With the wind and the snow and the bone-crushing temperatures doing their darndest to bring us to our knees, chances are you're not the only one wishing they were somewhere warm right now. But when someone emailed me this e-poster for the upcoming Liquid Sol Festival taking place in Arizona this March, suddenly Chicago in the middle of a record-breaking cold snap didn't seem so bad.
If you give me a line-up card for just about any music festival, regardless of the genre, I can usually find at least one band that I can hang my hat on, but this line-up has got me stymied. First of all, if Train are your headliners...there is really no way to end this sentence without sounding like a dick.
The rest of the "top-tier" acts are All-American Rejects (whom my ears rejected long ago), Everclear (one original member, the douchey one), the BoDeans (one original member, the douchey one), Gin Blossoms (two original members, the douchey ones), Ed Kowalczyk (the douchey one, apparently, as his former bandmates in Live want nothing to do with him).
After that, it's a pretty steep drop-off. with Blind Melon (minus the singer who died), Buckcherry (two original members, it hurts that I know this), Vertical Horizon (is there any cred at all to being "an original member of Vertical Horizon"?). Tonic does have that one song everybody's heard a zillion times ("If You Can Only See"), but I contend that anybody who can name two Tonic songs.is either in the band or not to be trusted near a jukebox.
The one band worth going to see, if any, is Cracker (two original members, one's douchey, the other is easily the best secret weapon of any band working today, Johnny Hickman), but I've seen them recently and am not about to stand in an Arizona parking lot for twelve hours to see them play for half an hour.
The fact that the word "CRACKER" is not smack dab at the top, in the biggest font possible,just further confirms my belief that the short-sighted signing practices of A&R execs in the '90s would one day lead to entire festivals that nobody cares about. Seriously, I cannot for the life of me imagine the person who would take a look at the poster above and go "Holy shit, Fuel AND Vertical Horizon? I'm going!"
In fact, I would almost want to send a scientific research team to survey those who ultimately attend this event. Did they get the tickets for free, lose a bet, or is someone daring them to stand in a parking lot while vaguely familiar music is played at them for ten hours? The ONLY thing this festival is missing, if you think about it, is some Third Eye Blind.
THAT would be a festival.