ghostsinthegrooves.com

Outdoor concerts by big acts were rare in the Twin Cities, then a rundown, forgotten amphitheater conjured up the Prince of Darkness.

The Twin Cities gained something this year that was sorely missing for far too long. A proper outdoor music venue. The new amphitheater, about twenty miles from downtown Minneapolis, is state-of-the-art, has amazing sound, good sightlines, and is big enough to draw major summer tours. 

There was a time when another amphitheater served the Twin Cities. Although calling it a proper amphitheater gives the wrong impression. It was rustic, essentially a stage nestled by three hills. 

Somerset Amphitheater is a 45-minute drive from the Twin Cities. The concert venue, originally called “Float-Rite Park Amphitheater”, opened in 1981 with an inaugural concert by the Charlie Daniels Band. Built to welcome 40,000 fans, the stage lies nestled in a natural amphitheater, cradled by gentle hills.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the venue hosted a smattering of concerts each year by artists who were either on their way up, “Goo Goo Dolls” and “Soul Asylum” in 1993, or by artists who were on the backside of commercial success, “Warrant” and “Blue Öyster Cult” in 1991 and “Foghat” in 1993. Then in the mid-1990s, something in the Twin Cities changed that altered the fortunes of Float-Rite Park. 

Radio Station 93.7 KRXX was sold in early 1994. The station flipped its call letters to KEGE, started calling itself “The EDGE,” and switched to an alternative rock format, tapping into the new sound of grunge and modern rock. The change ushered in new listeners and high ratings. 

Seeing the popularity of the new station and watching the success of popular summer music festivals, Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E., on Harriet Island in St. Paul, “The Edge” decided to host its own festival.  

“Edgefest” was first held in July 1994 at what was then known as Apple River Amphitheater. The festival was a hit. In 1995, it was held again and headlined by some of the biggest artists representing the modern rock genre, including Bush, Collective Soul, and punk rock pioneers the Ramones. 

The success of these festivals being held at Float-Rite Park led to Ozzfest announcing a tour stop there in 1997.

These two festivals, both being held at Float-Rite Park amphitheater, seemed to be the turning of a corner for Minnesota concert lovers. Being a live music fan in Minneapolis & St. Paul around that time was tough. Especially in the summer. With no large outdoor amphitheater, a lot of touring bands would bypass a Twin Cities date during summer tours. It was annoying to see popular bands announce summer tour dates and never be coming to your city. If by the off chance there was a big act coming to town, it was going to be held indoors, no matter the time of year. With the resurrection of Float-Rite Park, that was slowly changing with successful dates for Ozzfest and Edgefest. And now I was going to experience an amphitheater show that I had heard so much about. 

In 1998 my older brother, Hunter, attended Edgefest, his first music festival, and came home talking about how amazing it was and saying that next year we should go to Ozzfest. 

At the time I didn’t put much thought into it because it was a whole year away. Mid-summer of 1998 gave me a new concert experience that was festival-like in its own right.  That summer the Minneapolis Aquatenniel Festival put on a free concert headlined by The Smashing Pumpkins. It was the biggest concert of the summer, in both hype and attendance. At the time the Smashing Pumpkins were one of the biggest bands in the world. Official estimates put the crowd somewhere between 200,000-250,000. To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the Smashing Pumpkins. It’s not to say I didn’t like them, I just wasn’t all that familiar with them. Of course I had heard some of their songs because they had been getting a ton of airplay for the last couple of years and it seemed like every guy in junior high owned a “Zero” shirt. Still I was excited for the show, music aside, the popularity of the band and the fact that it was free ensured it was the can’t-miss event of the summer. By that time the largest concert I had attended had been The Rolling Stones the previous fall, but that had been inside a domed football stadium and was a seated event. So, the idea of just being a part of the energy of a giant crowd, outdoors, in the middle of summer was intriguing to me. It didn’t disappoint, the energy was palpable, and it gave a sense of what the festival crowd might be like the next summer at Ozzfest.

Hard Rock and Heavy Metal were not a big part of the music I was listening to when I was a teenager. I did, however, like Ozzy Osbourne. I had first become familiar with his music when I was ten or eleven years old, and in the most unlikely of places. 

My grandparents were both deaf and belonged to a deaf camping club. I would go on these trips with them occasionally. We would load into their motor home, drive to a campground a couple hours away, and enjoy, for me anyway, a mostly silent weekend. There were other kids my age and older who would be there, some of them hearing, some not. One afternoon, a bunch of us kids were hanging out and one of them grabbed a stereo. They put on a CD, and we carried on with the conversation. A minute later, one of the deaf kids signed something I didn’t understand to the guy next to the stereo. He cranked the volume up. It was loud, with heavy bass, and a lot of guitar. It was Ozzy. Before I could even ask the question, the girl sitting next to me, who also was hearing, turned and said “Yea, we listen to a lot of metal, Ozzy, Metallica, and Megadeth, so the deaf kids can feel the music.” 

I was blown away by it but it made sense. For the next 48 hours I became really familiar with loud, metal music. Metallica and Megadeth were just loud with indiscernible lyrics. Ozzy was loud, but there was a definable melody, and I could even understand some of the lyrics.

Early in 1999 Ozzfest was announced, and the headliner was not just Ozzy, but the original Black Sabbath. 

Settling into the summer vacation groove for a couple of weeks, the day of Ozzfest finally arrived on July 1st, 1999.  

