Friday 19th May – Rock on the Range Day 1

The heat today was oppressive, so we whacked the aircon on for the first time in months.  Not wanting to buy too much over-priced food at the venue later, we stocked up on a hearty brunch before even considering the journey ahead.

I went for a wander around the camp site but we’d left it too late to get a lift from anyone, the place was deserted!  Plan B - we got an Uber to the nearest bus stop instead.  Hopping on a number 10 bus from there was only $2 each, including the transfer onto the number 4 bus north out of the city centre to near the venue. So, although it took us an hour and a half to reach the MAPFRE stadium only 16 miles away, for $10 all in, it was worth it.  Besides, we weren’t in any rush… It turns out we could have stayed at the camp ground even longer!

‘Why is everyone walking the other way?’ said Simon as we got off the bus to walk to the stadium.  He clearly did not trust my directions!  But we did seem to be walking against the flow of traffic. A helpful man seated in a car shouted out ‘they’ve evacuated the stadium!’ to solve the mystery for us.  An approaching storm had caused the organisers to ask the entire crowd to leave the stadium and seek shelter.  It wasn’t raining yet, so we decided to keep walking to the stadium. After all, we hadn’t even managed to obtain our wristbands yet and it would be a good time to sort that out if everyone else had left.  

It still wasn’t even raining when we reached the ticket office – and found it shut.  It seemed like a bit of an over-reaction! But we were now at the front of the queue for when it did re-open and at least there was a ledge above the ticket office that would provide a certain amount of shelter from any approaching storm.  We met Anthony, who was in the same position as us, trying to get the wristbands for him and his wife who was arriving later.  As he was on his own, we started chatting to kill the time.  Spirits were high amongst us and the like-minded music fans around, even though we all just wanted to get into the venue to kick the weekend off. Eventually the torrential rain and some thunder and lightning did arrive and it got a little cosy under our ledge when many others squeezed in with us!

View from under our ticket office ledge

Some just tried to sit out the rain.... he wasn't sat there for long!

After each onslaught of rain, we took a tentative look at the surrounding skies as more waves of dark grey cloud approached.  It wasn’t looking good. Discussions about what they were going to do with the Soundgarden slot turned into conversations about whether they may completely cancel the rest of the day and how long we were all willing to stand by the closed ticket office. We were starting to think this festival was jinxed!  We had arrived at the ticket office about 415pm.  After two hours of standing there we got news through that the meteorologists reckoned the worst was over and they would re-open the stadium about 7pm.  This was especially good news as some of the crowd under a nearby tent had commenced ’10 green bottles’....... but started at 100! 

The '100 green bottles' gang

I got a wristband!!

Sadly, they had time to reach zero before we got our wristbands and gained entry, but we were impressed with their perseverance!

Finally we were in - rock nails and everything but would I need the sunglasses?!

Finally inside the MAPFRE stadium (named after the Madrid–based Mapfre insurance company who sponsor the home soccer team) we got more bad news.  A can of beer was $10 and a small pizza $9 – extortionate! On the plus side, our three-hour delay had saved us a fortune!  We headed up into the stands.  Our tickets don’t allow us entry onto the pitch-level, we went for the first-come, first-served seating option in the stands that was significantly cheaper.  We found ourselves some seats and dried them off to enjoy our first beer and over-priced pizza, whilst waiting for an announcement about how the rest of the day would play out.

After a rousing electric guitar rendition of the National Anthem from the blonde hottie who plays in Alice Cooper’s band, things basically picked up from exactly where they left off before the evacuation.  The bands were all still going to play but with slightly shorter sets and quicker turnaround times between artists.   

We met our neighbour, Kristi, who is here with her sister for the fifth year in a row.  They are in a group who meet up each year and save seats for each other and have become great friends just through attending the festival.  We watched Of Mice and Men (not the British folky band version – more ‘shouty’!) and Bush, who were excellent and really went for it.  Then we left our seats in the hands of Kristi and the gang to go and catch a bit of Sum41 on the second stage.  We returned to find our seats safely retained and watched Chevelle, who we’d never heard of before but really enjoyed.  Then it was time for Live, a band from back in the nineties who it turned out hadn’t played a gig together for eight years!  They had found themselves in the unenviable position of playing at the time when we had all been hoping to see Soundgarden.  Every band paid tribute to Chris Cornell in their own way, through a mention or a cover.

As everything was running really behind schedule we weren’t even sure that they would be able to stay open to do the Cornell tribute.  But, straight after Live had finished, they put up photographs and started playing Jeff Buckley’s version of ‘Hallelujah’:

That song is so beautiful that I well up when I hear it any time, let alone when I’m mourning the loss of a legend with the masses!  Everyone was silent and deep in their own thoughts.  When the song had ended two of the members of Stone Sour came on stage and did soulful renditions of ‘Wish you were here’ by Pink Floyd and ‘Hunger Strike’ whilst everyone sang along.  Hunger strike is a song that Cornell sang himself with Temple of the Dog, a band that consisted of him and all of the members of the current line-up of Pearl Jam, with Eddie Vedder providing supporting vocals.  We missed a reunion of Temple of the Dog when they toured North America in 2016 for the 25 year anniversary of their album.  The dates just didn’t fit in with our travel plans at the time. Maybe we should’ve just caught that plane?! But hindsight is a wonderful thing.

After the live tributes, they played a montage of Cornell’s greatest moments on the big screens.  By now, people had started to filter out of the stadium.  It was heading for 1am after all!  I really didn’t want to leave during the tribute, but the other factor was that the temperature had plummeted following the earlier storms and I was finding it impossible to stop shivering in my seat.  We wandered forlornly out of the stadium with the rest of the crowd having bid farewell to one of our heroes.

Time to sort out our ride home.  Due to the fact it was now the early hours of the morning, Uber were quoting us $59 to get home!  We were a bit stuck, because it was too late for the buses to be running. We started walking to reach an area where the crowd had thinned down a little.  Seeing an available taxi stopped at some lights we went into haggle mode, but ended up having to fork out $45 for the 20-minute drive back to the RV site. Ouch, maybe we need to review our transport arrangements for the rest of the weekend?!