jobe.ca: edgefest

I found this while searching for my name on a search engine! Pretty cool blast to the past!

From: "Scott Carmichael"
Subject: Edgefest 97 in Calgary!!!
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 1997 14:40:16 -0600

Well Edgefest 97 in Calgary was definately a rocking time.

We leave my house at like 10:15 and after a stop at the bank, and a 20 minute drive, we end up at Race City Speedway. After standing in the line, mingling with each other for 30 or so minutes, the line starts to move and Security announces that you can't bring food in. So all of a sudden everyone starts giving us food and this guy (dave) gives us all a bunch of cookies and some girls in front pull out a few packs of Pringles for us to feast on.

11:05. We're in. We go and pick up some food coupons and then make our way to the main stage. We sit around for like 1:30 and in the meantime see dave on the other side of some sort of walkdown barracade thing and say "Hey dave!". Five seconds later I turn around and Dave is standing there. It was all most scary. He was even wearing a Superman shirt to match.

Yay, it's time for the first band. Problem is that they aren't too great, but everyone has so much energy and only came here to mosh and surf anyways, that that is what they do. So after about 10 minutes of moshing and surfing, people notice that "Hey, this is the philosopher kings" and then stop the moshing.

Next comes Dodgy. Originally I was like "Who the hell is dodgy?", but after the first song I realized, "Hey, I know this!" and so did everyone else so here comes more moshing and surfing. Andrew asks me "Hey, you want to go up?" So I say shur, and by golly, I'm up. After travelling about 1 foot, I come back down and then two guys throw me back up. "Woohoo!"

Next comes silverchair... The best moshage band there. I think that they also hurt me the most, but oh well. Here I am, standing in the middle of the freaking silverchair mosh pit with my shoes undone (after my friend had lost his laces and the tongue to his shoe, i thought "oh great!"). So I mosh for a while and my shoe comes off, but I am close enough that I just slip it back on.

Time for I Mother Earth. They open with one more astronaut. Everyone screams and its back to moshing. By this time, I am totally hyped up, but really freaking tired of getting kicked in the head by crowd surfers. Everyone is hot and screaming. They spray us down some more with the big hose. Another sunday was a killer song. Everyone was out to mosh the hardest that they possibly could. I knew I should be hurting, but the amount of adrenaline in my system stopped me from feeling it.

Who else, but Collective Soul comes on. Now, I think that Collective Soul is a great band and all, but I never really thought of them as a hardcore rock band. But 17 kicks in the head later, I thought "Well, maybe they are". They decide to play Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train". Boy did the crowd go wild! Everyone was singing along and think moshing was at its peak.

Collective Soul leaves and 20 minutes later are replaced by Tea Party, who were referred by many to be pretty good but not as great live as they had hoped. They played a lot from the old stuff that I had never heard and I went crowd surfing to "Temptation" - a song that I did know. After a while they were over and everyone was anxiously awaiting OLP.

OLP hits the stage. Everyone is screaming. The whole crowd has been waiting for this and even the people who had been lying on their blankets crowd up to the front. I was approximately 20 metres from the front when they started to play and I was getting thrown around like a cat in a dog pound. I hurt all over and couldn't stand there much longer, but I made it to the front to crowd surf to one of my favorite OLP songs "Julia". After that, I returned to the safety of the older people at the back of the crowd where there was space for me to stand and enjoy the music instead of wondering how not to get hurt by the flying people from above. They played their classics such as "Naveed" and "Starseed" along with "Superman's Dead" and a two song encore including "Clumsy".

By this time I was dead. I went to the "meeting spot" that only 3 out of the 4 of us knew about, and we were hoping that the fourth (glen) would know where to go. We walked down one road for what seemed like an enternity and then walked in the opposite direction across another road until we reached a train, in which case we turn around and return to the main road. We still had not found our ride, so we walked down the main road towards "Barlow Trail" and I spotted a van resembling that of my friend's. We inspected the van and then abandoned hope when the friend said "That's not my license plate". So eventually we walked all the way to barlow trail (a mere 3.5 kilometres away) and then eventually used a cell phone of a nice lady in a new camaro. We discovered that our ride was all the way back at race city. I told my friend on the phone to tell them to pick us up at barlow. He responded by saying "we're on *that* road". Anyways, we ended up having to walk back thanks to andrew's choice of words. And the van ended up being the one we inspected earlier. Needless to say, I was TIRED!