OFFICIAL Virgin Mobile FREEFEST 2009 Q/A - Hype Thread! REVISED

I had a great time, and found Merriweather a great site for a festival of this size.  The west stage worked really well because you could see from everywhere.  Reminded me of the same stage at Lollapalooza that the Hold Steady played last year….

Gotta say thanks for everything…  True that staff is always great.  Concessions wouldn't let me re-use my beer cup, which saddened me just from a recycling standpoint, but man, if that's my only complaint, that was a helluva day!

Saw Kosmo and Bombay, but didn't make it to the 932 otherwise.  We got in about 3 and really wanted to catch all of Hold Steady, then stayed over at the West stage except for a short trip to catch about a third of the Weezer set.  All good….all good.

thatguy wrote:
ugh…no pictures of me in white and khaki.  it's painful to see.

are you trying to say, "i'm too sexy for this shirt, too sexy for these shorts, too sexy for these annoying screaming girls . . . ."?  :D

West stage was great, main stage sucked.  Could hardly make out any music from the lawn

Smylie wrote:
West stage was great, main stage sucked.  Could hardly make out any music from the lawn

hence that is why I skipped out on weezer and blink as I knew the sound from the lawn would be bad.  West stage was great  ;D

a very positive review from Spin… like i sez, you've got a winner on your hands.

The Best of Virgin Mobile Freefest
All summer long, we've been chronicling the best and worst moments of every major music festival, from South by Southwest to Lollapalooza. At Sunday's Virgin Mobile Freefest in Columbia, Maryland, just between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, it was nearly impossible to find a surly crowd or witness a trainwreck set. Simply put, there wasn't much in the way of "worst." Oh, and did we mention that all 35,000 tickets were given away for FREE? Could this be the perfect festival?

http://www.spin.com/articles/best-virgin-mobile-freefest

There is a survey about the festival on the website now, worth a quick run through to provide feedback about the venue and event.

Any chance of getting some archived performances on the website?  Would really like to watch the Franz Ferdinand stream again…

http://www.virginmobilefestival.com/#/home/

fun write-up about just how "free" this festiavl really was… i.e. very.  thank you, sir branson!

Rockin? In Virgin?s Free World

Conventional wisdom says that nothing beats free. Unless, perhaps, it?s free with benefits. While tickets to the fourth Virgin Mobile Music Festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Aug. 30 were, in fact, free, a few hundred music fans got serious benefits.

http://www.pollstar.com/blogs/news/archive/2009/09/04/687783.aspx

Somehow I ended up with a single, white, right-foot Chucks.  Anyone know where I can get a lefty to match?

yet another good article in pollstar on FreeFest:

Virgin Fest Lets Free Ring

as the story points out, i appreciated that the sponsors were more than just a constant eye-sore - they really contributed to making it a better event.

suggestion for next year: don't make it a freefest, make it a cheapfest/highly-subsidized fest.  the fact that it was free prompted a lot of people to grab tickets and not go, they were never committed to going and it was no loss to them if they didn't.  also, it created a field day for scalpers.  $20-30 would still be a ridiculously low price for that much entertainment and would help mitigate some of the above issues.

</$0.02>

Christine wrote:

hutch wrote:
well I did show up at the 230 932…I got in about 232 actually.. but I don&#039;t know what any of y&#039;all look like so I kind of looked at everyone, walked around and looked at the stuff on the walls and walked up… I didn&#039;t feel comfortable yelling &quot;MEETUP!!!!!!!!!&quot;

sorry about that..next time

I stopped by the 932 for a little while, but I&#039;d lost track of whether there was a specific meetup time, so I didn&#039;t get there &#039;til 6:15ish.&nbsp; I&#039;ve never met most forumers, so I&#039;m not sure if any were there then.

Overall, I enjoyed the festival, esp. (in order of performance times) Holy F*ck, Lee Burridge, Public Enemy, and Weezer.&nbsp; I was a little sad that the dance stage was so dominated by trance music – I found Pete Tong unlistenable.&nbsp; I felt a little sorry for Chuck D that Flavor Flav got way louder cheers than he did when Chuck introduced the band.

I parked in one of the satellite lots and it was fairly easy – took a shuttle bus to the site and then back.

that's odd, since his show on BBC Radio 1 is decent, guess DJ-ing 'live' he's different.  As for 'trance' - it's my least favourite dance music genre - the dance tent's lineup this year looked tremendously dull

I'll take trance over ed banger electro shit any day.

I didn't think the DJs were bad at all. I enjoyed what I saw. Pete Tong played a cool mix of Underworld's "two months off", that was a nice touch.

i will never understand why dj's are famous, they just play other peoples music.

if you enjoyed the weezer set, weezer.com will be selling downloads/cds of the freefest show and other weezer shows from this tour…

Got wrote:
i will never understand why dj&#039;s are famous, they just play other peoples music.

in my opinion they improve "other" people's music….  ;)

The vfest set is now up for sale at http://www.weezer.com/live/.

I downloaded that Weezer set a few weeks ago. It's well worth it. Sound quality is good!