Endfest 15
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wolfmother, The Mars Volta, Eagles of Death Metal, The Subways
White River Amphitheater
Auburn, WA
August 12, 2006
By Cheryl
(SugarBuzz Seattle)
Photos By Cheryl
Ever find a great band on the rise which drives you to force 30 second listening opportunities upon strangers at the bus stop, offering your own Ipod ear buds to share in the musical glory you’ve found? I enjoy a great many bands, but I recall proudly being the street-corner Billy Graham of two bands for approximately 45 day intervals of time during their early accent to the masses: The Eagles of Death Metal (December 2003) and Wolfmother (February 2006).
Well I’ll be damned! My evangelizing rewarded me with a holy grail: the Endfest one-day music festival in Auburn with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Subways, The Mars Volta along with the Eagles of Death Metal AND Wolfmother on the bill. There is a God - and whoever it is sent the clouds away, fixed the temperature at 82 degrees and provided me with free tix and VIP passes to the show.
It all went down at the White River Amphitheater – an open air, 20,000 capacity stadium nestled in a quiet, wooded valley on the Muckelshoot Indian Reservation, in the shadow of Mount Rainier. This was the 15th year of Endfest, an all-ages music festival hosted by Seattle’s alternative rock station, 107.7 The End. Depending on your age, you have roughly two choices if not watching a band: Grown ups saunter around or fester in the beer gardens while adolescents chug free Skittle-flavored milk samples or scarf down bad pizza to create a puke preventing layer in their stomachs to mingle with the warm 40 they guzzled down with a straw in the mini-van back in the parking lot. While the VIP pass I had did not offer any sort of back stage access, it did provide access to a little oasis away from the masses, where a bounty free food and drink lay before us at the top of a hill where one can “check out” for a spell - and so we did multiple times.
After the VIP time-out, we hit the second stage to see The Subways, the trio of UK youngins who set the stage in fire with modern party rock hit “Rock N Roll Queen”. The crowd thinned out, allowing us to close in on the stage for the Eagles of Death Metal. Unfortunately, founding drummer / Queens of the Stone Age front man, and my personal crush fodder, Josh Homme, was not in attendance. Some peroxide imposter with panties strewn across the bass drum filled in. As a few condom balloons bounced by, then Jessie “the devil” Hughes and friends took the stage for some boot-scootin, ass-shaking tunes of come-ons and innuendo found in, “Kiss the Devil”, “I Want You So Hard” and “Don’t Speak (I Came to Make A Bang)”.
The bitch with such festivals with two stages is that there is potential act conflict! EODM took a bit longer to set up than anticipated, and we had to make a really hard call: stay for some more or beat cheeks over to the main stage for Wolfmother. I knew the EODM would be back to delight me in the near future, so I opted for some Aussie Rock.
Back in the 70s, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin must have planted little seeds in a fertile patch down in Australia, which have since blossomed into the modern-day psychedelic metal power trio of Wolfmother. To those of us who were now tucked back on the lawn of the stadium, Wolfmother looked like tiny little men, just the size to close one eye to focus them into the small space between your pointer finger and thumb to “crush”, but DAY-EM do they deliver a big fat wall of sound, no more evident than in their opener, “Dimension”.
“Apple Tree” and “White Unicorn” are up next… with the soaring and versatile vocals of lead singer, Andrew Stockdale, further proving the theory he could be the prodigal love child of Robert Plant, Ozzy Osbourne and Jack White. Wolfmother busted out a free-form jam, then launched into current radio hit, “Woman”. After a long and swiggly Steve Vai type solo and symbol crashes, Wolfmother ends their way-to-short set with “Joker and the Thief”. All I could say was, “Whoa!”
Reeling from the rock wave of Wolfmother, the intense musical odyssey of The Mars Volta took the stage to bring us all back together again... for a moment. Personally, I have to be in a certain mood to get into Mars Volta. Former At The Drive-In members, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala creep around with giant hair and epileptic seizure James Brown moves, playing what I’ve seen best described as prog-rock constructed between bong hits. Mars Volta is better served in a smaller club without the distractions of a festival crowd and emo kids. Bluesy “The Widow” developed into a Santana on meth spectacle… and shortly thereafter, things went wrong.
Cedric made a smart-ass comment to the kids in the pit, making fun of them for slam dancing. Keep in mind, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are headliners, so many concert goers are ready to pit instead of hippie-dance, and its still daylight. One or more of the people in front didn’t take too kindly to the dig, and soon Cedric got pelted by a plastic soda bottle full of piss. Cedric FREAKED OUT resulting in a drawn-out swearing rant that would make a longshoreman blush with the threat and promise to meet whomever outside the gate to kick their ass. About ½ way through the next song, Omar’s amp cut out, causing another freaky flair up where he smashed his axe into the amp and stomped around and off the stage. Cedric took the mic to say, “That’s what you guys get for having a show on an ancient burial ground.” Harkening back to the pee-pelting, Cedric ended the set early with “I will give you free merchandise and a lifetime supply [of tickets] to a Mars Volta show. Find that person and kick his ass for me, bring me his head-- and we'll be friends!" No one has taken MV up on their deal of a lifetime. I hear At The Drive-In broke up back in 2002 as the band members fought a lot. Weird.
The masses chilled in the grass watching the sun go down on Mount Rainer, while hit the VIP section again to see what was left of the vittles, then back to the blanket at nightfall to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Opening with a jam groove with low-end bass master, Flea, drummer Chad Smith (creepy how he looks like Will Ferrell) and the six-string heroics of John Fruscuiante, Anthony Kiedis took the stage singing “Can’t Stop” followed by Dani California" and "Scar Tissue." Would the famed athletic sock uniform might be in wardrobe rotation this evening. It was not, but Flea, was sporting a thin body stocking which looked like a giant tattoo. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were totally “ON” that night, filling the stadium with great tunes and getting everyone on their feet. This particular RHCP fan, goes more for their early material up-to and including “Blood Sugar Sex Magik”, though. It was a long day and after Flea echoed a scolding for the Mars Volta Piss Pelting, we decided to make it an early night.
Fire and brimstone with bottles of piss tossed towards Cedric’s noggin, did not miss. This was Endfest 15. And it was great.
http://www.myspace.com/thesubways
http://www.myspace.com/eaglesofdeathmetal