After 5 days with too little sleep, too much to drink, lots of laughter, sunrash and a rather bad sunburn I'm back home from Sweden Rock Festival.
So let's see if I remember everything the way it happened.
Tuesday: Ricky and Madde picked us up at 4 am. Since our normal sleeping pattern is getting up at noon-1pm and then not going to sleep until 3-4am, we decided not to sleep before. Instead we slept some in the car. If I take anti-motion sickness pills I rather enjoy road trips :) Due to taking a wrong turn a few times we arrived to the camp site around 1pm (should take about 6 hours to get there, took about 10 xD) and while we raised our tents and the party tent rain started falling. My Converse got all wet :( Lucky I remembered my wellingtons ;) After everything was set up we turned on the music and started on the alcohol. The rest of the Tuesday was spent drinking, laughing and singing along to weird music. We attracted a few people during the day and evening. We were just a few metres away from "the peeing fence" where all the guys went to pee and so we attracted some of them while they were on their way and then they kept coming back :) This day also introduced our mascot - Jerker the Viking :)
First person to fall asleep. Covered with his own beers and crowned with the duct tape. Ricky and Toni bowing down to him :P
Wednesday: Raining all day and not really any band I was interested to see. Instead we spent the day pretty much like the first one. Except at one point in the evening Toni and I went to have a look at the main festival area with all the stages and stuff, in connection to finding some sort of food. In the area we found Ricky by himself. Him and Toni played around and were going to sit together on top of a recently emtpied out trash can, but Toni moved and Ricky fell halfway in, then he fell all the way in. A group of middle aged people close by saw it happened and they along with us had a laughing fit from Ricky falling in the trash can. Then the two guys from the other group got the idea to turn the trash can over and roll it up the hill with Ricky in it. Then they just let go and let him roll all the way down. We all laughed so hard, including Ricky. Too bad we were all laughing too hard to remember to film it! xD But that was pretty much the main event of Wednesday.
1). Ricky with cool contacts drinking mead out of a real drinking horn. 2) & 3). Madde's G&T cans had these stickers on them... 4). Tequila hat! 5) & 6). Ricky in a trash can. 7). What happens if all of us stack our legs? Jerker is in there! 8). Toilet art :P
Thursday: The rain had stopped, but it was still cloudy and a little chilly. I was excited for this day. For this day I had planned on seeing four bands;
Black Stone Cherry,
Alter Bridge,
Rob Zombie, and Alice Cooper, but in the end I only saw Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper. When it was time to leave for Black Stone Cherry the sky opened up and rain started pouring from out of nowhere. Pouring down hard. So I decided to stay in the camp. I had only heard a couple of songs by them anyway. Then when it was time for Alter Bridge, Toni was basically passed out in the tent, so I decided to let him sleep and skipped Alter Bridge too. Have only heard a couple of songs by them too so it was alright. Then we went to the Rock Stage to watch Rob Zombie. I haven't really heard much by him and I couldn't sing along to any of the songs (except when he played the first verse and chorus of School's Out just cause Alice was gonna play directly after him on the stage opposite), but he was cool and I will definitely check out more of his stuff! Then it was time for Alice Cooper. How I had longed for that moment. Three years since last time. I saw him in 2011 in Stockholm, I missed him in 2012 in Gothenburg, and in 2013 in Östersund, but now it was finally time again! And it was incredible!
Not as great as last time, but nothing is as great as first timers. My only complaint is that they had turned up the dist on the guitars so much that I couldn't recognise several of the songs until Alice started singing and I recognised the lyrics :/ Favourites were
House of Fire,
Hey Stoopid,
Feed My Frankenstein,
Caffeine,
The Ballad of Dwight Fry,
School's Out (same as last time with
Another Brick in the Wall during the bridge!), and
Department of Youth. All in all a great mix of old and new songs, and still a few songs I didn't recognise! I need to listen to his albums a lot more, but 26 albums are a lot to take in! ;) Cooper for president! No one does gigs like he does. Other bands go out on stage do their stuff and get the crowd going. Cooper doesn't interact, he's got his stage persona and it would destory the atmosphere to interact. His gigs are like a mash-up of circus/freak show/old school horror movie and I absolutely love it! School's Out was the last song he sang and for this song Rob Zombie came out on stage and performed with Alice.
