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According to the Music Midtown site, in 1993, Alex Cooley and Peter Conlon joined forces with the idea of presenting a festival that would encompass all aspects of music, in an urban setting with an affordable ticket price. This vision came to life in 1994. Since that time, Cooley/Conlon have created one of the most successful annual music festivals in the country, which still offers one of the lowest ticket prices of any comparable event.

What started out on Peachtree Road has grown to six stages and this year with over 100 bands encompassing over 42 acres. Throughout the years, Music Midtown has presented a wide range of musical genres including Rock, Alternative, R&B, World Music and Gospel. The festival has included performers at all levels of their career from emerging bands to international superstars.

So I went. Here's my impression of the bands that I saw.

Friday Night

I started off checking out Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who is one of those youngish blues players. He wasn't bad, but sounded too much like all the other white blues guitar players that have come and gone across the years.

After grabbing more beer and a turkey leg for dinner, we went to the 99X stage (alternative music) to see Puddle of Mudd. I can now honestly say that if you ever have a chance to see Puddle of Mudd, don't bother.

Next we good a little local flavor with the crunk bands YoungBloodZ and Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz. Crunk, for those who don't know is defined (by the Urban Dictionary) as musical genre of hip hop formed and dominant in the Southern states. The music is loud and abrasive in nature, with bass heavy beats, and loud repetitive lyrics. The music is high energy and is usually heard as only club music. Not really my cup of tea, but these two bands REALLY got the crowd going. And this was the first I got to see boobies. Gotta love concerts where women flash the band.

Ended Friday seeing Ludacris. STAND UP! Ludacris was excellent, getting the crowd really going and bouncing, despite the rain. And way more boobies!

Saturday

Drive By Truckers are a local band who are channelling the ghosts of Lynard Skynard. Great southern flavoured country-rock. They are really good.

Then I bounced around between 4 different stages, catching little bits of the sets by:
Wyclef Jean - I like Wyclef, but he was all rockin' out at Music Midtown. They played "Gone Til November," but as a jazzy-rock fusion piece with hard guitars and drums. Frankly, I liked the slow version.

Chris Robinson & The New Earth Mud - Chris Robinson, ex of the Black Crowes, had his new band playing. They sounded like the Black Crowes, only no where near as good.

The Offspring - I like the Offspring, and even own an album of theirs. However, they are not a good live band, and they kept trying to get the audience to sing along with them. Only, no one had any idea what song they were singing, so there was just lots of silence. And then the lead singer would say something like, "C'mon people, sing it loud!" And we would all sit there looking at each other. Time to move on...

The Doors of the 21st Century - The surviving members of the Doors, with Ian Astibury from the Cult as the lead singer. The Cult was always trying to be the Doors, now it looks like Ian has succeeded. Only problem is, Ian Astibury can't even sing as well as Jim Morrison. And Jim Morrison couldn't sing.

Ashlee Simpson - a late fill-in, Ashlee and her band were actually the best act I had seen since the Drive By Truckers finished their set earlier in the day. Lots of energy with hard guitars and banging drums. Who would have thought Jessica's little sister would be better than the Doors, Chris Robinson or Wyclef?!?

Finally, we ended the night at Foo Fighters. They were incredible! I was surprised how many of the songs I knew, and even the ones I didn't I was immediately attracted to. The band moved effortlessly between songs, often times weaving one song into the next. Very polished!

The night ended with a dash through the rain to the MARTA (the subway of Atlanta). Soaking wet, the train was packed with people. Soon the place smelt like a locker room, and the windows were steamed up. And then a 16 year old kid who was 2 minutes earlier taking swigs direct from a flask in his pocket was throwing up all over the floor of the train, adding to the great mix of humid body smells, alcohol and smoke. Beautiful. But it's all part of the concert going experience, right?

Sunday

Sunday I rested, apparently missing Courtney Love acting crazy and Jessica Simpson acting ditzy. Who would have thought?

Dream land. The sun shines in a bright blue sky. I fly over Europe, past Venice and Paris, across the Atlantic by the Statue of Liberty and suddenly I am back in time, looking at King Arthur’s castle. Music wafts through the dry, hot air. Amy Lee sings, “bring me to life.”

I land. The Great Pyramid rises up before me. The Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. I just drove from the office to the hotel, but whole parts of it have already faded from my memory. What happened during those lost minutes on the road? I should be concerned that perhaps I ran a car off the road or killed a small child crossing the strip, but my brain can’t focus. The ability to develop emotion or coherent thoughts is not present, those parts of my brain shut off. My brain, running on so little sleep, is conserving itself, making sure that the important things to my survival are running at their highest capacity.

