Questions from answers

This past weekend was the inaugural Pemberton Music Festival. I have to say it takes a lot of vision to want to turn some farm fields into the biggest music festival BC has ever seen. When I first heard of the festival I was quite excited, then I saw the ticket prices at $250 plus fees for the weekend plus camping seemed way over priced. Then I looked at the 3 day line up and most of the acts I wanted to see were on the Sunday with Coldplay headlining. When tickets first went on sale they only sold 3 day passes, but I was hoping they would eventually sell one day passes. Then I was being optimistic and hoping they would sell one day tickets for $100 each. When they eventually went on sale they were selling one day tickets for $150 plus fees! That was crazy to me, could you spend one day at a concert and spend $170 at a show and say it was worth it? So I skipped on buying one day passes and said I’d pay $100 to go the show and not more. I resorted to daily checking Craigslist. About a week and a half before the show I reached a deal with a girl to get 2 tickets for $225 for my friend Glen and I, it was a bit of a compromise as I would be spending $12.50 more that what I had hoped. A time transpired I lost contact with the girl and I was again looking for tickets. Then a week before the show I put an ad in Craigslist looking for 2 tickets at $200 and then a day later I got and email from someone who lives close to me was selling 2 tickets for $200. He won them on the radio and was unable to go, his loss, my gain!
Pemberton is 30 minutes north of Whistler with generally only one road to get in and out unless you want to make the long journey the other way. When people began arriving on Thursday, there were news reports of people waiting in traffic for up to 8 hours and confusion as to what exactly was going on. Then on Friday with the dry weather we have been having, there was lots of dust and some people leaving early because of allergies. On Saturday there were reports of the kinks slowly working themselves out and I was optimistic that by Sunday things would be going along a lot more smoothly.

On Sunday I met up with my friend Glen in Whistler at 11:30am for lunch. The trip up to Whistler went a lot faster than we were expecting considering the whole road is practically a construction site. We ate lunch at the Old Spaghetti Factory and were on the road again to head up to Pemberton at 12:30. We left ourselves 1.5 hours to make the 30 minute journey in order to make the first act I wanted to see at 2pm. The drive was going well until about 10km to Pemberton when traffic was at a standstill. There were a few times were did not move for 20 minutes at a time! It took us over 3 hours to make the last few km. Needless to say I missed The Airborne Toxic Event at 2pm. The next band I wanted to see was Vampire Weekend at 3:30. The time was getting to 3pm and my friend Glen wasn’t to into seeing Vampire Weekend so I said I’d walk/run to the show while he would eventually find a parking spot. So I started running to the show, uncertain how far exactly I had to run. It ended up being about a 5km distance in the warm sun. Ironically as I started running the traffic became better and my friend Glen wasn’t too far behind me.

Once I got to the show things got better, I had arrived finally!
I missed the first few songs of Vampire Weekend, but I caught most of their set. The sound was great and the mostly college age crowd music. I thought they put on a decent show.

There were 2 stages and once one act finished the other started. Next up on the smaller stage was Wintersleep from Halifax. I had heard only a couple songs from them, but was pleasantly surprised their set was more electric than the acoustic singles they had put out. Glen and I were quite impressed with their show and after Coldplay was probably one of our favourite bands of the day.

Next up on the other stage was Death Cab for Cutie. This was another band that I had only heard a few songs from. They had a good size crowd watching them, but seemed to only put on a mediocre set. I did however want to hear more stuff from them and have been listening to the Transatlanticism and Plans albums recently which I have enjoyed.

We had missed the band N.E.R.D. because we weren’t too interested but they were late and made the 2 stages start overlapping, so we missed the beginning of Matisyahu. Again I think I had only heard one song from Matisyahu before, but I have to say he put on a solid show, which I really enjoyed. Even though he is a white boy and Jewish too, he really can do reggae/rap like the best of them, with a great backing band as well. I would definitely see him again.

Next up was Jay-Z, we weren’t too keen on seeing him, but we did want to position ourselves to get in a good spot for Coldplay after Jay-Z. I can’t say I really understand rap, like women are called bitches and we should say ‘Ho, ho ho’ like it’s Christmas. Anyway for the most part it was entertaining and the crowd seemed to be into it as well.

And finally at 10:10 Coldplay finally showed up on stage. We were about 15 rows back and feeling very snug with the people around us. We thought their would be a lot of pushing a shoving when Coldplay started, but thankfully the crowd was quite well behaved, except for those making out in the Porta-potties during Coldplay’s set??
Anyway Coldplay put on a great show and had the crowd singing along for a number of songs. Then they went into the crowd and sang an acoustic version of the Scientist which the crowd enjoyed as well. They put on a great show as I was expecting, a great way to end the day and the festival.

It was midnight before we returned to our car and the parking lot didn’t move for 2 hours and we finally made it back to Whistler at 3am. It was a long day but worth it. If I ever go again, I really hope they work out the traffic problems, otherwise it could be a great festival for BC.