Firefly Music Festival – Dover Downs, DE 6/18-6/21/14 (FESTIVAL RECAP)

Red Frog Events third annual Firefly Music Festival kicked off Thursday, June 19th at the beautiful expanse of land known as The Woodlands at Dover Downs International Speedway in Dover, Delaware. An estimated 80,000 music fans of just about every demographic you can think of attended the event, up from 65,000 in attendance last year. Adding an extra night allowed music fans to ease into the festival. Thursday featured a lineup that included Local Natives, Phosphorescent, Amos Lee and Rac on three stages, providing a solid warm-up before the full seven-stage barrage of bands began on Friday.

Artistic lighting installations adorned scenic paths between stages allowing easy access to the performance areas, although a fair amount of hiking was required to get around the vast venue. All weekend music fans were queued up to get into the wooded area called The Thicket, Firefly’s silent disco and when they reemerged, many looked like they had just been on one of the those multi loopty-loop roller coasters. The two Hammock Hangouts were also very popular with attendee’s seeking a place to rest, and a third DIY Hammock area cropped up in the tree line in the back of the Main Stage area. The Brewery, an air-conditioned tent occupied by Dogfish Head Brewery and World Cup fans had games broadcast on multiple screens.

Thursday

The Gates opened around five o’clock, and by five forty-five, a large crowd had made their way to The Forrest Stage for singer-songwriters John and Jacob’s energetic set. Irish rockers Kodaline ripped through an impressive set that began with emotive versions “After the Fall” and “One Day” from their debut LP In a Perfect World. San Fermin is the brainchild of composer Ellis Ludwig Leone and the group he assembled provided a lush set of beautiful vocals and flowing musical arrangements. Amos Lee’s set was silky smooth and loaded with soul and funk. Headlining Thursday night was Local Natives and the band’s harmonies shined through material from their Humming Bird and Gorilla Manor albums, and a tasty organ filled cover of Johnny Cash’s “Out Among the Stars” from the lost 1980s sessions that was recently released.

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Friday

Indie pop band Bleachers, formed by Fun.’s Jack Antonoff attracted a large exuberant crowd on the Main Stage where they performed songs from their forthcoming LP, Strange Desire, including their first single “I Wanna Get Better” and a cover of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”  Scandinavian band New Politics armed themselves with drums arranged all over the stage for extra thundering percussion and featured a Justin Timberlake cover,”My Love”. A relaxing set of folk rock was performed by singer songwriter Samuel Beam, known musically as Iron and Wine, with a full band on The Main Stage and a solo acoustic set later in the day at The Coffee House, Firefly’s more intimate performance space. Portugal. the Man capped a great set with a tasty tease of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” that blended nicely into their own “Purple Yellow Red and Blue”. The Arctic Monkey’s would have no trouble headlining a festival, and the second to last performance on The Main Stage by the band was exceptional, that featured almost every song from their latest release AM along with older songs “Brainstorm”, and “Florescent Adolescence” from the bands second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Pulsing lights brought the trees surrounding The Forrest Stage to life for Australian band The Jezabels set and the band shimmered with tight grooves and powerful vocals with incredible range and tone from Hayley Mary. The big show of the day came from The Foo Fighters and the incredible amount of people that had gathered for their set were treated to an amazing show. Dave Grohl, who was recently inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Nirvana greeted the crowd with a couple of rebel yells and simply saying,”Hi everyone, my name is Dave. How are you?”, he then went on to explain that he had spent a lot of time in Delaware, loving the smell of Grotto Pizza (a Delaware pizza fixture) and “loving a pizza place that would drive your drunk ass home in Rehoboth Beach”.

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Grohl also explained that it has been a long time since he had played with The Foo Fighters, and missed it and went on to say to the audience, “I miss you guy’s a fuckin’ lot, how ‘bout this, we have a good time as long as we can, ‘till someone tells us to shut the fuck up”, then he led his Grammy winning band through big Foo Fighters hits, “Times Like These”, “Rope”, “The Pretender”, and “Learning to Fly” that propelled much of the audience into high spirits. After giving kudos to The Arctic Monkeys, Dave Grohl dedicated “Monkey Wrench” to them. The encore was pretty unexpected, Dave Grohl let the audience know how much he loved rock and roll and how much he loved being in The Foo Fighters, then he said they were going to do something they had never done before, “tonight, for the next four or five songs were a bar band called The Holy Shits that play kick ass classic rock songs” and the band went to crush covers of “Schools Out” (Alice Cooper), “Miss You” (The Rolling Stones), “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” (Van Halen), and “Under Pressure” (Queen). The band closed the show with their very own classic – “Everlong”.