It’s 5 o’clock in the afternoon in Las Vegas. I have past tired. I know that it is 8 o’clock back in Toronto. I know that I have slept 3 hours in the past 24 hours. I know that a bed awaits me upstairs, but I won’t go to bed. If I go to bed now, I will be up too early in the morning. I will force myself to stay up until at least 9 o’clock.

Rewind to last night and see my flight from Toronto to Las Vegas being delayed, and delayed, and delayed again. I finally arrive at the Luxor Hotel at approximately 12:30 in the morning, more than 4 hours after I was expected. There is a line up at the check-in, even at 12:30 in the morning. I don’t get checked-in until after 1. By the time I work my way through the casino, up to my room and settle in, it is 1:30. I set my alarm for 3:30 and turn off the light.

When the alarm goes off I rise, shower and head out. Arriving on the main floor, I am getting off the elevator while two couples carrying open beers and drunk were getting on to the elevator. I walk through the casino floor with my laptop slung over my shoulder, looking distinctly out of place as compared with the others on the floor. A man smokes intently and stares at the wheels on his slot machine spin, oblivious to my passing. A woman walks away from her slot machine and to the ATM machine. “What a desperate measure,” I think to myself, “you should go to bed.” So should I.

As much as I look out of place in work clothes and carrying a laptop, this world seems out of place to me. On so little sleep I find it hard to focus. If I move my head quickly it takes a moment for my eyes to refocus. Noises seem louder and more garish than they usually would. And noise and lights are what the casino is all about. To all sides slot machines call out to me. My brain is operating on tunnel vision, and I feel like I have attention deficit disorder. A ring and a flash occur to my right, and so I turn. Lights flash by my eyes as a blur. A ring occurs to my left, causing me to turn again. The calls continue as I walk across the floor.

Finally, I am out in the air. The night air is crisp. I look up into the sky. Stars are visible if I face away from the hotel, but as I turn towards the hotel the stars fade out of existence and all that is visible is the great spire of light shooting towards the night sky. The brightest light in the world, or so the hotel propaganda says. I try and focus my thoughts, but they seem to flitter out of my brain and up the beam of light into space. I decide not to think and instead just to drive.

Flip back to the afternoon. I sit at a bar in the Luxor and order a beer. I sip it slowly as the casino frenetically exists around me. I feel almost like I am moving in slow motion while everyone else is moving double time. On the weekend I had watched Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray goes to Japan. He is tired with Jet Lag, and confused by the barriers in language and culture. The distance that Bill Murray felt between L.A. and Tokyo is as far as I felt between Toronto and Las Vegas, even though the physical distance is nowhere near as much.

I eat, though I am not hungry. I wander the casino, unstimulated by the flashing lights and clanging machines. I am just killing time until I can go to sleep. My walk is like that of a zombie, my eyes shallow and unfeeling.

Finally it is 9 o’clock. I am tired not just because I hardly slept the night before, but also because it is midnight in Toronto. I settle into bed, my eyes shutting slowly. I would be lost in Las Vegas for the whole week, never able to really catch up on my sleep until the weekend came and I was back in my own bed in Toronto. In my real dreams, and not in that fantasy of reality that is Las Vegas.

The Details
Name: Greg Wesson
Current Residence: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation: Consultant
Hobby: Travel

Why Travel?

I never traveled much when I was younger. Other than day trips, the only trip I took as a kid was a 3-week road trip with my parents from Toronto to the east coast of Canada. I didn’t get on a plane for the first time until I was 16, and even then it was just an hour-long sightseeing trip in a 4-seat seaplane. During university, I only took one spring-break trip, myself and some friends drove from London, Ontario to Shawnee, Pennsylvania for a ski trip. My first commercial flight was when I was 25 for a business trip to Moncton, New Brunswick.

Travel sounded like something fun, but it was always something for later. There was never enough time or money. There was always something else that I needed to do. But then the world changed.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1999. My mother was 65 and had just been retired for 9 months when she died. At the time I was stuck in a job I hated, spending 50 to 60 hours a week doing tedious work for people I didn’t really like. I put myself in my mother’s place – imagined myself 35 years in the future, at 65 and newly retired. If I were diagnosed with cancer, would I be sitting there thinking about all those things that I had said, “next year, next year, next year?” I quit my job and decided that I wouldn’t put off those things that I wanted.

