There almost wasn't any air at Red Bull Rock 'N' Air, an extreme sports music fest held at Red Rocks Saturday in Morrison, Colo., outside Denver. But though the ski and snowboard competition, one of the event's main attractions, was canceled just before doors opened, the remaining exhibitions and concerts by 311 and Pennywise more than made up for the lack of gravity-defying snow sport.
The night before the event, organizers had turned 150 tons of block ice into snowflake-like shavings via a woodchipper and loaded the "snow" onto a colossal wooden ski jump and landing. The jump was built on an eighteen-foot scaffolding over part of the amphitheater stands, stopping right in front of the stage, to afford a close up view of both the concert and the athletes. This, organizers said, was partly what set this soon-to-be-annual event apart from other sport and music fests.
But overnight, the snow's weight caused the scaffolding to start to collapse, and by morning, a routine safety check determined that the jump was "structurally unsound." Organizers then re-arranged the event's schedule of remaining events, pushing back door time for several hours. The added wait and cancellation of the snow sport frustrated waiting attendees, some of whom had driven as far as from California and Pennsylvania for the sold-out event. The twenty athletes who were to compete were disappointed as well, though they got to divvy up the prize money, scoring about two grand each. "I didn't get to jump once," said free-skiing contender Shane McConkey. "It's a bummer. And the jump looked so cool . . . We did all this and we didn't even get to chuck our meat."
At the fifty-foot vertical ramp in the Core Village in the parking lot, pro skaters and BMX bikers added extra time to their exhibition, and they did not disappoint. Though most of the vert riders and boarders displayed an amazing amount of grace and agility, skate vet Tony Hawk stole the show when he successfully struck a front side 900. The trick -- a two-and-a-half midair rotation -- has been Hawk's signature ever since he made skateboarding history at last year's X Games when he executed the world's first 900. Hawk had never executed the move perfectly, always landing with his knees bent or in a squat. But this weekend he nailed the maneuver as he landed standing up.
"This is a new beginning for me," the Carlsbad, Calif., skating legend said. "I've never stood up after that extra spin. You have to shift your weight so it sends it to a different axis, so you're not so top heavy. And you never know until you're in the middle of it if you can do it. You have to start spinning without the intention to land. You have to do it without fear."
"No fear" could've also been the slogan for Pennywise's set, shortly following the skate/vert exhibit, since the band toyed with dangerous security situations, taunting the audience to break down the barrier between them and the stage, and finally inviting so many onto the stage during "Bro Hymn" that the band members were impossible to spot in the swarm.
Poking fun at the unused snow jump -- still a few feet from the stage -- guitarist Fletcher Dragge riled up the crowd with jokes about being "structurally sound," urging crowd members to find other means to launch themselves in the air. "This is where we get sued," he joked. "But fuck it, let's have a good time." "Shit, no, we didn't say that," singer Jim Lindberg quickly added, trying to do damage control.
Lindberg and Dragge made much use of their stage time to rail on corporate product pop and other ills of society, but didn't resort to juvenile gags or heavy political poses to do so. Instead, they turned the show into Punk Ed 101, taking the opportunity to educate the largely teen audience about bands from Black Flag (from their shared hometown of Hermosa Beach, Calif.) to Nirvana (via a vehement rendition of "Territorial Pissings"). And though the anarchist-themed "My Own Country" and "Society" are especially appropriate during the election season, Pennywise opted to emphasize with their between-song banter the songs' Nietzschean aspects, about living by one's own rules rather than bowing down to established belief systems. And then, immediately after saying something thought-provoking, Pennywise would blast back into a melodic gust of buzzing guitars.
Where Pennywise's set was meant to incite as well as be insightful, 311 brought the crowd down to a less demanding place with their party-time cross-genre musical mix. No insurrectionary asides here, just laid back rhythms and grooves that shifted easily and quickly from ska to hip-hop to dancehall to funk to metal and back, with glistening minor chords and delicate melodies.
Instead of saying much other than the usual "Wassup?", frontmen Nick Hexum and S.A. Martinez communicated to the crowd mostly through their dance moves, Hexum smooth and fluid, Martinez herky-jerky and exaggerated. Their vocal styles, too, were just as opposite, as the two alternated between Hexum's melodic funk crooning and Martinez's quicker raps. Most of the largely self-referential songs ("All Mixed Up," "Down") from 311's middle period were a collage of style that went down easily, but also blended too easily with each other. But their newer material, like their earlier songs, kept a harder edge that suited the band better.
The focus on pure rhythm became most evident during what seemed like a Chad Sexton drum solo that mutated into a drummer's circle of sorts, as the rest of 311 came out and did drum rolls along with their bandmate. Sexton kept the underlying, complex beat going as the others took it into synchronized new directions. It sounded somewhat tribal, if not primal, and made the rest of their music seem somewhat tame by comparison. If only they could hold onto that essence and spirit, and somehow allow that to translate into their more mellow material, then putting them on an "extreme" bill would really make sense.
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