1). Balloon as a table? 2). Rob Zombie on stage 3). Alice Cooper on stage 4). Feed My Frankenstein puppet 5). Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie on stage
Friday: First really hot day. After Cooper's concert I woke up around 4 am from freezing to death under my cover inside the tent. About 8 am I wake up again. This time dying from heat! I remembered to put on my sun lotion with the highest spf available in Sweden (50) and still I had burned face and shoulders by the end of the day :/ Around 11.30 I went with Johanna and William (Toni wasn't up and ready yet) to watch the National Day celebration. June 6th is the Swedish National Day. But it only lasted for 5-10 minutes. Swedes suck at celebrating their National Day. So we grabbed something to eat (pulled pork burger ftw) and watched Kings of the Sun for a while. At 1pm
Electric Banana Band came on the Festival Stage and it was awesome! I listened a lot to them when I was little so I recognised most of the songs, although I was 12 the last time I listened to them. Totally worth spending an hour watching them. I love how a (sort of) parody band with a target audience for children can get a whole crowd of tough rockers and metalheads dancing to nonsense songs :D After that we went to buy soft ice and slush ice and then went to watch Rockklassiker All Stars on the smallest stage, but we left after 15 minutes cause the sound from one of the biggest stages (where there was another concert at the same time) completely drowned the sound from the small stage and as we heard nothing we left. Then it was all party party until we left for the stages again to watch
W.A.S.P. This was Toni's hallelujah-moment, just like Cooper had been mine. And we can't agree which concert was the better - I think Cooper and he thinks W.A.S.P., but I guess it depends on whose fan you are ;) After W.A.S.P. it was time for
Black Sabbath. Neither of us are Sabbath fans, but it's one of those bands one should see before they drop dead so we listened to maybe four or five songs before we left. I don't understand a word Ozzy says. I did discover that I liked Sabbath a lot better live than on CD. They make concept albums and I find that on a CD all their songs are too long and sound too similar that I can't really tell them apart, but during a concert all the songs are mixed up and it worked better imho. After Sabbath we bought T-shirts and stayed up partying until about 2 am when we finally went to bed. This is also the day we found Jerker brutally murdered on the ground. And the day the security guards gave us all a condom each xD
1). Electric Banana Band on stage! 2). Rockklassiker All Stars on stage 3). Glam rockers walking around like this. Very show-off. 4). W.A.S.P. on stage! 5). Black Sabbath on stage! 6). Toni took the arm of Jerker and put it in his pants it was after this that we got the condoms xD 7). Poor Jerker brutally murdered... :(
Saturday: Woke up around 8 am with the feeling that I was melting, it was so hot inside the tent. After putting on my clothes I crawled out on all fours and the morning air was the best thing in the world. This day we had no concerts until 6 pm when I was going to see Within Temptation. There was a possibility that I was going to drive the next day and so I kept drinking to a minimum and only before the concert itself. It was my third time seeing Within Temptation live (first time on an
arena gig, second time on
Metaltown) and it was just as awesome as the other times. I really respect Sharon. After about 30 minutes Toni left and I stayed in the scorching heat to watch the rets of the concert. In the beginning most songs were from their new album like
Let Us Burn,
Paradise,
And We Run,
Dangerous, and
Summertime Sadness, so it wasn't until the classics (
Our Solemn Hour,
Stand My Ground,
What Have You Done) that the concert really got going. Sweden Rock was only the second stop on their promo tour and the album has only been out for a few months, so not everyone knew the songs yet. Since I was alone from the concert with a nice guy I had only known for three days, I decided to skip
Billy Idol and went back to the camp with him. There we had some party and Toni decided to skip
Arch Enemy. Their concert didn't start until 00.30 am and we were pretty tired for all of this day. To the point that Toni and I actually went to bed at 11 pm already.
1). Within Temptation on stage! 2). Toilet art
Sunday: Awoke around 4 am again from freezing to death. Then some sort of alarm sounded at 7 am. After Toni and I had both gotten dressed we started to pack our things. We decided to dump the tent there since the zipper to the door had pretty much stopped working. Even without all the alcohol it still took the four of us (me, Ricky, Madde, Toni) two rounds to bring all our stuff to the car. We got it packed in the trunk Tetris style and then we drove off. Ricky drove for about two hours and then stopped at a gas station where we bought food, drinks and snacks and then we switched. I drove for about an hour and then we stopped at another gas station to fill up the tank and we switched back. I think driving is boring, mind-numbingly boring. After 30 minutes I feel like I have driven halfway across Sweden already. The more I drive the more confident I feel about it, but I still think it's so terribly boring that I can't understand how anyone can enjoy it. I rather sit in the back seat and watch the landscape pass by while dreaming away. I also have a bad case of road rage and I sit swearing under my breath at all those drivers who don't know how to use their blinkers. But today I mostly swore over all those friggin trailers all over the friggin highway. We got home after about 6½ hours and I put dibs on the shower already before we set foot inside the door. First shower since Monday was amazing.
Post-festival selfie
And now, here I am. Sweden Rock is over and I liked it a lot more than
Metaltown.
