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A 26-year-old man has turned himself into police, saying he was responsible for the Solingen knife attack that left three dead and eight wounded at a festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary, German authorities announced Sunday (Aug. 25).
Duesseldorf police said in a joint statement with the prosecutor’s office that the man “stated that he was responsible for the attack.”
“This person’s involvement in the crime is currently being intensively investigated,” the statement said.
Federal prosecutors said they were investigating on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and membership in a foreign terrorist organization. The suspect, wearing handcuffs and leg shackles, was taken later Sunday from the police station in Solingen to make a first appearance before a judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.
The suspect is a Syrian citizen who had applied for asylum in Germany, police confirmed to The Associated Press. The dpa news agency reported, without citing a specific source, that his asylum claim had been denied and that he was to have been deported last year.
On Saturday (Aug. 24), the Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, without providing evidence. The extremist group said on its news site that the attacker targeted Christians and that the perpetrator carried out the assaults Friday night “to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.”
The claim couldn’t be independently verified. Only a small number of claims on the site have turned out to be completely baseless, said Peter Neumann, professor of security studies at King’s College London. However “ISIS’ strategy for a number of years has been to claim attacks which are merely ‘inspired’, in other words, in which the link between organization and attacker is merely ideological.”
Friday’s attack plunged the city of Solingen into shock and grief. A city of about 160,000 residents near the bigger cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf, Solingen was holding a “Festival of Diversity” to celebrate its anniversary.
People alerted police shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time Friday that a man had assaulted several people with a knife on the city’s central square, the Fronhof. The three people killed were two men aged 67 and 56 and a 56-year-old woman, authorities said. Police said the attacker appeared to have deliberately aimed for his victims’ throats.
The festival, which was due to have run through Sunday, was canceled as police looked for clues in the cordoned-off square. Instead, residents gathered to mourn the dead and injured, placing flowers and notes near the scene of the attack.
“Warum?” asked one sign placed amid candles and teddy bears. Why?
Among those asking themselves the question was 62-year-old Cord Boetther, a merchant fron Solingen.
“Why does something like this have to be done? It’s incomprehensible and it hurts,” Boetther said.
Officials had earlier said a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion he knew about the planned attack and failed to inform authorities, but that he was not the attacker. Two female witnesses told police they overheard the boy and an unknown person before the attack speaking about intentions that corresponded to the bloodshed, officials said.
The attack comes amid debate over immigration ahead of regional elections next Sunday in Germany’s Saxony and Thueringia regions where anti-immigration parties such as the populist Alternative for Germany are expected to do well. In June, Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed that the country would start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant left one police officer dead and four more people injured.
The IS militant group declared its caliphate in large parts of Iraq and Syria about a decade ago, but now holds no control over any land and has lost many prominent leaders. The group is mostly out of global news headlines.
Still, it continues to recruit members and claim responsibility for deadly attacks around the world, including lethal operations in Iran and Russia earlier this year that killed dozens of people. Its sleeper cells in Syria and Iraq still carry out attacks on government forces in both countries as well as U.S.-backed Syrian fighters.
They say if you can remember the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair from 1969, you probably weren’t there. But some of the musicians who played the festival beg to differ.
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Fifty-five years later, the performers’ memories are clear as mud — well, make that about mud, as most of them well recall the rain-soaked wallow that was Max Yasgur’s farm during those “Days of Peace & Music” from Aug. 15-18, 1969. Some of braver ones even slogged their way onto the grounds to experience Woodstock from their fans’ point of view. And they certainly remember being flown into the site by helicopter as well as the late-running performance schedule and a backstage area where most were warned not to consume anything that wasn’t in sealed bottles or packages — unless they wanted to be on another kind of trip than they one they’d taken to get there.
Ten Years After drummer Ric Lee has good reason to be clear in his recollections; not only is it a significant chapter in his 2019 memoir From Headstocks To Woodstock, but on Friday (Aug. 16) the group releases Woodstock 1969, its entire six-song performance from Sunday, Aug. 17, 1969 — including a rendition of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl” that had to be restarted when Alvin Lee’s guitar was out of tune. It was a ferocious hour on stage for the British blues-rock band, and the epic version of “I’m Going Home” — immortalized in the Woodstock concert documentary that came out the following year — elevated the quartet’s fortunes during the ensuing decade.
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“Crikey, we played as well as we could under the circumstances, I think,” Lee, the younger brother of late Ten Years After guitarist Alvin Lee, tells Billboard. “And ‘I’m Going Home,’ you can see it in the movie. When we went to see it a year later at a cinema on Wilshire Boulevard…a lot of the other acts were there, and when ‘I’m Going Home’ played everybody in the theater gave us a standing ovation, which was incredible from our peers. Alvin and I talked about it a few times; we wondered what it would have bene like if, for example, ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ had been used instead of ‘I’m Going Home’ — although it’s very different to speculate about those things.”
Lee says TYA was not aware of how significant Woodstock would be leading up to the festival. The group was on the road in the U.S. and was even resistant to adding it to the schedule, but its agent, the late Frank Barsalona, persisted. “Chris Wright, our manager, kept turning it down,” Lee says. “Frank kept saying, ‘You really ought to get on this. This is gonna be a big festival.’ He finally said, ‘Look, Janis (Joplin) has signed, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are gonna do it and (Jimi) Hendrix is doing it, so you’d be crazy not to do it.’ Finally Chris caved in, and we did it.”
