After a week home, I’m going to document my week at Cornerstone Festival, mostly for my own archival purposes. This is built on posts on the cornerstonefestival.com blog with a little more details and commentary here.
With twin girls on the way soon, I was bound and determined to make it to Cornerstone Festival 2007. Every year I tell myself, “this could be your last year”, but this year it seems more the case than ever. Who knows? My friend, Jerry, knowledgeable fellow veteran of the newsgroup rec.music.christian was driving up this year and so I once again took the opportunity to hop a ride up there. As I’ve said before, usually with the road trip the best that you hope for is that nothing bad happens like a flat tire or car problems, but the twelve-hour trip actually went quickly and we even took an opportunity to visit the Superman statue in Metropolis! We rolled into Macomb around 9 PM and promptly set up our dorm room. I tried to stay up a little later than normal. It takes a little adjusting to go from sleeping in early for work to staying up late for encore shows.
Tooth and Nail Day, the “preview” day before Cornerstone has started and the heat is oppressive. Supposedly today is the hottest day of the festival. I sure hope so. We started out the festival by catching some of the newest bands to reach the festival. You can always tell who the rookies are. For the first two songs they jump and bounce around and then by the third song, they are motionless, succumbed to the heat. As a friend of mine said, “suddenly they are a shoegazer band.”
Still, there was lots of great stuff to see this afternoon. We saw afterEIGHT straight out the gate and then walked over to the Fat Calf Stage to see Dear Future, and I really enjoyed them. My friend, David, at the dance/techno van had…. technical difficulties, so unfortunately, I will have to wait and see him perform later.
We stopped for lunch and sat drained in the heat. After recharging for a while, it was back out to see Ivoryline and then later in the day, Ruth. So far Ruth had been the best band I’ve seen so far, combining a little bit of Third Eye Blind’s sound with a little bit of country and pop.
Some punk band on a generator stage regaled us with a cover of “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion as we walked by. Best cover so far.
So far, the heat had drained the will to live. It’s hard to get motivated to walk from tent to tent. About six or seven in the evening, the heat snapped with a pouring thundershower. Some girls sitting next to me realized all their stuff back at their campsite was lying outside and now getting drenched. Oh dear.
Sullivan opened the evening shows for me. The singer was drenched to the bone with water and sweat but poured out every drop of his energy for the audience. Jonezetta followed with a lively set. This is their second year at Cornerstone and they are beginning to get comfortable with the oddities of playing in front of a festival audience. They will be playing a couple more shows this week, so I might try to catch them again when the tent is less crowded. Run Kid Run played next at the Encore stage and ended their set on a very worshipful tone, reminding all of us why we are here in the first place. The last show of the night for me was Spoken. While waiting for the next band, the house engineer plays “Livin’ On A Prayer” by Bon Jovi and every kid in the tent knows the words, singing “whooah-oh!” at the top of their lungs. There’s hope for this generation yet. Spoken started out the night coming on to the stage to Micheal Jackson’s “Thriller” and played a couple bars from “Beat It” on the way out. In between, they played a great set of crowd favorites and a couple songs from their new album and even a cover of Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time”
It’s a bit early to be ending a night at Cornerstone (about midnight), but that’s all the shows we want to see tonight, so this is a good opportunity to adjust to “Cornerstone time” And so ends the first day.