I realized that the things stopping me from traveling wasn’t the money or the time or any of the things I needed to do. It was that I was scared. Scared of putting myself out in an unfamiliar world.

I remember sitting in my office on a seemingly average Tuesday morning in September of 2001 when someone said, “an airplane hit the World Trade Center.” It was September 11th, 2001, and as the details of the day revealed themselves, I remember one main thought kept going through my head, “I would hate to die at work.” I thought to myself, as I sat watching the replies over and over on CNN, “what if that had been my office building?”

There is no time like the present. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. None of us knows if we have a tomorrow.

It was tough, booking my first big trip to South America. I almost backed out a few times, but I went through with it. At times, I felt stupid, the 32 year old backpacker. Isn’t backpacking for college kids? I certainly was actually stupid a few times, but it was also one of the most fun and most liberating experiences of my life. And as to backpacking being a college kid thing, most of the people I met on the road were my age or older.

I am not an extreme traveler. I have met people on my travels that do it month after month, year after year. I still am afraid sometimes, and still doubt that I have what it takes to get out there. Staying off the road, though, is not an option. Sometimes I get tired being on the road, but after being home for a few weeks, I start getting the hankering again. Its time to go to the bookstore, visit the travel section, and pick a lonely planet guide off the shelf.

Twelve Hours Is A Long Commute

I was standing at a urinal that, via the rubber urinal cake holder was informing me that I was in at Eppley Airfield, the world’s cleanest airport. The speaker above me cracked to life, “Attention passengers on American Airlines flight 4276 to Chicago, the inbound aircraft has not yet left Chicago. We expect that the plane should land at approximately 2 o’clock, and that it should take about 15 minutes to turn the flight around, so the flight should now be leaving at 2:15 P.M. There are thunderstorms to the west of O’Hare, and a number of flights in Chicago are delayed. For passengers who are connecting in Chicago, it is quite likely that your connecting flights are delayed, so you could still make your connecting flights.” An hour and ten minute delay, looks like it was going to be a long travel day.

Even before my mother died, I was already a seasoned business traveler. I have over the past 6 years worked for two “Big Five” consulting firms – Accenture and BearingPoint. The Big Five used to refer to the accounting and consulting firms Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, the five largest professional service firms in the world. (Actually, when I first got in, it was the big six, as Price Waterhouse and Coopers Lybrand were separate firms at the time). Despite the fact that most of these accounting firms have split off their consulting units into separate companies, or sold them to competitors, or just fail to even exist anymore, the term is still widely used. But even if the companies don’t exist anymore or have morphed and changed names a number of times, the lifestyle that a Big Five Consultant has remained mainly unchanged. Unless you are really lucky and get a project in town, that lifestyle is one of constant travel.

Basically, my job is to temporarily go to companies and help them with specific projects in their call center and marketing departments. The projects can last from as short as a couple of weeks to as long as a year. The companies can be anywhere. Since 1997 (my first year at Accenture) I have spent at least a month in: Detroit, MI, USA; Montreal, QC, Canada; Denver, CO, USA; Columbus, OH, USA; San Antonio, TX, USA; St. Louis, MO, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA; Atlanta, GA, USA; and Las Vegas, NV, USA, in addition to my home town of Toronto, Ontario and my current location of Omaha, Nebraska, at Eppley Airfield, waiting for my flight to Chicago.

I was headed home on a Friday from Omaha to Toronto. The week started early on Monday morning, with a 6:46 A.M. flight out of Atlanta to Dallas, and then on to Omaha. After five days in the office and four nights at the Club House Inn and Suites, I headed back to Eppley Airfield to fly back (via Chicago) to Toronto. I was scheduled to land in Toronto at 5:55 P.M. All told, the flight from Omaha to Toronto, including the time spent in Chicago was scheduled to be 4 hours of gate to gate travel time. When you add the 20 minutes from the office in Omaha to the airport, plus showing up an hour before hand to clear security in Omaha, a half-hour to clear customs in Toronto and the 30 minute drive home from Toronto’s airport to my apartment, it would be six and a half hours door to door.

That’s pretty bad, but certainly not the worst I’ve had. Toronto to San Antonio was a one-stop, 6 hour ordeal, plus a couple of hours on either end for clearing security and customs. That was before September 11th. After September 11th, the time in airport has increased, making the usual hour I used to schedule for clearing security and customs has increased to 2 hours. Toronto to my apartment in San Ramon, California, outside of San Francisco used to take 8 hours door to door, and that was with a direct flight.

