You are in a sea of Japanese fans, staring patiently at the Sonic Stage. It’s Day 2 of the Summer Sonic Festival. You have stood here for 45 minutes, because you want to be as close as possible to the stage when the Pixies finally walk out and pick up their instruments.
Suddenly a couple of tall, loping Westerners slip through the crowd. And stand directly in front of you.
Hey! Who planted the Redwood Forest?
That’s just one of the challenges of attending a music festival in Japan: Summer Sonic draws a lot of Westerners, people who book a ticket halfway round the world for two days of music, food, booze, merch and stress relief. And so did you. So you just learn to mosh along with the situation the best you can.
A lot of people make the pilgrimage to Summer Sonic each year. It’s a pilgrimage that usually begins with buying online tickets (if you’re a gaijin), maybe looking into a Japan Rail Pass (available in Manila at travel outlets such as the one in Dusit Thani Hotel) to defray train costs, and packing a whole lot of bottled water.
Unfortunately, like most music festivals, it also involves a Sophie’s Choice of picking and choosing which headliners you will eventually settle into watching as the two-day festival commences. Since there are about eight stages, you can’t see everyone at once (though Japanese scientists may be working on this problem as we speak); so research, selection and precise timing are important to max out your ticket, which will cost about US$150 per day.
This strikes me as an annoying modern inconvenience that young audiences seem willing to accept blithely, without protest. Why must you choose between, say, Queen, Kraftwerk and The Pixies — all playing simultaneously on separate stages kilometers apart? Surely it wasn’t like this in the days of Woodstock — you didn’t have to choose between The Who, Santana or Jimi Hendrix; you got to see all the bands on the lineup.
So why does this generation put up with getting less music for their money than previous generations? Well, perhaps they look at the overall festival experience as more than just music: it’s the chance to bask in the August sun, drinking draft beer, buying concert towels to remove slicks of sweat every five minutes, getting fluorescent tattoos and other diversions at the festival’s many side booths, and of course getting sprayed down periodically by bikini-wearing Japanese girls on roving flatbed trucks bearing water blasters.
10:30 AM
Our journey on Day 2 started on a Keijo line from Tokyo to Makuhari Station in Chiba (Day 1 was in Osaka). If you’ve never been to Summer Sonic, you’ll find it easy to locate the festival grounds: just follow the hipsters, western or local variety, as they get off at the station (about a 45-minute ride from downtown Tokyo). It helps to download a map of the festival layout onto your cell phone.
11:30 AM
As you enter the festival grounds, you’re handed a lineup map for the day and a handy wrist tag in exchange for your ticket. With three main venues and about five other side stages, there are about 65 bands playing from 11 a.m. till 11 p.m. Will you be able to see this many bands? Not unless you can bi-, tri-, or quad-locate. Instead, cherry-pick concerts through research — check out YouTube videos or Spotify tracks beforehand, see which bands sound promising. Another tactic is to simply go visit each stage during the day — start with the huge Marine Stage, where Queen was set to stomp with Adam Lambert later that evening on Day 2.
When we arrived at this massive baseball stadium though, the stage was occupied by Little Mix, a troupe of female Brits reminiscent of the Spice Girls, if the Spice Girls had all their charm and talent surgically removed, leaving behind only ambition and aggression. We left after about five minutes, not yet ready to bake in the noontime sun in a baseball stadium.
Heading to the nearby Beach Stage, we were pummeled by Japanese metal bands for about two hours, enjoying the food booths and colorful towel-head look people were starting to adopt. The Official Bar Tents all over Summer Sonic are convenient: enjoy the novelty of being served overpriced draft beer and cocktails by Japanese girls wearing bikinis.
12:30 PM
Our wanderings eventually took us back to Marine Stage, where we sought bathrooms and then vending machines. It became clear after a few hours that vending machines were to become our bosom companions during the festival. I personally went through about six bottles of water, and a couple Pocari Sweats. (The festival operators don’t mind you carting around plastic bottles in your backpacks, though there’s a social contract involving videotaping performances with your cellphone, which is prohibited and which few Japanese patrons do. Pictures are okay, though.)
2:00 PM
Sometime around mid-afternoon, after enjoying some ice cream, perusing the merch tents for Pixies stuff (sold out), and getting doused by bikini-wearing Japanese girls, we felt it was a good time to chill. So we headed over to the Mountain Stage area.