That meant flying to New York at “some daft time” after a show the previous night in St. Louis, then taking cars to the Holiday Inn, aka “Tranquility Base,” in nearby Goshen, N.Y., where the musicians were lodging. “Janis and her band were in the room, a bunch of other people,” says Lee, who was traveling with his first wife. “I had a carry-on bag with me, a rucksack; I put that down on the floor (in the lobby) and was gonna use that as a pillow and get some sleep, but then they said, ‘You’ve got to go to the site.’” TYA was pushed off its initial helicopter site by Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, but the next one got the band to the site on time to watch Joe Cocker perform — and also to be warned “don’t eat anything that’s not been cooked ’cause we got hepatitis breaking out.” The musicians sheltered in trailers during the Sunday afternoon rainstorm that pushed TYA’s slot into the evening.
Despite the “Schoolgirl” snafu (the aborted attempt is also included on the Woodstock 1969 album), Lee says TYA was satisfied with its performance but was more than ready to get out of Bethel, N.Y. — which was an adventure in itself. Though the roads were blocked by cars abandoned by concert goers, Lee found a limousine driver who was ready to get out of Dodge, too. “We found a state trooper who was very helpful,” Lee recalls. “We said, ‘Can you find us a way out of here?’ ‘I can, but you’ve got to be very careful. You’re going to be driving between the tents, so you have to be careful not to hit the ropes — and there are people sleeping between the tents, so you’ve got to be careful not to run them over.’ So we did that and got out of there.”
The restaurant at Tranquility Base was closed, however, so the by-then famished band found a late-night diner down the road. “The waitress said, ‘What would you like?’ We said, ‘Everything!’” Lee says with a laugh. “So she went away and came back with food. Then we had to jump back in the limousines and leg it down to New York. When we got there they’d sold our rooms ’cause we were so late, so we managed to find another hotel that could put us up, then the next day we drove down to Baltimore to get back on our tour.”
It was a lot to go through, but like many of its Woodstock peers, TYA has no regrets about being part of the experience. “Especially when the film came out, we were suddenly on the world stage, and we started playing in Japan and all sorts of other places,” says Lee, who’s planning to publish an updated edition of his memoir. “Our U.K. and European audiences got larger. There was a definite shift that was the result of playing (at Woodstock).”
Seen, Felt, Touched, Healed
While The Who were already enjoying Stateside popularity when they brought the rock opera Tommy to Woodstock, Pete Townshend — who was also cajoled into accepting the gig — felt a boost from the festival and the film, too.
“I would have preferred not to have done it,” Townshend told us some years ago, “but it did actually cement our career in America. And then the film came out and it re-cemented it. Tommy was finished; it had sold maybe a million and a half copies. Woodstock put it back on the charts, and then the film came out and Tommy sold another four million copies. It was a huge part of our career, and I was very grateful we were there.”
But, Townshend added, “I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was chaos, wasn’t it? It was completely nuts. What was going on off the stage was just beyond comprehension — stretchers and dead bodies and people throwing up and people having bad trips. And all they could say was, ‘Isn’t this fantastic?! Isn’t this beautiful?!’ I thought the whole of America had gone mad at that moment.”
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, meanwhile, remembers a scene that “was muddy, smell, but great to see old friends.” Fifty-five years later, however, he has a different perspective on what made Woodstock great.
‘”I’ve always felt that the stars of Woodstock were the audience, never the bands,” he explains. “It was the audience that created a wave that…To me it was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, even though casualty-wise it got worse. But it was start of making the government realize that you’re gonna have to get to grips with this, ’cause they’re gonna have a rebellion on their hands. It was the Woodstock audience that did not, not the bands.”
Souls Sacrificed
Carlos Santana echoes Daltrey’s feelings about Woodstock’s impact beyond the music. The band that bore his surname was one of the unquestioned highlights of the festival, with a fiery, reputation-making Saturday performance that preceded the release of its debut album by a week — and also translated well to film with a galvanizing rendition of “Soul Sacrifice.”
“Woodstock is a spiritual frequency, a spiritual event,” says Santana, who’s used footage and sound from the film during his own shows for quite some time. “When you think of Jesus walking around on the mountain, passing out gluten-free bread and mercury-free fish — people made Woodstock sort of like that kind of event. It’s out of time. Woodstock was not a commercial, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola event. It was three days of unity, harmony, oneness to bring awareness to equality, fairness and justice. The people at Woodstock, if you look at them, they’re hippies who believe in something different than the corrupt corporations of religions and politicians. We believed then and we believe now that peace is possible in our lifetime, on this planet. That’s why Woodstock is still relevant. We still need peace.”
Santana, who also performed at Woodstock ’94, recalls arriving at the site and seeing the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia “already playing his guitar on the hill, with this beautiful, blissful smile on his face.” As for the crowd, he remembers “an ocean of flesh and hair and teeth and arms and eyes. Woodstock was like a living ocean of people. Then you could just feel the sound, which had a different kind of reverberation when it bounced of the people and came back to you.”‘
Long Time Gone
The four members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were admittedly nervous when they finally took the stage at 3 a.m. Monday for only their second performance as a quartet — including both acoustic and electric sets. As David Crosby noted years ago, “Everybody we knew or cared about in the music industry was there. They were heroes to us — The Band and Hendrix and The Who…They were all standing behind us in a circle, like, ‘OK, you’re the new kids on the block. Show us.’” Stills, in fact, told the crowd that the group was “scared sh-tless.”
Graham Nash concurred more recently that, “Stephen was pretty nervous that night, but I thought we did well. I didn’t give a sh-t how many people were there; I had already been through that with the Hollies for six or seven years before I had ever met David or Stephen. My fondest memory was playing ‘Guinnevere’ with David, just his guitar and the two voices trying to reach however many thousands of people were there.” Another good memory, he adds, was that “the first thing we did was go to John Sebastian’s tent and get high on weed. (Woodstock) was a brilliant piece of work. It should not have happened as well as it did, and I think that (co-producer) Michael Lang really put his all into it and pulled it off. It was a wonderful idea, and it came off really well.”