We finally got off the ground from Omaha at 2:30 Central time. Unfortunately when I landed in Chicago my flight to Toronto had already left, apparently not deterred by the weather that had delayed my Omaha-Chicago flight. The next flight to Toronto on America was scheduled to leave at 5:37 P.M., 2 hours and 10 minutes after my originally scheduled flight. I would now be arriving in Toronto at 8:00 P.M. At least I would miss most of rush hour. That would cut 10 to 15 minutes off my drive home. I went and sat at one of the airport restaurants, had some dinner and read my book. Being patient is one of the key attributes one needs when traveling every week.

So, too, is being flexible. My scheduled flight from Omaha to Toronto was the 3rd flight I had scheduled for this same day. Originally, I was flying from Atlanta to Toronto on that day as part of a massive routing from Toronto to Omaha, Omaha to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Atlanta and Atlanta to Toronto. Two days before the outbound flight, my plans changed and instead of going to Omaha and Las Vegas, I was needed in Atlanta. So I booked new flights from Toronto to Atlanta and returning to Toronto. Then, after I arrived in Atlanta, it was clear I was actually needed in Omaha. So, change number three happened – Atlanta to Omaha followed by a flight from Omaha to Toronto. Certainly I think my skills in designing and installing call center systems is good, but my true skills lay in finding flights and hotels in short order. A fellow co-worker at BearingPoint said that our true “core competency” is not consulting, but rather is traveling. No one can plan a business trip and execute it quicker and with more aplomb than a Big Fiver.

No planning, however, could have helped me in Chicago. The 5:37 departure got pushed back and back and back. We changed gates 3 times. Finally, the plane left just before 9:00 P.M. central time.

We landed in Toronto after 11:00 P.M. I cleared Canadian customs, got into a cab and was home just before midnight Eastern time. I left the office in Omaha just after 11:30 central time (12:30 eastern time), so that means my original 6 and a half hour commute had almost doubled to near twelve hours. I sat down on my couch and popped open a cold beer. In twelve hours I had finished a book, completed the U.S.A. Today crossword puzzle and collected 1000 air miles on my American Airlines AAdvantage program, taking my total to 24,908 miles. That’s only 92 miles away from gaining a free flight from my hometown to Toronto to somewhere in Canada or the U.S., like say, Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, the world’s cleanest airport. That’s not a bad deal for 12 hours of my life, is it?

“Another Mai Tai?” the bartender asks me. I am sitting at the bar in Trader Vics, Beverly Hills, California. The bar is in the front room of the restaurant attached to the Beverly Hills Hilton. The room is very dark with a long wooden bar. The bar is decorated with thatching, colored lights and pictures of the South Pacific, attempting to instill a feeling of being in Polynesia. Or at least, what people at the start of the space age thought Polynesia should look like. It is a sort of Gilligan’s Island version of Pacific austral islands, the type of place where women wear grass skirts and coconut bikinis, and where a witch doctor would appear wearing a giant 5 foot long masks.

I order another Mai Tai. The Mai Tai, invented at Trader Vics and described (on the Trader Vics website [www.tradervics.com]) as “the bracingly refreshing rum cocktail created at his Oakland restaurant in 1944 and introduced to the Hawaiian islands in the 1950s.” The drink comes in a tall glass with lots of ice and a stir stick topped with (what else) a Polynesian totem, rendered beautifully in brown plastic.

I wander outside, and am momentarily blinded by the sunlight. The bar was so dark, and without windows or clocks it was hard to determine if it was day or night. Getting outside, I am reminded that it is late in the day, around 7 o’clock, and the sun is low in the western sky. The air is warm and dry, a beautiful night for walk. I wander down Rodeo drive, looking into the windows of shops with impossibly expensive merchandise in the window.

A convertible Mercedes Benz pulls up beside me. A man gets out of the drivers seat, tall and blond, wearing a pastel pink polo shirt, a pair of open-weave slip-on shoes and a yellow sweater tied around his neck. He opens the door for his passenger, a tall blond woman who has had so much plastic surgery that the original skin from her face is probably somewhere around the crown of her head. I stare at the man, wondering why someone in 2003 would have chosen to wear pink pastel and jauntily tie a sweater around his neck. He would have looked in place on Miami Vice in 1985, and not here in the present.

