Deve’s Blog

Damn it… I didn’t like Venezia much as a city (see this post)… but now it’s official, I also hate Mestre and its fucking storms that come out of nowhere in an hour…
At least not everything was a disaster for this Heineken Jammin’ Festival of mine…

Saturday, July 3rd, we entered the park around 2.30 pm, relaxing under a little tree, then walking through the (useless) water atomizers, then Stereophonics (I didn’t know them but they were not bad at all), then we get closer to the stage for the Cranberries. Dolores was in great shape, excellent concert, and having heard Zombie live is a nice “kill notch on my rifle”, so to speak…
And then Aerosmith… we were all worried about how Steven Tyler would sing, as it seemed he was going to leave the band just a few months ago… then he went to a clinic to “clean up”… 62 years old…
So I think everyone shat their pants when, at the end of the second songs, he screams a high note… and begins coughing heavily… … “oh fuck”… but he waves to us to hold on… catches his breath… AND BURPS LOUDLY IN THE MICROPHONE!!
He was having fun with us all… and from then one he pulled off a brilliant performance to say the least, with the highlights being, for me, “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” and obviously “Dream On”; he sang them perfectly, as if they were recorded… shivers and goose bumps… The setlist was almost complete, maybe it missed “Dude” and “Crazy”, but almost everthing else was in there.
Awesome concert.

Sunday, July 4th, same routine, resting in the shadow of another little tree… Rise Against played a decent music, then Editors, sounding like Depeche Mode clones (and I don’t like Depeche much), then the horrible 30 Seconds to Mars, really awful. Unfortunately, during their concert a huge black cloud got closer and closer… the wind was crazy continuously, changing directions, and for a while it seems like the cloud would avoid us and head straight for Venice… but then it goes back and the first raindrops come down. The 30 Seconds must stop the concert, and so we ran for cover, just in time, under one of the food stand tents.
One and a half hour of downpour, with a moment of real violence (they said 80mm of water came down in half an hour). At 9.30 pm we finally left the tent, but there were 10cm of water in front of the stage, and the concert was cancelled… we walked through water and mud, got a bus to Mestre, walked to the hotel, had a kebab, a shower and went to bad… huge disappointement…
For the time being, Green Day will keep playing only in my iPod… but we’ll try again…