Brotherly Love
Edgar Winter got to experience Woodstock “from both sides,” as a performer and a fan. The former was playing three songs with his older brother Johnny Winter and his band on Sunday at midnight, after The Band. But Winter, who had yet to release his first solo album and launch his band White Trash, also spent time in the field, checking out the other performers.
“I loved Hendrix,” Winter reports. “I loved Sly. I loved Richie Havens, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Janis, of course; we knew her from back home (in Texas). There was so much great music. It was just an amazing diversity of music; I enjoy festivals that are organized like that as opposed to the ones that say, ‘OK, we’re gonna get three blues guitar players.…’”
Winter also recalls that, “There was no real schedule. It was just organized confusion, like whoever they could find that was capable of getting on stage and doing a performance was next. That was crazy.”
Winter also credits his own time on the Woodstock stage as putting his career into motion in earnest. “Johnny was the guy who had the ambition and the drive, much more than me,” Winter says. “I had been more interested in jazz and classical, but he had decided he was gonna be a star at a very early age. After Woodstock, that indelible moment of being on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people, this endless ease of humanity, that made me realize music can be so much more than just my personal world. It can reach out and transcend so many boundaries and bring people together. That’s when I thought about being an artist, writing songs and doing something in popular music, and the rest is history.”
BRISBANE, Australia — Bluesfest Byron Bay will wave bye-bye after its 2025 edition.
The event is an institution on the Australian festivals calendar, staging performances from the likes of Bob Dylan, BB King, Paul Simon, John Mayer, Mary J Blige, and Kendrick Lamar, plus homegrown stars Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and Crowded House, across its 35-year history.
Its place and time is unique, presented each year over the Easter long weekend, the final fest of the warmer months, doing so from its home of Byron Bay, the picturesque beach town that sits on the most easterly point of Australia.
“To my Dear Bluesfest Family, and after more than 50 years in the music business, Bluesfest has been a labour of love, a celebration of music, community, and the resilient spirit of our fans,” writes Peter Noble, Bluesfest festival director.
After the 2025 fest, “as much as it pains me to say this, it’s time to close this chapter,” he continues.” Next year’s festival is “definitely” happening, “but it will be our last.”
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Bluesfest is one of the most-popular, and longest-running, multi-day shows of its kind in Australia. Its organizers boast a swag of domestic and international awards, including multiple Helpmann and Pollstar trophies.
History apparently means little in a marketplace where the cost-of-living crisis, changing ticket-buying behavior and a slew of factors are crushing the widerfestivals business.
No brand is immune.
This year alone has seen a remarkable lineup of casualties, including Splendour In The Grass, Groovin The Moo, Spilt Milk, Caloundra Music Festival, Harvest Rock and others.
During its heyday, Bluesfest averaged 85,000 attendees. That figure swelled to 102,000 in 2022, when live music returned from the lockdown years. The most recent show, however, counted fewer than 65,000 attendees.
When Bluesfest collected the best festival award at Variety Australia’s Live Biz Breakfast in June, Noble, speaking from the podium, delivered a rallying cry for festival organizers in these particularly tough times.
“We’ve really got to be as one as an industry. We need to speak to government,” he remarked. “We need to say this is the time you support our industry because we are facing an extinction event and that event can be looked at during the times of COVID, government delivered a lot of funding… come on government. Give us a hand up, we don’t want a handout. We can get through this because our industry is worth it.”
The final edition of Bluesfest will be a four-day event, from April 17 to 20, 2025, on the 300-acre Byron Events Farm, about 7 miles north of Byron Bay.
The first artist announcement for Bluesfest 2025 will be made next week. “This final edition is not just the end of an era,” reads a statement, “it’s a celebration of everything that Bluesfest has stood for over the past 35 plus years – music, community, and unforgettable experiences.”
Sabrina Carpenter brought out a special guest to perform a Nancy Sinatra classic at Outside Lands 2024. During her headlining set at the San Francisco festival on Saturday (Aug. 10), the 25-year-old pop star welcomed Kacey Musgraves for a surprise performance of Sinatra’s 1966 hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” “She won’t come out […]
In 2017, Yungblud met the world with a riotous show at The Water Rats, a dingy club in London’s Kings Cross area that also hosted Bob Dylan’s first live performance in the U.K. — as well as the first ever by Irish group The Pogues.
They went on to even bigger things and this weekend Yungblud will, too. On Aug. 11, the Doncaster-born artist will host the inaugural Bludfest, a 30,000 capacity, one-day event at Milton Keynes Bowl, England. Previous performers at the venue include Queen, Green Day, Metallica, Foo Fighters and Michael Jackson.
The 27-year-old – real name Dominic Harrison – will be joined by a diverse bill including his recent collaborator Lil Yachty, Soft Play (fka Slaves), Jazmin Bean, Lola Young and feature a slot by The Damned; the headline performance will mark his first full U.K. live show in over a year. Harrison released his most recent LP, Yungblud, in 2022, which charted at No. 1 in the U.K. and landed at No. 45 on the Billboard 200.
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Across two stages and alongside fairground attractions, an art exhibition and a nod to the beloved Camden boozer The Hawley Arms, Bludfest is an all-encompassing proposition. “I’ve said from the start that it cannot be a gig wrapped in a festival, it needs to be a whole world,” he tells Billboard. “When I spoke with the team it became clear that it was important that part was nailed.”
Disillusioned with the state of the live music industry, Harrison has also been vocal about keeping ticket prices affordable for his young, passionate fanbase. He joins British artists like Paul Heaton and Tom Grennan in trying to buck industry trends for rising entry costs for fans amidst an uncertain and costly landscape for touring artists. An entry ticket for the event is capped at £49.50, though he has partnered with AEG to ensure a sound and slick production on the night.
