Saturday @ Rothbury

By Saturday, the mildly uncomfortable heat had transformed itself into burning-hell-sauna-like conditions. The lines for showers, ice and the sinks were all about an hour/hour and a half long.
Still, we headed back out to the blistering heat to see some more shows.

We briefly saw State Radio at the Odeum. I liked a lot of their older songs, but they played this new one about Guantanamo that was absolutely horrendous. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to politically-charged songs ( I love em) but they made some stupid rhyme with Guantanamo and screamed it at the top of their lungs, over and over and over, until the horrible song was over. I guess, in a nutshell, you could say I wasn't super impressed with their performance.

We skipped the rest of their set and headed to the media tent...where we met this dude:

Look it's Kyle Gass!
The GMNext folks booked us some time to chill with the musician/comedian/actor (He's 1/2 of the band Tenacious D and did the voice of KG Shaw in Kung Fu Panda, among other things)

So we chilled with Kyle for a bit, talking about Tenacious D, Kung Fu, breakfast foods (specifically a hatred for continental breakfasts at hotels) and the strange ways of the band Of Montreal.

Then he showed us his (and GMNext's) bus.

This is where Kyle does all his interviews with artists at the festival. The videos from them can be found on the GMNext Plug In site.

The Black Keys at the Ranch Arena
They seem like very interesting characters...

Their facial expression alone were enough to keep me entertained.

Another great face...

A new method of avoiding paparazzi? Or just a rockstar-kinda pose?

The Black Keys were great...They played a decent amount of songs from their new album but didn't neglect their old songs either. They were really fun to listen to and watch.

Confession time: After Rachel had taken a sufficient amount of photos, we decided to lay down on a lawn blanket and ended up completely zonking out. This is most embarrassing because we weren't too far back from the stage. It must have been the heat/lack of sleep/exhaustion because that music was LOUD. I guess you could say we got rocked to sleep? Okay bad joke, I'm sorry.

In the evening, we put on some warm clothes and headed to Dave Matthews. By the time we made it to his set, the venue was PACKED.

We sat way back at the top of the hill, so we could barely see Dave (forget trying to take pictures) but this is a little peak at what the surrounding area looked like at night

We decided to go exploring through the Sherwood Forest after Dave. We followed a bunch of blue Christmas lights until they brought us to a little Zen garden. After walking along the Zen garden, we stumbled upon this...a secret stage (apparently State Radio had a "secret show" here the night before). Saturday night at the secret stage brought on a mix of theatrical/mime-like acts of talent and some DJs.

We did see some of STS9 (Sound Tribe Sector 9). Maybe it's because I'm not familiar with their music, or that whole scene, but I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be expecting. Everyone who liked STS9 said that their performance was amazing. To me? Meh?

On the way out, we did end up catching a little bit of DJ Rekha, which (according to her MySpace) is a combo of hip-hop and electronica infused with South Asian styles of music. It was really really cool sounding, I highly recommend her.