their thing. They were tight, the production was on point and it seemed the Strokes had saved my sanity by playing one of the best rock concerts I've been to in decades.  (Props to the event planner who booked the Pixies to play right before these guys - have you heard "Where Is My Mind?"? Ok. Have you heard "Is This It?" ....It seems like we've found the source material Mr. Casablancas. Not really, but the similar sounding intros to different songs is still pretty cool.)

We went home, we got one uber that fit 4 people for 6 people, because math is hard, and 2 unlucky friends got to hoof it home on foot.  I'd been up since 4am and I was so freaking tired I just went to sleep while people were still hanging out in the room.  Turned out we missed a Paul Pierce last second buzzer beater.

Reporter: “Did you call bank?”

Truth: “No, I called game.”

When day two started we realized we needed to rethink some things.  Turned out, anti-chaffing baby powder was going to be more of a necessity than a luxury for my buddies, and I decided I could use some Tylenol and sunscreen because I get it, I'm one of the older people at this concert.  We got breakfast at some crazy place. It was delicious, the place was awesome, it was my first coffee in over 24 hours, things were looking up. I purchased Smirnoff Ice instead of beer because it was like 90 degrees outside and I was going to end up drinking beer for approximately 10 hours anyway.  I got shit for it, deservedly I suppose, but maybe my genius just isn't recognizable.  My older friend and I decided to see what all the fuss is about and joined Snapchat.  It took us each about a day and half to get the hang of it (you crazy kids, here comes some screen shots of a guy who can't work his phone) the morning had some bands we either didn't know or didn't care enough about to see so the couple hours out of the sun was nice.

First band up was Real Estate.  Nothing wrong with these guys, but we were back at day one - same spot - same brutal sun - same immediate drench of sweat. Afterwards we checked out Devil Makes Three on the hill - and it was definitely white people music, but that works for me.  We left a little early to set up shop for Built to Spill.  With the sun being as relentless as it was, I decided to hang on the hill and enjoy this one sitting down.  It was still too hot to be a live human being outdoors - but Built to Spill turned my brain into the tastiest bowl of figgy pudding you've ever come across.  After my mind had finished delightfully melting out of my ears, these guys closed their set with Joyride and a freaking Blue Oyster Cult cover.  Brilliant.  I was looking forward to seeing what the fuss was about with Neutral Milk Hotel, but the size of a crowd they drew did not warrant me fighting to get close.  People in my group were hungry and weren't having any of what they were putting down anyways, oh well.  We got food back at the trucks.  We decided on pizza because there wasn’t a line and then paid whatever it is they wanted for it.  It's sucks because this is Georgia and I'm literally buying pizza out of a truck, but it beat being hungry.  
The next set up was Social Distortion but I made the decision to skip it for a better spot at Wilco.  So then there's this.  General admissions one major downfall is that you have no control over who or what is going to be around you. We get a really good spot but some jackweed popped up and started jabbering on about mobile cell phone towers and being Israeli and knowing someone in Japan and marketing and all in all doing a great job demonstrating that whatever chemicals he's ingested today are the ones really behind the wheel.  Sun went down, Jeff Tweedy and his boys did their thing...and the crowd did try their damnedest to get them to keep playing so we could all have a reason to not walk over to the Avett Brothers it seemed.  
Some of our group goes home after Wilco because who really cares about the Avett Bros, and 4 of us wander down to see what is definitely not my cup of tea. If an 18 year old me knew then what I know now, I probably would have stuck around shows like this.  Our buddy tried to pick up a random girl, which doesn't work out and we decided to go find a bar.  Well.  On the way, since we were hungry, the four of us in all our dirty smelly sweaty drunken disgustingness decided to stop at a very nice looking sit down Chinese restaurant.  I was kind of hoping more for like the Golden Arches or something low key but I can only work with what Atlanta is giving me here.  We got the poo poo on you treatment when we asked for booze, most likely because they're about to close and we must have smelled like what happens when Bigfoot wears a jockstrap.  
Onto the bar we went, and we literally just powered our way into the first one we saw because when one of the younger guys I'm with gets drunk, apparently he develops more inertia than his body has mass for...take that thermodynamics.  It was super clean, and there were some gay men having dinner at several tables, some ladies with fresh crew cuts, the DJ is blasting Blondie’s Heart of Glass, and we got stopped by a gentleman before getting to the bar.  We couldn’t hear what he was saying so we gave him our IDs to which he kindly responded, “I don't want y’all's IDs- I wanna dance.”  Our buddy made it to the bar and ordered a round for all of us before finally realizing we've meandered into a gay bar.  A pretty nice one at that.  I felt embarrassed about how bad we must smell more than anything, but we're not going to be rude- we’ll stay for a drink and then go elsewhere, unless the DJ starts playing Montell Jordan or something.... which he did.  The executive decision to commandeer the dance floor was made.... One of my friends was really nursing his beer and we ended up dancing to three songs before we eventually move on.   Sorry for the smell everyone - not sorry for blowing your minds with my sweet moves.   We stopped at the next bar we saw... blatantly ignoring some of the bawdiest tongue in cheek double entendre signs I've even seen in public and almost proceed to make the exact mistake twice.  It's turns out our hotel and the concert venue bookended a pretty predominantly gay neighborhood, or "gayborhood" as the Internet tells me...

