Camp Bisco VI & Etc

This summer, I’ve been to more shows than I usually go to in an entire year. And that’s awesome, but my checking account probably wouldn’t agree.

Two weeks ago, I went to Warped Tour. Yeah I know, pretty lame as a 23 year old, but I didn’t feel too bad buying a ticket since it’s was around $25 (before Ticketmaster bent me over). And now that I think about it… I feel worse about having purchased a ticket to Sounds of the Underground, since a portion of that money definitely went straight to Hot Topic, who I believe was the main sponsor of that tour… Ugh.

Anyway, Warped Tour was pretty cool musically. I got to see Coheed & Cambria and Killswitch Engage (I’ve seen both of them twice before), Tiger Army, and Bad Religion. They all put on great shows, and it was definitely awesome to see Bad Religion, who I’ve liked for probably 7-8 years now, but never had a chance to see live before.

I also saw some of Pepper’s set, and the last bit of MC Chris’s set. I totally forgot he was gonna be there – For those of you who don’t know, he does the voices for some of the characters on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, notably MC Pee Pants. Judging by what I saw his set wasn’t incredible or anything, but at the very least it was entertaining.

Two days after the Warped Tour, I went to see Between the Buried and Me at the Chameleon Club in Lancaster. They played with The Red Chord and Cephalic Carnage. Last time I saw BTBAM they were with The Red Chord too.

The Red Chord put on a pretty good show – I like these guys a lot, but we were up on the balcony for their set, because that’s where the bar was. I actually drove to the show alone and met up with two friends, one of whom (Brian) was already very drunk when he got there. He got kicked out of the club within 15 minutes of arriving.

Anyway, when the Red Chord finished up their set, Kyle and I headed down to the stage. Somehow I managed to make it to the front row. This was great, because not only did I avoid the scene kids in the mosh pit doing their karate kicks and windmill moves, I also got to yell into the mic at one point, like a 14 year old girl at a Fall Out Boy show. Tommy, the lead singer, was no more than 2 feet from me for the majority of the performance.

Anyway, their performance was nothing short of amazing. I’m not sure how many of you are into this type of metal, so I’ll wrap this up, but if you are a fan and have yet to see them live, do yourself a favor and check them out.

And I’m not done talking about music yet! After Bonnaroo this year, I told myself I had to make it to another music festival before the “season” ended… “Season” meaning the warm weather that allows for camping and basically being a degenerate hippie for 3-4 days. There have been a lot of good music festivals since Bonnaroo, but the majority of them are nowhere nearby, and I’m not in a position to be buying plane tickets right now, the tickets to the festivals are usually expensive enough as it is.

So we eventually decided on Camp Bisco. This is Camp Bisco’s sixth year, but from what I’ve read it’s usually at a different venue every year because they are never welcomed back by the property owners.

Anyway, the festival was started by The Disco Biscuits. I’m not crazy about this band. I’ve tried to get into them before (they were at Bonnaroo in 2006, but I didn’t end up seeing them) but nothing about the music really grabs me. I’ve heard amazing things about their live shows though, so I thought I’d give it a shot anyway.

The Disco Biscuits ended up playing four seperate sets (all three nights, plus one unscheduled afternoon set to make up for some scheduling conflicts). That’s a lot of music from a band I don’t know that well. They didn’t really click for me. Umphrey’s McGee played an awesome set at the fest. They played for around 2 hours or so, and I definitely would have rather seen them play more sets over the weekend than the Biscuits.

There was an abundance of electronic music there. When I hear “techno”, I lose interest right away… But some of this stuff is cool. Shpongle is some of the most out-there music ever (I just couldn’t bring myself to call it “trippy”). Unfortunately, Shpongle’s set was during a Disco Biscuits “setbreak”, so it was only about 3 songs.

I was really excited to see Hallucinogen in Dub. Unfortunately, Hurricane Bisco was at it’s most intense during their set. The wind and rain was so ridiculous at this point that I actually stayed in my tent just to hold it down – I honestly thought that if I wasn’t inside it to anchor it down, it would have blown away – And it most likely would have. I saw the damage the next day, and even people’s E-Z Up shelters were destroyed, and those things are generally very sturdy.

There was tent litter all over the place, bent poles and stakes all over the ground. It was some of the most ridiculous weather ever, and we camped through it. I ended up sleeping in my friend’s truck that night though, because my tent got flooded. This was the second night in a row that it happened, too. The first time (Thursday night) I definitely wasn’t in the right state of mind to come back to my tent late at night and find all of my clothes and stuff completely soaked.

I missed Girl Talk’s set at Bonnaroo, so I was determined to catch it at Camp Bisco, and it was pretty cool. He had like 25 people up on the stage dancing with him.

I thought Slick Rick had one of the worst sets of the weekend. His backing band was cool, but he just didn’t really do anything for me.

Anyway, the venue is owned and operated by bikers (apparently they’re Hell’s Angels) and they couldn’t have been nicer. I’d love to go to another festival there. There was no unnecessary searching or anything – they checked cars upon entry, and that was it. At Bonnaroo, every time you wanted to enter the stage area, you got searched. At Camp Bisco, not only do they not search you, but you’re actually allowed to bring beer with you to the stages, as opposed to breaking the bank on six dollar beers all weekend.

I’m not going to touch on every band I saw there, but Sound Tribe was awesome, Bustle in Your Hedgerow was cool, and Holy F*ck put on one of the best sets of the weekend, in my opinion. Anyway, I’m sure most of you don’t care about this, so I’m not gonna keep going with it, but I feel obligated to let you know what I’ve been up to… Minus the incriminating details, of course. Hi mom!

Not feeling very creative? Depending on what you’re trying to come up with, the Idea Generator just may be able to help you. It’s pretty simple: it just gives you 3 random words, but if I was trying to come up with an idea for a drawing or something, this thing would definitely help me out.

Dammit… Seeing stuff like this makes me wish I had time to learn to play guitar. I used to listen to In Flames constantly, not so much anymore, but I still love their older stuff, and that video is awesome.

I take my iPod Nano with me when I go running, and I have the Nike+ adaptor – That’s how I track my runs, and it’s also how I keep my ‘running stats’ widget on the right side of this website updated. I just realized today that it hasn’t updated the last couple runs, though, and then my iPod stopped working. I’m pretty sure if I do a ‘factory restore’ through iTunes it will start working again, but that means I’ll lose all my run data, as well as all my music and playlists. What a pain in the ass. But I guess it’s been way too long since something electronic of mine has malfunctioned or broken. Actually, that’s not true… My digital camera is all screwed up, the memory card got corrupted or something and I lost like 200 pictures. So that’s very good.

Anyway, that’s all I have time for right now. Have a great weekend everybody.