UPDATE virgin music festival

I've been asked about some of the other bands that played. Here is an update:

TV on the Radio - We left after the B-Boys, as they were playing, sorta heard them on the way out.
Sasha & Digweed - I didn't come within 50 yards of the "Dance Tent" the entire time. Even though Girltalk might have been interesting.
Interpol - I didn't move between Wu Tang (they started right as Wu Tang ended on the other stage) and Velvet Revolver. I figure if I really get a bonar for these guys they play 930 almost every year. I'd kinda rather just listen to old Gang of 4 and Wire records.
Matisyahu - He ended right before we got there. I really had no desire to check out an ex-Phish head who's gone hasidic do a neo-Snow routine about the Torah.
MIA - Isn't she like the female version of the soundtrack to Da Ali G show?
The Police - like I said previously, I understand the importance, I just don't give a shit.

virgin music festival

Sat'dee:

Drove to Lexington Market to get on the Metro. Parked in the Hippodrome's parking garage. Baltimore's Metro is filthy compared to DC's. Also all the passcard vending machines were busted so the Metro was free. Took that to the Rogers station and got off and took a bus for a few blocks to Pimlico.

Got there in probably the middle of the Fratelli's set, and scoped them for a while. Was alright. The bass player switched basses between every song, which is such a guitar player thing to do. Maybe the heat & humidity kept throwing them out of tune or something.

After the Fratellis we met up with Brit's coworker+girlfriend+roommate and walked towards the main stage where Amy Winehouse was doing that one Lauren Hill song that's all "That thing, That thing That thi-i-i-ing". We stood around there for a while, then Brit went to hit the can and evidently got distracted by Paolo Nutini on the second stage so it took her like a half hour to get back to us. Then Brit & me and +roommate went to go check out the rest of Paolo Nutini's set, all the while figuring that Paulo Nutini was Pete Bjorn & John.

I guess right as we got there Cheap Trick was coming off the main stage, but we didn't know, for some reason in my mind CT was on the second stage later, so I kept waiting for CT (that was our excuse for leaving the other folks to watch Incubus on their own), but we missed them. Oh well.

Then we ran into Brit's pothead ex-friend Lindsay, and we watched Pete Bjorn & John. They were pretty interesting.

Then we parted ways with Lindsay and went to get some food and hit the can. We hung out inside the Pimlico building for a while as we missed Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals on the main stage. When we got back to our feet we went back to the second stage to catch a little bit of LCD Sound System but I wasn't feeling it so we headed to the main stage.

Then, after a while the Beastie Boys came on and did their thing, and it was pretty awesome, even though by then the sun-baked/stoned/drunk crowd wasn't gonna go off too much. Their way-old punk stuff with Mike D on the mike didn't translate quite as well as it could have, I think Adrock is their better punk singer. They did a good mix from all eras.

Then we left.

Sundee:

Drove to the Metro Stop next to Pimlico which took way less time.

Got there as Explosions In The Sky were setting up, listened to them for a while, was cool. Then we headed over to the main stage for Panic! At The Disco which Brit though she wanted to see but was wrong. When they came on she said "Wait, this is that band? They suck ass." So we headed back to the second stage and waited for the Bad Brains to come on. Brit went somewhere, but then came back before the Bad Brains hit the stage. They came on and they place exploded. I slammed with the crowd for a few tunes and have a bruise or 2. HR more stands and sings than goes off and screams these days, but the rest of the band was totally on point. They did a little more of their 90s-era chunka-chunka metal bullshit than I cared for, but they did enough ROIR era stuff to make up for it. HR stood around strumming one of theose Ibanez Artcore hollowbody jazz guitars for half the set which was weird. He also threw a big round loaf of bread into the crowd which confused everyone.

After them we waited for fucking ever and then Wu Tang Clan showed up and rocked the house. They got the crowd going more than any other act that I saw. A lot of audience participation. They did a lot of 36 Chambers stuff, and Method Man was definitely the frontman. They also did a singalong of "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" in honor of ODB. I was sorta surprised when they did "Da Rockwilder" from the Redman Methodman Blackout album, seeing that Redman wasn't there. Cappadonna was there though, to put his verse into "Triumph".

I was pretty drained after Wu Tang.

Then Velvet Revolver came on and I guess a lot of people care about that band enough to know all the words to a lot of songs, where I really only care about it because it has 2 of the dudes that played on Appetite. They rocked pretty good, and I got to see Slash, who basically was the reason I ever picked up a guitar. They did a lot of their songs which I don't know, then they did "Sex Type Thing" which I though was way improved over STP's version, and then some more of their own tunes and then "It's So Easy" from Appetite. We stayed around for a few more tunes before I realized that they weren't going to cut the bullshit and just play every tune from Appetite front to back so we mosied over towards the main stage where the Smashing Pumpkins Lightshow Extravaganza was starting up.

It was pretty obvious that the effort to get less than a quarter mile from the stage was going to be tremendous, so we hung back for a few minutes then decided to beat the traffic out of there. I will say this: According to my eyes and the big projector screen, either Billy Corgan got James Iha and D'Arcy back or he got some other Asian dude to play rhythm and some other skinny blond chick to play bass.

So, all in all it was pretty fun. I liken the mainstream festival concert crowd more to a sports event crowd than an actual real club show crowd. Only with more pot. Jesus was there a lot of fucking pot there. Everybody there but us was smoking pot. Being in the television industry for this past most-of-a-decade really made me forget that there are people out there who still do that. I kinda feel like it stopped being in production around 99.

