Rock The Bells, San Bernardino, CA (8/11/07) Recap.

If you were unable to make it to out this year’s Rock The Bells hip hop festival out in the boondocks of Cali better known as San Bernardino, here’s a recap to fill you in on what you missed, complete with horrible-quality pictures. The Hyundai Pavilion staff definitely called my bluff with their “No Digital Cameras” rule — I found out how easily I could’ve snuck mine in after having walked about a mile away from my car (where I left my digicam), and thus was forced to work with a disposable.

Due to various circumstances — traffic, long-ass line for admission, friends that are flakier than fucking croissants — I missed the first few acts on the main stage. I was sad to miss EPMD and Pharoahe Monch, but one of my homies was particularly wanting to see Immortal Technique. We came across an Immortal Technique tent amongst the vendors, hoping to find him, but the word over there was that he was out doing interviews and no one knew when he’d be back. I did exchange pounds with Poison Pen, one of the many MCs on Immortal’s classic “Peruvian Cocaine”, and a blogger in his own right over at HipHopGame.com.

The vendor tents were in the same area as the Paid Dues stage, which featured a few noteworthy acts, among them MF Doom and Felt/Living Legends (basically, all the Living Legends plus Slug from Atmosphere). However, unlike most everybody performing on the main stage, none of these acts quite fell under the category of People You’d Pay Close To $100 To See Live. So, needless to say, very little of my time was spent at the Paid Dues stage, but for the time I was there, I caught some of Cage‘s set, which was one of the Paid Dues acts that I really wanted to see. He mostly performed new shit off of Hell’s Winter, and closed with what you’d expect him to close with — the A Clockwork Orange-sampling “Agent Orange”.

He also bigged up Scifen clothing because, well, his hypeman and fellow Weatherman Yak Ballz was sporting one of their shirts. I wonder if, technically, I’m bigging up Scifen clothing indirectly by mentioning that. In which case, if someone from Scifen is reading this — I welcome free shit. Double XL, preferably.

The ticket stubs read “Rain or Shine” — and just as the former was an issue for the New York show, the latter was the issue over in sunny California. The heat was pretty unbearable — case in point, the majority of the crowd may have been Caucasian, but they’re weren’t exactly white by the end of the day. Fortunately, at least one dude got the right idea.

At this point in the day, me and my friends were getting some food and chilling on the grass, stretching out our legs from the near 2 hours of standing in line. And because of the way that the Hyundai Pavilion is set up, making this decision placed us in concert-view purgatory. So, I could post pictures of what I can only assume are the sets of Black Star and Public Enemy, but they’d be of very little value.

Mos Def and Talib Kweli‘s set was about 75% Mos solo shit, 25% Black Star shit. I met a dude in line who was psyched about seeing Kweli — I’m guessing he came away disappointed. Mos started reciting Melle Mel’s verse from “The Message” as a segway to “Close Edge”, which was dope. Later, Talib joined Mos to perform “Definition”, “Respiration” and “Brown Skin Lady”, before Mos closed up with “Ms. Fat Booty” (which included a break down halfway through over the instrumental to “Dear Summer”, Jay-Z’s killer solo track from Memphis Bleek’s last album), “Umi Says” (which he somewhat-strangely dedicated to Dave Chappelle), and “Sex Love & Money”.

Public Enemy performed a lot of their classics, opening with “Shut ‘Em Down” and “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos”, and closing with “Fight The Power”. In between, they performed a couple of new songs, one of which was over AC/DC’s “Back In Black” — I couldn’t really tell if I liked ’em or not. They’re included on PE’s latest album, which came out last week, and is titled (**clears throat**) How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul? Hmmm… hey, anyone remember self-titled albums?

Depending on how closely you follow PE, you may have heard rumors in the past year or so about Chuck D not being too happy with Flavor Flav‘s new-found reality-TV stardom, and the image that Flav was taking on as a result. Well, that appears to not be the case — Chuck made note to mention that Flav is now a “TV star”, and it didn’t sound in the least bit like mockery. Now, I don’t expect Chuck to be on some “motherfuck everybody in power”-type shit at all times, but it felt a little unsettling to hear that from him. Flav closed out the show by saying “Peace”, preaching togetherness, and mentioning that there will be a Flavor of Love 3. Seriously. Those were pretty much his words, in order.