Saturday

90’s epitome rock band, Third Eye Blind, attracted many of the older music fans to The Main Stage for a set of their more memorable songs like “Semi-Charmed Life” and “Jumper” that triggered huge sing-a-longs. It is impossible to have a seven-stage mega festival without conflicts and tough choices must be made, such was the case with Grouplove and The Kaiser Chiefs that went on at the same time on opposite ends of the festival. And if your taste or mood was psychedelic pop rock you went to Grouplove, and if you wanted English post punk rock you went to The Kaiser Chiefs. For the fans who caught The Kaiser Chiefs they were treated to a boisterous set that conjured images of soccer hooligans and leather clad London punk rockers with ripped up British Flag t-shirts, particularly with songs like “Ruffians on Parade”, “I Predict a Riot” and “The Angry Mob.”

Cage the Elephant was another highly anticipated set and a large and diverse crowd had assembled to hear songs like the popular “In One Ear”, the crunchy groove of “Take It or Leave It” and the bluesy “Ain’t No Rest For the Wicked”. Imagine Dragons, to the dismay of many, have had some huge commerical success from their album Night Visions and their position as the second to last band on The Main Stage reflected that. The band chose the closing track on Night Visions, “Fallen” to open the set which spurred an immediate responses from many audience members with the infectious beat and catchy refrains. Imagine Dragons played a song for the first time in the United States called “Battlecry”, which was played once prior in Hong Kong. It only took the intro to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” to send young kids who recognized the song and those who were obviously older avid fans of the Canadian power trio to begin a mad sprint toward the stage.

Imagine Dragons brought out Cage the Elephant for their big finish, the biggest hit from Night Visions, “Radioactive”. Continuing an epic day of music was an awesome set by Beck. The artist donning an Amish style hat of some sort began with a pulsating version of “Devil’s Haircut”. “Loser”, an anthem for anyone with even moderate self-esteem issues, was a definite highlight of the set. After teasing the audience with the introductory beat and bass of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean,” Beck asked the audience if they should really play the song, and after a positive reaction from most of the crowd, they continued with a thoroughly enjoyable version of The King of Pop’s classic hit. Other highlights of the set included “E-Pro” and “Where It’s At”. After twenty years, OutKast’s Big Boi and Andre’ 3000 still have the moves, the beats and the rhymes and a mostly ecstatic mega-sized crowd were dancing and grinding to the grooves. Andre’ 3000 brought up a group of ladies from the audience for a dance jam on the stage during “Hey Ya!”  Other highlights included Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, the title track from the Hip Hop artists’ first album released twenty years ago and “Roses” that spurred another memorable Firefly sing-along.

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Sunday

Dallas Green left a successful band, Alexisonfire, to pursue his solo singing/songwriting career that would evolve into City and Colour. Green introduced the band as City and Colour, a North American band. Highlights of the set included “Harder then Stone” and “The Lonely Life” from the latest City and Colour release, The Hurry and the Harm. Most Americans’ exposure of English singer/songwriter Jake Bugg comes from reruns of Glastonbury Festival on the Palladia channel playing acoustic music with incredible enthusiasm, but Jake Bugg’s set at Firefly was an electric rock band kicking ass and taking names. His best-known song is “Messed Up Kids” from his latest LP Shangri La, and was a highpoint of the set.

Weezer, began their set with the instantly recognizable (at least for the thirty and over crowd) “My Name is Jonah” and ended with the hit “Buddy Holly” from the era of when MTV was still a music video channel. Winning the award for the most (come see our set at Firefly) e-mails to this music journalist is Sir Sly and their set did not disappoint. The band arranged themselves for optimum interplay and they took full advantage rotating on instruments and taking turns jamming in the drummers face via additional drums located in front of his kit.

Broken Bells is Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse and James Mercer, front man for The Shins, excellent side project laid grand versions of “Perfect World”, “After the Disco”, and “Holding On For Life” from 2114’s After the Disco. Sunday headliner Jack Johnson had the Lumineers join him on stage, which although sounds like a match made in hell for critical music fans. he later explained, they only had five minutes to work on something and loved that The Lumineers were up for doing two songs. Johnson the went on to ask the audience to sing along to cover any missed chords and they went on to play “I Shall Be Released” (Dylan cover) and “Breakdown.” Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” made a nice segue to “Staple It Together” and was a highpoint of the set. Fireworks and Big Gigantic provided a semi-late night grand finale that sent a sizable amount of lingerers from the Jack Johnson and Childish Gambino shows sprinting toward the stage.   One might have their doubts about a festival near a speedway, but Firefly made tiny Delaware proud once again for a weekend in June.

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