That's about it.

THIS WEEK'S SASSIEST BOY IN AMERICA!!

John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer and conductor. In a career that spans six decades, Williams has composed many of the most famous film scores in history, including those for Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Hook and Harry Potter. In addition, he has composed theme music for four Olympic Games, numerous television series and concert pieces. He served as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993, and is now the orchestra's laureate conductor.

Williams is a five-time winner of the Academy Award, and his 45 nominations to date make him joint second-most nominated individual with fellow composer Alfred Newman (only Walt Disney had more). He was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.

John Williams was born on February 8, 1932 in Long Island, New York, USA. In 1948, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he attended North Hollywood High School. He later attended the University of California, Los Angeles and Los Angeles City College, and studied privately with composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. In 1952, Williams was drafted into the United States Air Force, where he conducted and arranged music for the Air Force Band as part of his duties.

After his service ended in 1954, Williams returned to New York City and entered Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. During this time he also worked as a jazz pianist at New York's many studios and clubs. He had played with composer Henry Mancini, and performed on the recording of the Peter Gunn theme. He was known as "Johnny" Williams in the early 1960s, and served as arranger and bandleader on a series of popular albums with singer Frankie Laine.

Williams was married to actress Barbara Ruick from 1956 until her death on March 3, 1974. They had three children together. One of those children is Joseph Williams, former lead singer for the band Toto. He married for a second time on June 9, 1980 to his current wife, Samantha Winslow. Williams is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi, the national honorary fraternity for college band members.

After his studies at Juilliard, Williams returned to Los Angeles and began working as an orchestrator in film studios. Among others, he had worked with composers Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman. He was also a studio pianist, performing in scores by composers such as Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein. Williams began to compose scores for television series in the late 1950s, eventually leading to Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel.

Williams's first major film composition was for the B-movie Daddy-O in 1958, and his first screen credit came two years later in Because They're Young. He soon gained notice in Hollywood for his versatility in composing jazz, piano and symphonic music. He received his first Academy Award nomination for his score to the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, and was nominated again in 1969 for Goodbye, Mr. Chips. He won his first Academy Award for his adapted score to the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof. By the early 1970s, Williams had established himself as a composer for large-scale disaster films, with scores for The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno (the last two films, scored in 1974, borrowing musical cues from each other).

In 1974, Williams was approached by Steven Spielberg to write the music for his feature directoral debut, The Sugarland Express. The young director was impressed by Williams's score to the 1969 film The Reivers, and was convinced the composer could provide the sound he desired for his films. They re-teamed a year later for the director's second film, Jaws. Widely considered a classic suspense piece, the score's ominous two-note motif has become nearly synonymous with sharks and approaching danger. The score earned Williams a second Academy Award, his first for an original composition.

Shortly afterwards, Williams and Spielberg began preparing for their next feature film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Unusual for a Hollywood production, Spielberg's script and Williams's musical concepts were developed at the same time and were closely linked. During the two-year creative collaboration, they settled on a distinctive five-note motif that functioned both as background music and the communication signal of the film's alien mothership. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in 1977.

In the same period, Spielberg recommended Williams to his friend and fellow director George Lucas, who needed a composer to score his ambitious space epic, Star Wars. Williams produced a grand symphonic score in the fashion of Richard Strauss and Golden Age Hollywood composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner. Its main theme is among the most widely-recognized in motion picture history, and the Force Theme and Princess Leia's Theme are also well-known examples of leitmotif. The film and its soundtrack were both immensely successful, and Williams won another Academy Award for Best Original Score. In 1980, Williams returned to score The Empire Strikes Back, where he famously introduces The Imperial March as the theme for Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire. The original Star Wars trilogy concluded with the 1983 film Return of the Jedi, for which Williams's score provides the Emperor's Theme.

Williams worked with director Richard Donner to score the 1978 film Superman. The score's heroic and romantic themes, particularly the main march, the Superman fanfare and the love theme (known as "Can You Read My Mind"), would appear in the four subsequent sequel films.

For the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, Williams wrote a rousing main theme known as The Raiders' March to accompany the film's hero, Indiana Jones. He also composed separate themes to represent the Ark of the Covenant, the character Marion and the Nazi villains of the story. Additional themes were featured in his scores to the sequel films Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Williams composed an emotional and sensitive score to Spielberg's 1982 fantasy film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The music conveys the film's benign, child-like sense of innocence, particularly with a spirited theme for the freedom of flight, and a soft string-based theme for the friendship between characters E.T. and Elliott. The film's final chase and farewell sequence marks a rare instance in film history, in which the on-screen action is edited to conform to the composer's musical interpretation. Williams was awarded a fourth Academy Award for this score.

The 1985 film The Color Purple is the only feature film directed by Steven Spielberg for which John Williams did not serve as composer. The film's producer, Quincy Jones, wanted to personally arrange and compose the music for the project. Williams also did not score Twilight Zone: The Movie, but Spielberg had directed only one of the four segments in that film. The film's music was written by another veteran Hollywood composer, Jerry Goldsmith. The Williams-Spielberg collaboration resumed with the director's 1987 film Empire of the Sun.

While skilled in a variety of twentieth-century compositional idioms, his most familiar style may be described as a form of neoromanticism, inspired by the large-scale orchestral music of the late 19th century, especially Wagnerian music and leitmotif, and that of Williams's film-composing predecessors. He was inducted to the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.