After PE’s set, and meeting some other friends at the main gate who were about 4 hours behind schedule, we moved toward the front of the stage for The Roots, and got surprisingly good position. Here’s what I saw when I turned around:

Needless to say, it was set to be a long drive home. But never mind that — here’s what I saw when I turned back around.

My view of ?uestlove was blocked by the speakers, so I can only assume that he was back there playing the drums, since I could hear drums being played, as well as various shouts of “Questlove!” from the crowd. The Roots’ first song was an odd choice — “Web” off of The Tipping Point. However, as anyone who knows this song can tell you, it showcases Black Thought‘s lyrical skills extremely well, and since it was just him and ?uest doing this song, it gave the live band time to set up.

And a live band it was. When’s the last time you’ve seen a tuba on stage at a hip hop show? Unless you’ve seen The Roots live before, your answer should be “Never”. And as heavy as it looks, homeboy was jamming pretty damn good with it, and never took it off despite the heat outside. After performing a couple of tracks off Game Theory, the band started to improvise a little, and play some live-instrument interpretations of random hip hop beats. At one point, they played “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, popularly recognized as the sample on Nas’ “Hip Hop Is Dead”, which led to…

Nas! That’s right, the same Nas that was supposed to perform a full set in between Black Star and Public Enemy, yet instead came out as a “special guest” of The Roots and performed 2 songs before exiting. As some who has seen a live Nas set before (it was incredible), this was a HUGE letdown. If there was a bright side to this, though, hearing “Hip Hop Is Dead” and “Made You Look” with a live band’s backing was pretty fresh.

After Nas left, The Roots went into “You Got Me”, which featured an amazing guitar solo from whoever it was that was playing guitar. It was technically flawless, and heavy on the theatrics as well. Not to knock Thought and ?uest, who both did their things, but the guitar player and tuba player on stage both stole the show. I really wish I could tell you their names, but when Thought introduced ’em on stage, it was pretty hard to hear. Furthermore, I was distracted by the free CDs being thrown at my head.

Next up was Cypress Hill. If the picture is a little foggy… well, I shouldn’t have to explain what was going on around me in all directions. We are talking about Cypress Hill here.

I’ve always dug Cypress Hill, but seeing them perform live has made me respect them so much more. They’re one of those groups that don’t come up often in conversation regarding hip hop legends — probably because they found their niche in songs about smoking weed and killing people, not exactly uplifting stuff — but they’ve definitely got more than a handful of classics. And considering that they’re new music is rather low in quantity and not too popular, it was nothing but classics all night. Hearing “Hole In The Head” and “How I Could Just Kill A Man” back-to-back was off the hook, as was Sen Dog, the original rapper/hypeman (you can keep your Tony Yayo’s and Spliff Star’s and what have you), performing “Latin Lingo”, one of my favorite Cypress Hill cuts.

About 6 songs in, B-Real announced that they were taking a “chronic break”, and the DJ threw on some Rick James (“Mary Jane”, of course) to aid the moment. This lead to Cypress getting in to some of their weed-smoker material, like “I Wanna Get High” and “Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk”. Appropriately, before “Hits From The Bong” kicked in, Cypress’ drummer Bobo came to the front of the stage and took a hit off of a bong that had to be at least 4 feet long. A little trivia for y’all: Cypress Hill got banned from Saturday Night Live after DJ Muggs (who was not present tonight) lit up a joint on stage during their performance. Could you imagine the consequences if they pulled this stunt on live live-filmed pre-taped TV? Fed time, perhaps?

One of the things that made Cypress’ set so memorable was the way they lead into their songs — they’ve clearly got the shit down to a science. The best example was towards the end, when Sen Dog points out to B-Real that someone in the front row looks “sick”. B-Real proceeds to ask the guy if he’s okay, and if “anybody in the house knows a doctor” — then, almost immediately, they cue the beat to “Dr. Greenthumb”. Genius. Cypress got a great ovation, and set the scene perfectly for the Wu-Tang Clan. [Also, B-Real, as I’m sure I hope you can tell in the pics, was rocking a yellow Wu-Tang shirt.]