Getting from one area to another is not as simple as running the 50-yard dash. You could retrace your steps backward, or you can take a shuttle bus (located near the Marlboro tents this time). We liked this option. People in Japan are quite disciplined about queuing up, so it’s a quick, air-conditioned ride to the other side of Summer Sonic.
Mountain Stage and its accompanying indoor venues — Sonic Stage and Rainbow Stage — are a great place to chill out as the afternoon wears on.
We spent the back half of the day enjoying laidback jazzy hip-hop by Robert Glasper Experiment, whose Vocoder-infused version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit lifted the crowd to blissful heights. At this hour, Mountain Stage was sparsely populated by people snoozing on their backpacks, rehydrating, and basically enjoying the chill-out vibe of an indoor, air-conditioned venue for a change. We did likewise. Later, of course, it would feature Kraftwerk as a headliner, which as mentioned, we had to forego in lieu of the Pixies.
Summer Sonic does force you to make difficult choices, and maybe that’s a good lesson for The Youth: you can’t have everything you want in life (unless you can quad-locate), so just learn to roll with things and try to enjoy the experience that life serves up. We did this. We settled in for Azaelia Banks (or just “Banks,” as her larger-than–life backdrop announced), a willowy model type who writes and performs her own songs, backed by a keyboardist and drummer. Here, we learned the value of being a seasoned performer. Though Banks was lovely to watch — kind of like a young Sinead O’Connor with hair, my wife said — her performance style involved frequent hand flutters and a runway walk about the stage, and as the set wore on, a voice that turned raspy and slipped out of tune in spots. Was she new to the stage? Later on, we watched much older performers — Ben Watt from Everything But The Girl, Black Francis — who got through their hour-long sets with ease and without laryngitis. It just goes to show the value of experience.
Air-conditioned Mountain Stage was a good place to regroup. Our next stop would be next-door Sonic Stage, for the final lineup of the evening.
4:30 PM
Sonic Stage is a convention hall away, so we settled in for the evening — loading up on water and Pocari Sweat (I love you, vending machines!) and getting as close as we could to the stage action, where England’s Metronomy were finishing up a convincing set. (“Chick drummers rule,” my wife noted.)
Ben Watt took the stage next, backed by Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, who had an astonishing array of vintage Gibsons at his disposal. Watt — once half of Everything But The Girl — now brings his seasoned voice and jazzy chords to Nick Hornby-style tales of modern living in middle age, and Butler’s responsive playing hit all the right spots. It was a relaxing, but satisfying and refreshingly musical set.
After the requisite 40-minute gap between sets, Britain’s The Horrors took stage at 6:50 p.m. (Summer Sonic is very precise about starting and ending times). What can you say about a Goth dance band that mashes up Psychedelic Furs, Jesus and Mary Chain, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure? They rocked, though I confess they sound less dynamic in the studio. The processed vocals of Faris Badwan, gated drums and ferocious guitar of Joshua Hayward reminded us we were at a “rock” festival. If nothing else, The Horrors have a great live sound.
But all this paled next to the Pixies, who took the stage at 8:30 to the kind of explosion of punk nostalgia you might expect from 2014. Minus original bassist Kim Deal (replaced by virtual copy Paz Lenchantin), the band relived our “Doolittle” days, and Summer Sonic’s tightly packed stage area became a polite moshing zone. Every hit — Wave of Mutilation, Here Comes Your Man, La-La Love You, U-Mass — elicited waves of recognition and mindless abandon. It was a great set, with guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer Dave Lovering providing “personality” as singer Black Francis (looking like the other half of Tenacious D, or Hank from Breaking Bad) merely summoned his inner weirdness and loud-soft demons. In fact, Francis spoke not a word to the audience from start to finish, not even a “Thanks, Japan” for the adoring crowds. Odd, that.
Though one could imagine that Kraftwerk spoke even less.
11:00 PM
After the show, decamp to the train stations (which stop running at midnight or so) or stop for a burger and a beer at local eatery Lotteria. And keep an eye out for midnight shows (usually listed inside the festival guide): some bands will hit the Summer Sonic stages at the witching hour if you’re willing to miss the last trains home and hit the local bars instead until dawn. It’s a little bonus to, say, catch Mogwai well into the wee hours. Keep your ears perked for tips on after-hours local club gigs, too.