Primal Fear

Meshuggah

Jorn

Firebrands

Eluveitie

A.O.T.W.

more interviews?

Now let me give you my thoughts on Ozzfest. The whole day was a great big experiment for this site as I had been planning for months to figure out a way to be the first with Ozzfest pictures this year. I requested that day off as well as the Friday after. I knew I thought my union (Teamsters) had set us up to get both the 3rd and the 4th off and that would have given me five days in a row to recover. Sadly I had to go in on Monday, but I am getting ahead of myself. My super awesome wife scheduled the day of the event off from her paying gig as well so she could run the ‘home office’. About a month before the event both my laptop and PDA/cell died (see previous rants for full story on that). So my wife sold off a ton of her personal collectors items on eBay to get me another phone. Yeah, she rules that much! So then with the help of our in house tech Slowfuse, we get an FTP (file transfer protocol) program working on the phone. I borrow his daughter’s camera because they both take an SD media card. Can I beat MTV and the rest of the big boys with this fly by the seat of my pants set up?

So a few days before the event, my partner in crime has to bail because between a move and school he can’t do it. Deathboy gets the mighty Jenzy to take his place. So I am up at 4:30 in the morning. Did you know they made a 4:30 in the morning? So me and Jenzy meet at the iHop in Auburn Washington at 6:00 am. To make sure we don’t have to stop and eat the entire day, we both get the steak omelet. Then it is off to the show. After several years, the Ozzfest crew seem to have their shit down to a science. Me and Jenzy sit in an office waiting for passes. Dave (as seen on Battle For Ozzfest) comes in for a few. Very nice guy. We get told we have a three song limit for photos (very well known industry standard). Then we get handed a photo pass and media pass. A slight bit of confusion leads me to believe that would only get me in. I freak and call the press agent. Little did I know that the on site media person is related to the contact I talked to and the two of them have their shit down. The photo pass goes to me and the media pass to Jenzy and I am reminded that I am way too high strung (especially on four hours sleep a night for a week).

About two minutes before we get our passes, the first band starts. I am told that the ‘first three songs only’ rule still will be in effect. So we rush like mad to get in and start taking photos. Then after one song I begin trying to send them over to Superwife. Well, somehow they get lost and Bad Acid Trip photos are lost forever. With All That Remains however, everything seems to work much better. My Superwife goes into action and gets them posted within minutes and sends out the press release we had made up the night before. Shortly after I am told by a few people that a few music news sites have already posted a link to the photos. My wife sends me a text message saying our little DIY webserver is running very slowly. At this time I am feeling great because we are the talk of the backstage area. We are the first in the nation with Ozzfest photos! We beat all the major music media people by several hours. Now here comes the bad part. After I sent the All That Remains photos my transfer rate goes down to about 5 kbs. It takes me a few hours to send the next one. So the third batch just keeps growing while the transfer rate doesn’t get any better. So it was two hours before we get the second update and about five more hours until the third update. In the end we get about 8,000 unique visitors that day. The bad news is that because the transfer rate is so pathetically slow, my cell phone batteries (three of them) run out. I also figure out way too late to do anything, that all the batteries I packed for the camera are the cheap kind and I run out of those just in time for the main stage. Thankfully the guys at Groove Or Die magazine had an extra set they could spare or I would have been done for the day. Go to www.grooveordie.com and give them some monkey love.

So we are told that after we take photos of System Of A Down we can stay in the SRO/pit area, but once we leave that we are stuck with whatever seats we bought (no, we did not get in free). Well, I knew our seats sucked pretty hard so I was going to stay put as long as I could. Jenzy was getting pretty tired though and walked out of the pit area and sent me a text message to tell me where she was. Since I was pretty tired as well and didn’t want to leave her stranded I left the pit area right before Ozzy. We get to our seats (almost in the nosebleed section) and she says she is ready to go whenever I am. I can barely stay awake and I couldn’t see anything from my seat anyways, so we leave. I hated to miss Ozzy, but it had to be done.

I then got home tired as hell. Now remember that I still had about half of the photos still not posted and thousands of people expecting them. So I go to extremes I won’t admit to here to stay awake and get the rest of them online for you all. This turned out to be another 8 hours shift, but I somehow got it all done. The next day we had 5,000 people come back to see what we had worked so hard to accomplish. The good news is that the little guy won. We were first in the nation with Ozzfest photos this year and that is huge! The bad news is that we ended up with almost no momentum from it all. I have more evil up my sleeve though and we should be making a huge announcement by next week. Something is about to happen that will bring this site to the next level. Now if only we could get more writers.

PS-Vote for the band you think should be on a future Ozzfest! Click here because underdogs RULE!