Back in ’04, the Wu head-lined Rock The Bells in San Bernardino, and it was the last time that they performed as a complete group, with the since-deceased Ol’ Dirty Bastard present… and I was there! Although this was truly one of my greatest memories of my concert-going life, I have to admit that, in my opinion, the Wu’s performance at ’07’s Rock The Bells was better. For one thing, back in ’04, the Wu took close to 2 hours to come out on stage, and it ultimately cut into the length of their set. This time, though, the Wu was out about 30 minutes after Cypress Hill finished their set, so they were able to finish properly, not on some “we’re out of time, thanks for coming”-type shit.

As sad as ODB’s passing was, you can see how much it brought what’s left of the Wu together. At times all 8 of ’em (plus Cappadonna and Streetlife) were at the front of the stage, backing up each other’s vocals, while at other times, 6 of ’em would play the back while 2 stood up front, one rhyming, the other playing hypeman. And the combinations changed throughout — it seemed like almost every combination of 2 members of the Clan interacted on stage at some point. It shows that the Clan truly do go back farther than music, and all their talk in the press about being a “family” isn’t intended for sensationalism. They appear to be much more united now then they’ve been in close to a decade, and the stage was shared pretty evenly (although Method Man can’t help but steal the spotlight with his energy).

While Iron Flag (and The W, to an extent) felt more like a collaboration of solo artists, I have a feeling that 8 Diagrams (now with a November 2007 release date) will be something special. I hope I’m not creating too high of expectation here, but there’s little doubt in my mind that 8 Diagrams should be the best album of the year (although, honestly, there’s not much competition as of yet).

Rather than mention a few of the songs that the Wu performed, I took it upon myself to take down their entire set-list on my cell phone, in crudely-abbreviated fashion. Keep in my mind that not all of the songs were performed in their entirety, most after 1 to 3 verses, with various Wu members (and the crowd) filling in for ODB as necessary:

• “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit” (Performed in full)

• “Da Mystery Of Chessboxin'” (Flavor Flav came out and gave big bearhugs to everyone on stage, then starting throwing some really small objects in the crowd. One of my boys thought they were keychains; I guessed crack rocks.)

• “Duel Of The Iron Mic” (Full)

• “Fish”

• “Bring The Pain”

• “It’s Yourz”

• “Liquid Swords”

• “Ice Cream”

• “Incarcerated Scarfaces”

• “One Blood Under W”

• “Do You Really (Thang Thang)”

• “Careful (Click Click)”

• “Protect Ya Neck”

• “Bring Da Ruckus”

• “Tearz (After The Laughter)”

• “C.R.E.A.M.”

• “Method Man”

• “Reunited”

• “4th Chamber” (Shavo Odadjian, bass player for System Of A Down, came out with his bass for this song. But, he didn’t actually play it, just kind of ran around the stage with it. Not sure who thought this was a good idea.)

• “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”

• “Brooklyn Zoo” (Performed by ODB’s son… well, one of his sons)

• “Da Rockwilder” (Redman was not present, but his voice on the original record was)

• “Triumph” (Full, and an amazing ending to the set)

My friends and I didn’t stay for all of Rage Against The Machine‘s set — let’s just say that the crowd turned from friendly Caucasian hip hop fans to violent Caucasian mosh-pit-throwing rock fans fairly quickly. Also, the lighting made it difficult to get any good pics of the band (as if I took any good pics the entire day), but on “Guerrilla Radio” and “People Of The Sun”, they sounded as good as ever. We did get an extreme close-up of a pissed off dad whose teenage son got his face swoll up by some guy — the dad looked like he was ready to murder the event staff people holding him back. I could’ve snapped a pic of it, but then he probably would’ve tried to murder me.

And with that, except for a select few — the kid that got swoll up, everyone else that got kicked out by event staff (a few of ’em probably deserved it), anyone whose main reason for coming was to see Nas and/or Talib Kweli — a great day and night was had by all. Rock The Bells continues to outdo themselves every year, and whatever 2008 brings, it should be yet another classic show.