A week out from the big night, Harrison tells Billboard about why the ticket market inspired Bludfest, advice from the Osbournes and his new label moves for album number four.
Why did now feel like the right time for Bludfest?
It’s something I’ve wanted to do for ages and this was the first opportunity in between tours and albums to do something on this scale. I wanted to build a physical space where the fans can all come together and realize how far this community has come. It needed to be a statement piece as a lot of critics don’t take me or the fans seriously, so I’m like “well, look what we can do.”
You’ve strived to keep ticket prices down to a reasonable amount at £49.50 ($63). Where did that desire come from?
I was in the U.S. last summer and it was the first time playing amphitheaters – our biggest venues in America yet – and it was the first time I experienced tiered seating and experiences. The floor and upper seats were totally full and there was this bullsh-t area in the middle, about 500 seats that were empty and I had no control over the price of them. There were kids outside of the venue who said they had to listen to the concert from outside because they couldn’t afford to come in. It hurt me when I heard that.
The global ticket market doesn’t understand people’s real lives. £250 for a ticket is making me sick. There’s a tour that just went on sale – which I won’t name – and I’m like “Are you f–king joking with me?” It makes me really angry.
There’s concern that young people in particular are being priced out of gigs by their favorite artists…
A lot of artists aren’t as in control of their career as you would think, or don’t pay as much attention to anything other than the art – which is fine and works for some artists, but that’s not me. The only explanation for where I am now, really, is my relationship to my fans. I wanted to make something feasible in a world where music has become a thing of privilege.
Looking at what The Cure’s Robert Smith did with Ticketmaster last year was so inspiring [Ticketmaster refunded what Smith called “unduly high” fees on tickets for the band’s U.S. arena tour in 2023.] That’s an artist at his stage of his career where they’re playing for original fans, but also for new, young fans and he’s still thinking about those people coming through. I don’t want my shows to only be full of people who can afford it.
How has the industry responded to you trying to do something different and less centered around profits?
I’m getting pushback from “the boardroom.” It’s so easy for artists to sit in the pub and say “f–k the label, promoters and corporate system” and do nothing about it. I got some heat from people because Bludfest is co-promoted by AEG but for me, the way to change the corporate system is not by betting angry but going and changing it from within. Most people on the ground floor at these labels or promoters just love music passionately as the fans do.
By taking something into my own control, I can get an insight into something I never would have come across and get an idea on costs and challenge them on why we’re charging a higher amount than what we need to. We’ve already got plans to take Bludfest to Paris or Prague; Japan, Australia and America all want it, it’s gone amazingly well. We have such a strong core fanbase in all of these places and we could really unite a bit of a scene around it.
You’re not the first to have the idea. Lollapalooza started as an outlet for Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell and your collaborator Ozzy Osbourne [star of the music video for Yungblud’s “The Funeral”] hosted Ozzfest for decades. Have you reached out for advice?
Sharon [Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and longtime manager] has been so helpful to me. I said to her that I don’t feel like people don’t take me seriously, and she replied “we’ve felt that our whole f–king lives, that’s why we started Ozzfest.” She gave such positive feedback and advice to look after the people because they keep us here. They’ve been so amazing as a family to me.
You’ve got an eclectic mix of artists on the bill from U.S. rappers like Lil Yachty to punk legends The Damned. How did you decide who would be right for Bludfest?
I didn’t want it to be a genre-focused festival. I wanted to think about artists in their own lane and doing their own thing from across the whole scene, so I hit up Lola [Young] who I think is amazing, Jazmin [Bean] who is in their own world, The Damned for the icon slot. I asked about Placebo but they couldn’t make it so maybe we’ll get them next year. I was speaking to Robert Smith, The Smashing Pumpkins and just all my contacts for suggestions, and they all love the idea.
I wanted it to be young, emerging artists. I didn’t want to call up Tyler [Joseph] of Twenty One Pilots, or Oli [Sykes] from Bring Me The Horizon, I wanted it to feel like it is the first year and have a bit of bite and punkiness.
You’ve just moved labels to Island (U.K.) and Capitol (U.S.) for your upcoming record. How is work coming along?
My next album is a rock opera… it’s mental! It’s a new phase in my life and these labels are so classic, and this new album feels like it belongs on prestigious labels like that. The last few months have been a lot more creatively fruitful and inspiring. I really had a choice about staying in the comfort zone or do I want to go to different places and experiment.
In the past I was stuck on the treadmill – to the point that even some of my previous albums felt rushed – or taking external ideas that would damage the art because I was trying to satisfy someone else’s idea for what Yungblud is and not what’s in my gut. But now I feel more excited than ever.
From her style to her crowd size, here are the most unforgettable details of the Lolla main stage debut.
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Seeing artists live is plenty of fun, but it can come at a cost. The biggest festivals and tours feature booming volumes to ensure everyone in the audience can hear, but without proper ear protection from concert earplugs, you risk permanently damaging your hearing. The World Health Organization even predicts that more than 1 billion young adults are at risk of permanent hearing loss caused by unsafe listening practices — and it’s easily avoidable.
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Loop is encouraging you to live your life “full volume” just minus the hearing loss. In celebration of Tomorrowland’s 20th anniversary, Loop has partnered with Tomorrowland to help encourage music lovers of all genres to practice safe listening with an exclusive collaboration featuring limited-edition earplugs inspired by the music festival.
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The Experience 2 Tomorrowland earplugs come in two shades: purple and black to choose from based on your style preferences. Both are priced at $40, but come with luxurious features that make the earplugs a worthy investment.
Keep reading to learn more and shop the exclusive pairs below.
