| Great moments in B.C.’s outdoor concert history |
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Vancouver Sun / May 29, 2009 / by Randy Shoremay The year it rained: The Vancouver Folk Music Festival was drenched by rain in 1989, but boasted possibly the best folk music lineup in the city's history including Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Loreena McKennitt, Mae Moore, Roy Forbes, Spirit of the West and dozens more. Seeger, then just 70 years old, wore a garbage bag with holes punched through it for a raincoat. Everyone froze. No one left. The year it baked our brains: T-Bird Stadium was a boiling cauldron of beer and sweat for the 1991 tour of Midnight Oil and the terrifically underrated Hunters&Collectors. Vancouver's granddaddy of smack-punk Art Bergmann opened the show to a mob roiling around the beer concession and, later, the porta-potties. It was a Lollapalooza: Still fresh and edgy in 1992, Perry Farrell's alt culture festival came to T-Bird Stadium with the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow and a mainstage line-up that in hindsight was a legends of rock list in the making: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Ice Cube, Ministry, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against the Machine and Porno for Pyros. Lilith’s baby steps: Sarah McLachlan flipped a bird at the record industry and put together an all-female music festival in 1996, when no one else would, and called it Lilith Fair. To test the waters, she put on a show at Nat Bailey Stadium with Lisa Loeb and Paula Cole. It rocked and the following year Lilith Fair was one of the top-grossing tours in the world for the next three years. Word is Lilith will come back for 2010. Completely sick, dude: As Lollapalooza lost steam and audience in the mid-90s, the Vans Warped Tour gained serious momentum, bringing a new extreme sports culture and a whole lotta punk, ska and exposed boxer shorts with it. The 1995 show was in the Pacific Coliseum, so the first Vans outdoor show in Vancouver was 1996 at the Plaza of Nations with Blink 182, Rocket from the Crypt, Beck and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Everyone says they were there. Most of them are lying. Magic Malkin: The site of so many beautiful moments and melodies was turned into a grass-upholstered honky-tonk for one night in 2005. A famously drunk Lucinda Williams, belted out her signature hurtin' tunes with a heaping helping of gravel and twang, while turning the air blue with her wobbly trucker-speak interludes. Two years later on the exact same stage, Lucinda was almost contrite throughout her show. Blues amid green: The Burnaby Blues and Roots festival is entering its 10th year at Deer Lake Park. The lineup is still being prepared for this August, but it will be hard to top the 2007 roster that included blues legend James Cotton and twisted voodoo jazzcat Dr. John. Possibly the most beautiful outdoor concert setting in Metro Vancouver, Deer Lake Park is being upgraded, which can only mean more of the same in the future. Rocking the mountaintop: More than 40,000 fans crowded into a Pemberton potato field in July 2008 to watch Tom Petty, Jay-Z and Coldplay put B.C. on the mega-festival map. The three-day event left piles of garbage so enormous they threatened to dwarf majestic festival backdrop Mount Currie. Pemberton Festival organizers secured a ten-year agreement to bring the festival back to the site — watch for its return in 2010. The memories will last a lifetime. The dirt in your ears, only half as long. |
