The World's Loudest Acre:
Wacken Open Air 2002
Thursday, August 1, 2002
It was Thursday, still officially the "pre-show" day of the
festival. Witch Hunter (a veteran of two previous Wacken trips) arrived
and drove us to the town of Wacken proper. My heart skipped a beat when
I saw the yellow highway signs leading to our destination. WACKEN 5KM.
This time I knew what to expect. The little town was besieged, awash in
long-haired metalheads carrying camping gear and crates of beer. In the
first minutes of our arrival I probably saw 15 different varieties of
Blind Guardian and Kreator T-shirts on the various hot, weary festival
goers streaming into the place. We joined them, standing in line for
over two hours to receive our passes and press accreditations. A very
long, hot, sweaty wait! However, in the line we were reunited with our
Italian friends, Francesco and Cristiano--not only bassist and vocalist,
respectively, for Stormlord, but also big muckety-mucks for the magazine
Rock Hard Italy. They had been nice enough to bring their roadie,
Claudio, a short and cheerful Italian fellow in full black metal
gauntlets and combat boots. After various misadventures backstage and in
the town of Itzehoe, none of which I will describe, we finally wound up
in the backstage area with beers firmly in hand, ready to catch the
entertainment of the evening…and ready for Wacken Part 13.
BLAZE BAYLEY was the first official act we saw at the festival,
having arrived back from Itzehoe too late (sadly) to catch Timo
Koltipelto's solo performance. I'm not a fan of Blaze Bayley, or of
Blaze-era Maiden, and thus I can't say I was really interested in his
solo stuff. However, Blaze was surprisingly tight, catchy and energetic
this first evening of Wacken. I rather enjoyed "Silicon
Messiah," and although he's definitely not even close to Paul
DiAnno or Bruce Dickinson on Maiden songs, his rendition of "Man On
The Edge" was competent. Not a bad start to the festival.
Toward the end of Blaze's set the gunmetal clouds that had been
gathering over the Wacken village finally began to weep. Ah! At last,
the heat is breaking! We retired to the backstage area for more beer
during the drizzle, which thankfully ended before long. Unfortunately it
had not ended soon enough. The rain soaked the mushy unpaved ground of
the backstage parking lot, and Witch Hunter's rental car did not have
four wheel drive and several other cars in the lot were already bogged
down in the muck. Not to fear! Nomad and I leaped out of the car and
gave it a good push. We freed the car in less than five minutes--but
wound up completely covered in mud from head to foot. This was endlessly
amusing to Ice Maiden, but a bit on the sticky side for us. Thankfully
we were headed back to the hotel where warm, wet towels and a bar were
readily available. We had a drink there, still mostly covered in mud,
but the hotel manager was quite cool about it, and the longer we sat
there we began to notice various metal celebrities milling about--Joacim
Cains of Warlord, for instance, who may be more well-known for his work
with one of my favorite bands, HammerFall! On my way back to the
bathroom to swab dried mud off my shorts I conveniently bumped into his
HammerFall bandmate Oskar Dronjak. Given the late hour and the amount of
beer I'd had I couldn't resist a little hand-shaking and hero worship.
"I love HammerFall--you guys rule!" Not a bad ending to the
first day of Wacken.
Because the rain had cooled things off, we could sleep with the
windows closed--and no mosquitoes. All of us fell into a heavy sleep…and
missed the fact that it started raining again, and continued raining all
night. Enter Wacken Tribulation No. 2: mud.
Read On... Friday, Aug
2