Experience 2 Tomorrowland (Purple)
These purple Tomorrowland Loops come with a luminous ring inspired by the official shades of the music festival. In addition to soft ear tips for long time wear, you’ll notice the outer ring is inscribed with the festival’s motto: live, love, unite.
Experience 2 Tomorrowland (Black)
For a more edgy look, these black and gold Tomorrowland Loops come with a sleek case featuring the music festival’s logo as well as ear tips sized from XS-L for your to find your perfect fit. Once they’re placed inside your ears, the design aims to stay in place no matter if you’re dance or head banging to your favorite music.
Billboard had the opportunity to test out the Tomorrowland earplugs for ourselves and can attest that these are unlike your traditional foam earplugs. The most notable feature (besides how fashion-forward they look) is the comfort. Every pair comes with four sizes of soft ear tips to choose from — once you have yours picked, you just slide them into your ears and forget that they’re even there.
They’re also a more sustainable choice as one pair can last you a lifetime — no need to constantly buy more. And the case is so sleek and easy to carry, making them a travel necessity that’ll be at the top of your festival gear packing list.
You don’t have to worry about sounds being muffled, either; the earplugs were built with sound filtering technology that filters noise by 17 dB (SNR). You can barely tell they’re in your ears they’re that good, especially when we used them, the music sounded just as clear — and with the added bonus of ear protection. You can also still talk to your friends with the Loops in, you’ll just have to speak at a higher volume.
Loop also has a range of accessories and we had the pleasure of trying out the Loop Link with the earplugs.
Loop Link
Consider the Link a handy tool for keeping your earplugs within reach. It comes with a comfortable rope-like design and magnetic closure that’ll prevent the accessory from slipping off your neck. On the ends you’ll find rubber loops that can attach to your earbuds allowing you to seamlessly take them in and out without a hitch.
Co-founder Maarten Bodewes considers this partnership a dream come true as he and his co-founder Dimitri O have been attending Tomorrowland for years. Part of the reason the two even created the protective ear pieces was from experiencing hearing damage themselves and wanting to create something that “looked cool” yet would be beneficial for your hearing health. To help appeal to more younger crowds, Bodewes finds Loop to empower anyone to “go front row” without risking their ears. He even compares the rise in fashion-forward protectiveness with sunglasses.
“I think today, if the sun is out, it’s bright out, people really don’t think about [wearing sunglasses],” Bodewes says in an interview with Billboard. “They put on their sunglasses and you’ve got them in all kinds of styles and colors, and it’s part of your outfit or your lifestyle. I think we’re seeing that same change in ear protection; where if it’s loud, you put your earplugs in — whether it’s at a concert, a loud restaurant, in a noisy city like New York or when you sleep and you maybe lay next to your snoring partner.”
For more product recommendations, check out Billboard‘s roundups of the best music coolers, picnic blankets and belt bags.
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Next month, Napa Valley, Calif. will play host to the Blue Note Jazz Festival’s Black Radio Experience helmed by artist in residence, famed pianist Robert Glasper. The festival recently unveiled its official sponsors list, featuring Tracee Ellis Ross’ PATTERN Beauty, Black Vines, and other notable brands.
The Blue Note Jazz Festival’s Black Radio Experience will feature the aforementioned Glasper along with his fellow headliners John Legend, Jill Scott, and André 3000. Longtime music journalist Sway Calloway will be the MC of the festivities. The event will be held at the Meritage Resort & Spa in Napa Valley, with plenty of activations on-site for fans to engage with beyond the entertainers in tow.
The Blue Note Jazz Festival’s Black Radio Experience proudly announced PATTERN Beauty, Volcan de mi Tierra Tequila,
Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Monster Energy, Lexus, and Black Vines® as this year’s sponsors.
As Napa Valley is a premier travel destination for wine lovers, the inclusion of the Black Vines® Wine Garden will showcase several Black-owned wineries, including LVE Wines by John Legend, Pur Noire Urban Wineries, Love Cork Screw, J Moss Winery, Mom Juice, and P. Harrell Wines.
PATTERN Beauty will also host a hairstyling and gifting suite, a must for the stylish and camera-ready attendees of the Black Radio Experience. Further, there will be specialty cocktails from Volcan de mi Tierra Tequila and Tito’s Handmade Vodka, a stop for folks to get their vibe elevated with Monster Energy drinks, and an up-close look at the Lexus GX, a luxury SUV from the fine automaker.
In a recent chat with Robert Glasper that we’ll share in full later this week, the award-winning talent expressed that the Black Radio Experience is more than music but instead is a convergence of Black culture that includes music, food, wine, and style.
Aiding that objective, Black Vines® is a burgeoning community of Black-owned wineries and vintners and hosts frequent events across the Bay Area, Napa Valley, and beyond. Learn more at the Black Vines® website here. The community is also hosting a points-based contest for a chance to win a backstage meet & greet with Robert Glasper for attendees and their friends.
The Blue Note Jazz Festival’s Black Radio Experience takes place from August 30 through September 1. Joining the headliners will be Musiq Soulchild and Marsha Ambrosius, who will both join Glasper for a special vocal performance. Andra Day, Ledisi, Common and Pete Rock, Madlib, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and more are also slated to perform.
The Aldea Mental Health Fund is a partner for the event and a portion of the ticket sales will go towards the Aldea Children and Family Services division.
Hotel and ticket packages are available now with three-day general admission passes beginning at $499 and single-day GA passes starting at $175.
Visit the website for more information, including ticket sales and hotel information.
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Photo: Mathieu Bitton / @candytman
Ruidosa Fest, self-proclaimed as the first Latin American festival focusing on women in music, is poised to make its U.S. debut at New York City’s Lincoln Center on August 10. The festival, part of the venue’s “Summer for the City” program running from June 12 to August 10, will transform Lincoln Center into a hub of Latin music, featuring live performances, a panel, and cultural exchanges.