In my head: Saturday night played out like this scene from Wayne’s World 2

I had fun, but it turns out we missed Lebron James hitting a game winning last second three that night.  (Would it be better or worse if I was making that up? I can’t tell)

Cavs Coach: “Lets have Lebron inbound in ball”

Lebron: “lol ur dumb”

Last day.  We decided breakfast was more important and a better idea than the first three rounds of acts for Sunday and headed out to get food.  Turns out Mothers Day is kind of a rough Sunday to try an find a place to get brunch on a whim.  We end up getting Mexican for breakfast - which both sounds like a death metal band name and kind of makes you feel like your stomach is hosting a real small very niche offshoot of OzzFest.  Head back, clean off all the booze we've purchased and caught rides down.  No line meant I got a free Georgia state coach falling down shirt, score.  Sheepdogs set was so hot.  They're awesome, but I was kind of dying.  Mexican brunch wasn’t propping us up as well as eggs and coffee did the day previous. It was approximately 136 degrees Fahrenheit with exactly 0% cloud cover when the spray-on sunscreen I've applied began to..pill?..or curd?...or produce larvae? I don't know, I can just tell you it wasn't acting like it was supposed to. Sheepdogs covered Bob Seger.  Solid stuff.  The day was significantly easier going.  Schedule wasn't as packed, we were all getting a little worn down, so we spaced things, skipped a bunch... Dr dog was awesome, but the sun just would not freaking quit.  We headed over to the trucks - a line for BBQ followed by a line for iced coffee equated to me missing all of Panda Bear’s set, but at least I was fairly close to hear it.  We skipped Ryan Adams... who I read covered Danzig! (Damnit) to hang in shade and wait for Minus the Bear. The crowd really dug it, they were good, they played an album from front to back which is cool, but I've never given a crap about them prior so for me it was like hey, I get it.  (More bands should do the we’re gonna play our full ____ album angle b-tee-dubs.)  They worked the crowd well - made a joke about Missy Elliot.  We missed Ride... Who are apparently a big deal with the younger crowd I guess? But I don't regret my decision.  
Our one buddy started to reach max level hammered, and we go down to see the festival closer Tame Impala on the main stage. They were pretty good, but the crowd wasn't as jammed for a Sunday and perhaps it's due to the fact that a lot of their fans are in custody for title 1 narcotics offenses? I didn't mind having to keep an eye on our guy.  More than anything, I respect his dedication to partying.  This night we all walked home.  With one regrettable decision left in me, my roommates and I decided to get Chinese take out delivered at 2 in the morning.  It's probably the worst Chinese I've ever had, but A) I'm in Georgia and B) it's 2 in the morning. I wouldn't exactly say it didn't meet expectations.  I went to bed, woke up and had some bomb-ass faith-restoring chicken-and-waffles for breakfast at a diner outside Georgia Tech before my flight home.  

See this guy? I ate that guy and he was delicious.

We did not miss any buzzer beaters on Sunday.