The midsummer air was thick, but we cut through it in my brother’s Lebaron Convertible. As we crossed into Wisconsin, we stopped off at a bottle shop. Hunter wasn’t a drinker, but he was twenty-three and willing to buy my cousin and I some booze to drink before we went into the show.  As it was a beautiful warm summer day, we went classy and told Hunter to buy us some Boone’s Farm. It seemed like it would be refreshing on a hot summer afternoon. Hunter returned for the hooch and we continued on our way. We were only about twenty minutes away from the venue, so while Hunter drove, Cody and I got busy chugging the cheap, fruity, Strawberry Hill. As we were waved into the parking lot I realized I had been talking too much because I was still on my first bottle. I drank down the rest of it quickly and immediately opened my second bottle. The idea was to drink as much as we could now because once we entered the venue there would be no more drinking. Such is life for an underage drinker. I finished my second bottle in about five minutes. By now, I could feel the warmth and lightheadedness brought on by the alcohol. Drinking two liters of Boone’s Farm in fifteen minutes will do that to you, and in my case it also left me feeling incredibly full. As Hunter, Cody, and I stepped from the car I could feel the wine cooleresque fluid reversing course. I threw up, not from drunkenness, but simply from being too full. I immediately felt better and now was ready to rock.

As we made our way through the gate I got my first look at the bowl-shaped venue. The main stage was located in the bottom of the bowl surrounded by hills, already packed with fans watching the mid-lineup bands performing. The music was heavy and loud. We wandered along the hillsides checking out the various merchandise stands and watching the concert from an uncrowded vantage point. The mass of people in front of the stage was packed in tight and moved like one giant organism. It looked like a wave as the mass was pushed one direction and then another. 

Cody announced he was going to the restroom. Unfortunately for him that meant backtracking across the hillside towards the gate. Hunter and I got sodas from a vendor and stood watching the show. From the corner of my eye I saw something or someone moving quickly. I turned my head to the right and saw Cody sprinting towards us, he leapt over blanket dwellers on the hillside and dodged people standing. He had a huge grin on his face as he moved. When he arrived back at our location, he was laughing and gasping. Before we could even ask him why he was running he turned to me.

“Holy crap! Cooper, you have to try it.”

“Try what?” I responded.

“Running as fast as you can and dodging people.” 

“You drunken fool,” Hunter chimed in. 

Cody agreed, “No doubt, it’s only fun because I’m half buzzed.” 

Without saying anything else, I, in my drunken state, followed his suggestion and took off running across the sloped bowl. I juked left, I juked right, I hurdled blankets, and I laughed as people yelled at me. I was just the right amount of intoxicated to see two or three moves ahead. 

As I got to the other side of the bowl and pulled to a stop, I turned to see Cody was following me. When he reached me, we stood laughing and trying to catch our breath. The band that had been performing finished and the organism in the middle of the bowl shrank as people moved away from the stage and up the hills. 

We made our way back around the bowl to where we had left Hunter. When we got there, Hunter suggested we go down the hill towards the stage. It was evening now, and just two bands were left to perform; Rob Zombie and Black Sabbath. 

We snaked our way through the crowd and were roughly half-way from the stage. As Rob Zombie finished his set, Hunter, Cody, and I decided to try to move close to the stage for Black Sabbath. The sea of people became more dense as we melded further into the crowd. The atmosphere was energized down here and I felt my skin prickle as we weaved our way ever closer to the stage. The house music pumped up and the crowd started shifting. I was now part of the organism that I had watched from the hillside earlier. Suddenly, but not unexpectedly, we could no longer dictate our direction. Now, we moved as the organism moved. The movement was gentle, swaying left and right, but that was short-lived. Soon the roadies that had been setting up the stage as a Fleetwood Mac tune played over the P.A. were gone, the music ceased.

As if they had been synced beforehand, the second the stage lights went dark, the gentle swaying stopped, and was replaced by a violent surge forward from the back of the organism. The limited movement that was possible just a minute earlier was gone. The crush from behind propelled Cody and I through a gap in the crowd, and finally closed back around us. We were just twenty feet from the front of the stage. 

“This is crazy!” Cody shouted. 

I couldn’t even respond, I was too focused on holding my ground. At six and a half feet tall, seeing the stage certainly wasn’t a problem, but weighing only 160 lbs, it took everything to stay in place. 

I quickly glanced behind to see if Hunter was still with us, only to find he had been swallowed up in the crowd. The crowd burst forward in a new push, as a flashlight on the side of the stage indicated the band was being led out. The speakers came to life with an air raid siren blaring through them. The crush from the crowd moved us to the right. A quick burst of energy from behind propelled it forward. This sudden change of direction caught me with a foot off the ground, and so tightly packed in, I floated forward as the crowd’s momentum carried me. 

“GENERALS GATHERED IN THEIR MASSES…”

I looked up as I heard Ozzy singing the opening lines of “War Pigs” and was surprised to see Cody still in front of me, and that we couldn’t go any further. We were now in the front row, pressed against the steel barrier. Looking up, Ozzy Osbourne towered directly over us from the stage. The show rolled on as we did our best to hold back the thousands of people pushing forward. We held firm and soaked up the music (and the water that Ozzy sprayed over the crowd with a fire hose) as long as we could. Eventually, the force of the crowd pushing from behind became too much. Every time the organism lurched forward, my ribs were jolted into the metal fence in front of me. Halfway through the show we did what the people who had been in front before us had, and signaled to security that we needed out. They grabbed Cody first, as they did I pushed backward as hard as I could to give them space to pull him out. Once he was over the barrier, they grabbed me. It was more of a struggle though as the guy behind me was pulling my shirt. They finally got me over the barrier. Security was quick to usher us off to the side, but I stopped for a second and turned back to look out at the organism, to see for just a moment what Black Sabbath saw on that summer night.

The new amphitheater is beautiful and modern, but it’s also sterile and seated. The organism from Float-Rite Park can’t exist here. But maybe somewhere, maybe on another plane or in another dimension the energy that made up that night is still exactly as it was, frozen in place.