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Founded in 2016 by Chilean singer-songwriter Francisca Valenzuela, Ruidosa Fest has evolved into a prominent platform that champions visibility and opportunities for “women who make noise.”
The festival’s lineup will feature a diverse array of talent, including Valenzuela herself, along with iconic Brazilian singer Bebel Gilberto, indie synth-pop duo Buscabulla, Puerto Rican singer-songwriter iLe, Colombian indie pop artist Salt Cathedral, Tijuana punk rocker Bruses, Venezuelan newcomer Nella, as well as Renée Goust + Khylie Rylo, Mireya Ramos, DJ Riobamba, and more.
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The day will kick off with an industry panel titled Latinx to the Front: Nuestro Ruido Is Worldwide. The event will explore the media influence of Latin artists, moderated by radio producer Jeanne Montalvo and feature YouTube’s Stephanie Carvajal, Sirius XM’s Ellen Flores, Rolling Stone‘s Julyssa Lopez, Amazon Music’s Angie Romero, and Billboard Español‘s Sigal Ratner-Arias and Isabela Raygoza.
Motivated by a stark gender disparity at Latin American music festivals, Ruidosa Fest was conceived after discovering that women constituted only 9.5% of acts at surveyed festivals in 2016 and 2017, a figure marginally improved to 22.5% when considering mixed-gender groups. This deep-seated imbalance spurred the creation of Ruidosa Fest, dedicated to enhancing the representation and contributions of female performers inside the industry.
The performances will begin on August 10 at 4:30 p.m. ET. For further details about the full schedule and more, visit the event’s website.
Ruidosa Fest
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Trigger warning: the following story features discussions about rape and sexual assault.
The first thing that hit you was the unbearable, eye-wateringly putrid stench. Then, the slow realization that some of the “mud” the kids at Woodstock ’99 were rubbing all over their viciously sunburnt, exhausted bodies and tossing at each other was not, in fact, just mud.
The sight of hundreds of young concertgoers wallowing in the fetid pool of human waste mixed with dirt pooling around the porta-potties would have made me sick if it wasn’t the 20th worst thing I would end up experiencing at Woodstock ’99. It was just one of the many flashing danger signs of the sinister, apocalyptic vibe that slowly spread across the three-day (July 23-25) festival 25 years ago — which was, of course, intended to honor the original 1969 peace and love gathering on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y.
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Instead, what became a disastrous cash-in on the good will of the original — following a well-received reboot in 1994 featuring Metallica, a mud-caked Nine Inch Nails, Bob Dylan and Green Day — turned into a fiery nightmare, ending in riots and reports of four alleged rapes and multiple sexual assaults.
I was there and watched in disbelief as more than 200,000 attendees baked on the tarmac of the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force base in Rome, N.Y. — a Superfund site that had formerly housed hazardous materials — at an event that was as far from getting “back to the garden” as humanly possible. Gouged by the promoters selling $4 bottles of water and flavorless $12 pizzas (with many of the promised free water stations just trickling or irretrievably damaged), the three-day event got progressively weirder, darker and scarier, as attendees whipped themselves into a testosterone frenzy to the strains of bro bands like Insane Clown Posse, Korn, Limp Bizkit and Buckcherry.
The many stories I wrote on site alongside my colleagues at the pioneering online music magazine Addicted to Noise — which later included a 20-plus-part, award-winning investigative series spearheaded by reporters Brian Hiatt and Chris Nelson that dove into the nitty gritty of what went wrong — are lost to history now, following Paramount’s recent decision to pull the entire MTV News archive offline. But those memories are still seared into my brain, and at the time I remember quickly dashing off a bleary-eyed day-after essay the morning after the fires assessing the damage to the site, the psyche and the legacy of the beloved original three days of peace, love & rock ‘n roll.
(It’s worth mentioning that the 1969 edition also had its own issues — including massive gate-crashing that forced overwhelmed organizers to reluctantly turn it into a free event, as well as miles-long traffic jams coming in and out and a lack of proper sanitation, food and infrastructure to handle the unexpected crowds.)
I stayed on site all night reporting on the aftermath at Woodstock ’99, watching as black-helmeted, storm trooper-like police in riot gear marched into the chaotic scrum while looters smashed ATMs and vendor carts, set fire to 18-wheelers filled with soft pretzels and crashed through the comically flimsy, daisy-covered “peace wall” meant to keep the non-ticketed hordes off site. Those depressing scenes came after days of watching young men harassing the many topless women who’d had their chests adorned with glittery paint at airbrush stations, while female artists such as Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow were greeted by cheers mixed with endless frat boy bellows of “show us your t–s!!!” A dozen state troopers and police supervisors were later demoted or suspended for posing in photos with topless women or agreeing to have their cruisers washed by nude attendees.
The MTV News crew was forced to flee the scene in a hurry after amped-up rioters began shaking their broadcast tower during the final night as fires broke out during the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ headlining set. “Holy s–t, it looks like Apocalypse Now out there,” singer Anthony Kiedis said as he looked out on the flames and smoke rising in the crowd. The veteran band had taken the stage wearing hard hats rigged to shoot flames into the air, and their decision to cover original Woodstock performer Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” proved to be ill-timed, as it was performed while a series of half a dozen massive bonfires sent flames into the sky all over the garbage-strewn field. The fuel for those fires: shattered shards of the what promoters had referred to as the perimeter-securing “peace fence.”
