Rock on the Range

This weekend is the latest installment of what has now turned into an annual event here in Columbus - Rock on the Range (although Ohio is pretty flat, so I don't know what range they are talking about). Its a weekend long music fest full of hard rock bands, most of which were popular about 5 years ago - Slipknot, Korn, Buckcherry, Saliva, etc. Even if these bands were popular now, this is exactly the type of show that you would think I would never want to go to for free, let alone pay to see. I don't like these bands or this type of music. In fact, I HATE these bands. With a passion. HOWEVER...

I was in attendance at the first ever Rock on the Range 3 years ago (it was only a one day show that year that did so well - SIGH - that it was expanded the following year). Now, let me explain - I didn't intend to go to this show. The night before, a friend of mine from back home calls me and says that he is coming to Columbus to go to the show and he had an extra ticket. I don't get to see him too often and I had no plans, so I agreed to go with him (maybe not one of my better decisions). Of course, I didn't know that the ticket would cost me $70 and the beers were $7.50, but oh well, he is an old friend.

I should have known we were in trouble when, after waiting in line for about 25 minutes just to get in, we found out that if you wanted to get access to the field level of Crew Stadium (where the stage was), you needed a wrist band. In order to get a wrist band, you needed a.) to have one of the employees mark your ticket with a sharpie, and b.) show this marked ticket to another employee and they would give you the wrist band. The concert promoters (or whoever the hell was running things that day) decided that waiting in line to do this was for suckers. They had 2 groups of employees - 1 with sharpies and 1 with fistfuls of wrist bands - stationed about 10 ft apart and you had to crowd around each group and yell at them to get their attention. It was like a cross between the floor of the New York Stock exchange and a scene from the Amazing Race whenever they are in India and children discover the contestants have money. It was RIDICULOUS. Luckily, we got tipped off about the sharpie portion of the process, so we brought one with us which allowed us to skip that step and save us about 20 minutes. However, getting the wrist bands themselves was still a struggle - I had to forcefully pull my friend's girlfriend out of the crowd by her arm after we got ours like I was rescuing her from quicksand. Eventually, we got our bands (which was better than a lot of people could say - they only gave out a certain number of wrist bands even though there was a lot more room on the field available than was used by spectators) and we were off!

Now, I am not going to waste any time talking about the music... it was just as awful as you imagine. I really didn't pay too much attention to it anyway. I was too busy drinking beers, smoking cigarettes and people watching. First, since, like I said, there weren't enough wrist bands for everyone that wanted to get to the field level, people were constantly trying to sneak in by hopping the rail. However, since these people were drunk, they weren't quite as stealthy as they thought. Needless to say, every single one of them were spotted right away by security. Now, here is where the fun starts - they ALL decided to try and run away from security. You would hear the crowd start to roar and turn around to see some jackass (usually shirtless) trying to escape security. None of them made it. My second favorite running activity was spotting the mullets. Lets just say I lost count within the first half hour. The best thing I saw all day, though, wasn't related to either of these events - it was the 13 year old girl that was there with her parents and their friends (it was very obvious that the parents were only there to escort their daughter and they probably got their friends to come along just to see ZZ Top, the headliner). She was standing in front of her parents in a wifebeater, with her arm in the air, sporting a GIGANTIC shiner, singing at the top of her lungs the song "Crazy Bitch" by... Buckcherry (sorry, I had to look it up on Wikipedia). It was just as classy as it sounds (look up the lyrics - I'm sure her parents were proud).