After suffering legendary gate-crashing at the original, peaceful event in 1969, which eventually swelled to half a million attendees, the 1999 promoters said beforehand that they were determined to lock down the military site. And in an effort that was comical until it was tragic, their solution was nearly six miles of plywood and steel fencing wall surrounding the tarmac, a barrier over which some fans easily tossed contraband to each other, and which they eventually breached on the final night. As the chaos erupted, I watched a stream of locked-out fans easily scale the wall. They were no match for the overwhelmed, by-then-exhausted uniformed force — which included more than 500 music fans in yellow “Peace Patrol” t-shirts, who’d had a total of two or three days of training and some of whom ditched their official gear to join the fun, and who struggled alongside 500 state troopers and a private security detail of 3,000 to maintain order.
Kid Rock during Woodstock ’99 in Saugerties, New York in Saugerties, New York.
KMazur/WireImage
To be clear: the riots and violence were not the direct result of the performers whipping up the crowd, the ill-chosen former military site or even what co-promoter Jon Scher derisively referred to as a few “bad apples” in the crowd wilding out. All of those factors certainly contributed to the weird vibe in the air, but the creeping sense that things were out of control took on a life of its own.
During what escalated into contentious daily news briefings by the promoters as the extent of the quagmire came into view to the assembled, frustrated press, Scher — who co-produced the event with original Woodstock co-founder Michael Lang (who died in 2022) — was asked repeatedly about the obvious breakdowns in infrastructure, crowd control and fan safety all weekend. Pushing back on reporters, at the time Scher often dissembled and appeared to brush aside concerns about what was clearly an increasingly out-of-control situation. More than two decades later, Scher continued blaming Limp Bizkit for some of the violence after their fans tore plywood sheets from a lighting tower to crowd surf while again brusquely brushing aside claims of mismanagement.
“Nobody came thinking they were going to stay at the Ritz Carlton,” he said in the 2022 Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, once again blaming “knuckleheads” (which he put in the 50-or-so range) for “causing trouble”; Scher made similar comments in another W99 doc from HBO in 2021 entitled Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage. His most outrageous claims came in response to questions about how women were treated on site and about the reports of the alleged rapes and sexual assaults. “There were a lot of women who voluntarily had their tops off,” he said in Trainwreck. “Then you get into a mosh pit and you crowd surf. Could somebody have touched their breasts? Yes, I’m sure they did. What could I have done about it? I’m not sure I could have done anything.”
Scher, who was not involved in the original Woodstock but did co-promote the 1994 version, was also not a part of a failed 2019 attempt at a 50th anniversary edition that melted down due to permitting and financing issues.
Speaking to Billboard this week, Scher says one of the lessons he learned was “you can’t have these heavy metal based bands” performing one after another in such an “isolated” location. Asked if that was disingenuous given the riot-free success of the all-metal touring OzzFest, as well as dozens of other hard rock festivals in the years since that have not devolved into such chaos, Scher says it was a “different era… it seems to me that by 1999 the ‘tribes’ got more aggressive… [But] these were dumb kids out having a blast, many inebriated.”
Scher again points to Limp Bizkit, saying that in his 50 years of promoting he’s “never” had to pull the plug on a band like he did when the Fred Durst-led group’s set got out of control during “Break Stuff” as fans began crowd surfing on plywood panels ripped from rigging.
He also says his team opened up some hangars to give weary fans some much-needed respite from the sun: “Who could have predicted the weather would be that terrible?” in the middle of the summer, he protests. Scher also points to the “intense” permitting and regulatory statues in New York regarding live gatherings, a direct aftermath of the 1969 festival, as the reason that the number of portable toilets, water stations and security were “more than adequate” for the job.
Unfortunately, he claims, the company hired to clean the toilets simply “didn’t show up” to service them twice a day as contracted and unruly fans wrecked a quarter of the free water stations, a combo that led to the “mud”-covered masses. “We couldn’t anticipate that,” he says, noting that the one reported fatality of an attendee was a young man who was helicoptered to a local hospital, where he later died.
As for the many alleged sexual assaults and four alleged rapes, after his poorly received comments in the films, the promoter was careful to explain that he was, “not saying they didn’t occur… but [according to Scher] not one person who said they got raped reported it to police during or after”; The New York Times reported on July 29, 1999 that four women reported to New York State Police that they had been raped at Woodstock ’99 and that a crisis counselor on site said they’d seen at least five women being gang-raped in the crowd. At the time, Police Captain John Wood told the Associated Press that, “it’s going to be difficult to pursue this because people have scattered to all parts of the country” and in the years since there don’t appear to have been any arrests or convictions tied to the alleged sexual assaults.
Scher’s careful to stress that the sexual violence may have occurred, and that his team sent senior security team members into the crowd to find the alleged offenders as well as alleged victims — but that it was a small group of hard rock “knuckleheads” and “animals” who were the main perpetrators of the violence and riots; out of the 200,000 on hand, Scher says less than 2% (this time he put the number at around 2,000) were responsible for the rioting, disorder and violence. “What happened was an atmosphere we didn’t really anticipate — one that was probably three-quarters men and women who took their tops off or who weren’t wearing any clothes,” Scher says.
James Brown performs on the east stage at Woodstock ’99 in Rome, New York at Griffiss AFB Park for the 30th Anniversary Concert July 23-25.
Frank Micelotta/ImageDirect
Regardless of the explanations of why things went wrong, I have to say that over the course of a 30-year career covering music, I have attended all but a handful of Lollapalooza festivals (the original touring edition and the stay-put in Chicago), the first four Coachellas and all but two of the Warped tours, in addition to dozens of other festivals — and this was still an unparalleled experience for me. While other festivals have had technical glitches, unfortunate injuries (as well as tragic heat-and drug-related deaths) and unplanned annoyances, not once have I seen anywhere near the type of chaos and disorder I observed at Woodstock ’99.
Have I seen young men grab women (and performers) inappropriately while they crowd surf, fans try to hop the eight-foot-tall fences around Grant Park in Chicago to bust into Lolla, or scramble for a sliver of shade at Coachella when the temperature hits the 100s? Of course.
But Woodstock ’99 was a different beast. After the initial salad days of touring festivals in the 1990s that launched Lolla, the jam-focused H.O.R.D.E., the R&B/hip-hop leaning Smokin’ Grooves, Ozzy Osbourne’s metal-themed OzzFest, the female-focused Lilith Fair and several more, Woodstock ’99 felt like the end of an era.
The shock to the system of the festival business afterwards had immediate consequences, many of which you can thank for the more comfortable, safer festival experience that has become standard operating procedure in the 21st century.
A week after the Woodstock ’99 fires were put out, California promoter Goldenvoice announced the first Coachella festival, an event they pointedly promised would be “high-comfort,” located on the picturesque, lush Empire Polo Club fields in Indio, CA. Attending that first year, the vibe was like a bizarro version of what I’d experienced just months earlier — with ample free water, bathrooms and parking, misting tents, shady rest areas and not a whiff of the air of menace and mendacity I experienced in Rome. Even during the ground-shaking headling set by Rage Against the Machine, fans cooked by the nearly triple-digit heat all day moshed to their heart’s content with little to no reports of the kind of violence and violations suffered at W99.
Billboard‘s senior director of live music and touring Dave Brooks says that after Woodstock, promoters began to share best-practices with each other, while dissecting what Scher and company got wrong and realizing that “an accident at one was bad for the whole business.”
“Festivals after Woodstock were more about the music community and the ethos of the festivals, where it went from merely surviving to something more like creating a utopian scene and expression of ideals,” Brooks says, noting that such events now are much safer. They are, of course, by no means impervious to tragedy, as evidenced by the 10 crowd-crush deaths and hundreds of injuries at 2021’s Astroworld Festival as well as 2017’s mass shooting assault on Las Vegas’ Route 91 Harvest festival in which a sniper killed 60 people and injured more than 800 more while firing a high-capacity rifle from an adjacent hotel.
“There’s no fool-proofing it, but things are much better,” says Brooks of today’s massive festivals — which, while safer, still sometimes result in tragic deaths, heat-related illness and deadly weather events. “Content and blaming hard rock acts is not an excuse for crowd-control issues… plenty of hard rock festivals take place around the world that don’t result in riots,” says Brooks.
As an example, when Lollapalooza established a permanent beachhead in Chicago in 2005, promoters dialed in comfort and safety via an impressive display of security, robust fencing and perimeter maintenance — while also offering plenty of free water stations, shady rest areas and rapid-fire responses to dangerous situations via clear chain of command.
There too, when the legendarily intense Rage played the boisterous crowd repeatedly pushed forward, causing a domino-like collapse of sweaty fans during a raucous 2008 headlining slot. In that case, the band halted the set three or more times to give security and attendees a moment to settle, diffusing what could have been a dangerous situation.
And when a freak, dangerous storm popped up in 2015, Lolla organizers pulled off what seemed like an impossible task: calmly evacuating more than 100,000 attendees from the park to safe shelter in less than an hour, and then just as professionally inviting them back in, with almost no incidents of note to report.
While I sprinted to my hotel room as horizontal torrents of rain pelted me along Michigan Ave., all I could think was, “thank God this isn’t Woodstock ’99.”
Sheryl Crow performs on the east stage at Woodstock ’99 in Rome, New York at Griffiss AFB Park for the 30th Anniversary Concert July 23-25.
Frank Micelotta/ImageDirect
Despite the deservedly terrible reputation the festival has developed over the past quarter century thanks to the final night disaster, Scher says he’s talked to “hundreds” of people since who said they had an “absolute blast” at Woodstock ’99. He also says the “peace” fence didn’t come down until the last night when someone rammed a Mercedes sedan through it — at which point the festival had already ended abruptly, after what he remembers as two-plus days of “amazing” music. He also stresses that he didn’t believe he was dishonest during the sometimes three-a-day briefings, but merely did not “embellish” his answers.
I’ll admit he’s not wrong about the music. There were, to be fair, some lasting musical memories for me from those three days of madness at Woodstock ’99. They included seeing James Brown for the first and only time as he opened the festival with one of his legendary high-energy sets and the undeniable bounce of DMX’s career-peak sunset performance — one of the first, and blessedly last, times I witnessed more than 100,000 white fans yelling the n-word at the top of their lungs with zero chill. Then there was the Twilight Zone-like experience of hanging with one of my musical north stars, an exhausted George Clinton, at the Rome airport the day after, as we commiserated on what the intergalactic funk legend said was the “definitely weirdest” experience he’d ever had. (Consider that for a minute.)
“I think the bad things that happened happened and I’m not here to deny that,” Scher say of the fest’s overall grim legacy. “But once you get past the sensationalism from the press, the overwhelming majority of people had a great time… I’m proud of the lineup and music, but I’m certainly not proud of the problems that happened.”
The lessons learned from W99 were harsh, and a few of the complaints from those times persist. Yes, some of the most popular contemporary American festivals have fallen prey to the rampant commercialization, corporate signage-overload and pricey VIP experience traps that leave some fans with an icky taste in their mouths.
But, thankfully, things have gotten better and festival promoters have gone to even greater lengths to ensure safety and security, even as ticket prices have climbed into the stratosphere for many major fests. At the very least, never again have I walked through the grounds of a major festival and typed the phrase I distinctly recall SMS’ing to one of my editors as the weekend devolved into madness: “This seems bad. Like, really bad.”
Stories about sexual assault allegations can be traumatizing for survivors of sexual assault. If you or anyone you know needs support, you can reach out to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). The organization provides free, confidential support to sexual assault victims. Call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE) or visit the anti-sexual violence organization’s website for more information.