Everything in Beverly Hills seems out of the past. Most of the people living here are old and rich, and maybe that’s the way they like it. Living back in the past, full of bars straight out of 1950 or clothes in the style of the 80s. I walk past a cigar bar where people enjoy cigars and bourbons, which is also a thing from the past in California. The law says that smoking is illegal in restaurants and bars, but somehow this cigar bar exists, either ignoring the law (pretending it is still the past) or with some sort of exception (actually turning back the clock).

I return to my hotel, the Beverly Hills Hilton. Merv Griffin, who is most famous for his talk show from past decades, owns the Hilton. He has decorated the hotel with pictures of him and famous celebrities, mostly shots from his show. Many of the celebrities pictured are now dead, or (even worse in Hollywood) old and irrelevant. Instead of the glamour and excitement that the pictures are meant to convey, they just give the hotel a sad and fading air. Living in the past, just like the rest of Beverly Hills.

One night we drive out to Santa Monica and head out to the end of the pier. We watch the sun go down, slipping off into the ocean, and then have dinner under the stars in the warm night air. Santa Monica is full of life, the pier filled with locals and tourists, both the rich and the poor. Cars cruise up and down the beach strip, and people wander around on foot. Forcing a cliché upon the difference between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, one would be tempted to say, “they feel like they are a million miles apart.” But it is not distance that exists betweens Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. Instead, I would say that they feel like they are decades apart.

For the U.S. Thanksgiving in 2002, I booked a long weekend in Lake Tahoe. Two nights, three days and a three-day ski pass to ski Heavenly ski resort. I knew the skiing wouldn’t be great, but I also knew that I would be moving from California back to Toronto in a few weeks, and then off to South America for 8 weeks, so I wouldn’t have much chance for skiing otherwise that winter.

South Lake Tahoe is a beautiful place, situated on Lake Tahoe and surrounded by mountains. From the top of the Heavenly ski resort, you can see both Lake Tahoe’s forested shores as well as the desert plains of Nevada. South Lake Tahoe is split down the middle by the California-Nevada border. The California side is typical ski town, lots of little hotels, restaurants and ski rental shops. Once you cross the border into Nevada, suddenly massive casino-hotels rise into the air, all the flash and neon expected of Nevada.

It was in one of those casino towers that I decided to have Thanksgiving dinner. I figured that I should be able to get a seat at the top of the hotel buffet on Thanksgiving Thursday. After all, wouldn’t everyone be at home enjoying a family dinner?

No, in fact, they wouldn’t be. It was going to be a two or more hour wait to get up to the buffet. So instead, I walked back over to the California side and popped into a little bar. The bartender served me beer and gave me a free plate of turkey and mashed potatoes. I chatted with a couple of cougars at the bar about South Lake Tahoe and what appropriate hot tub wear was. (It’s nothing, for those who are interested). After a few hours and a few beers, I wandered back to my hotel.

The next day I headed up to the hills. The skiing wasn’t great, but it was nice to be out, and the scenery was fantastic. But by the end of the day my knees were killing me and my legs were very wobbly. I headed back to the hotel and crashed on my bed. As I was watching a U2 concert on TV, I looked over at myself in the full-length closet mirror and noticed that I had a huge gut sticking out. “Oh my God,” I thought, “I am really fat.”

It’s not that I didn’t know, realistically, that I was overweight. I weighed 235 pounds, I knew, because there was a doctor’s scale in the cafeteria at work and I had recently weighed myself. At 5 foot 9, 235 pounds was pretty big. And every time I looked in the mirror, I saw the fat man looking back at me.

Inside me, though, I never really saw myself as fat. When I imagined myself, I imagined myself with the same thin body I had in high school. As much as I knew I was heavy, I never really believed it, until that moment in Lake Tahoe.

I don’t know what it was about that specific time and place that triggered the understanding. Maybe it was just the right time. Maybe it was all the bad things that had happened to me in the past few years – my mother’s death, my bad jobs, my unsuccessful relationships. Maybe it was my aching knees after skiing. Maybe there was something special about the mirrors. I don’t know what triggered it. All I know is that it was triggered, and I needed to do something.

In the event that I was going to back away from doing something about my weight, the next day Karma hammered the point home to me. On my second day of skiing, I could only manage a half-day until my knees were aching so much from carrying my obese frame that I had to give up. I didn’t even ski the third day.

That was November of 2002. On Monday I went and bought Dr. Atkin’s Diet Revolution. By the end of December I was down to 215 pounds. On February 1st, I was 200 pounds. March 1st and I was 180 pounds. Since that time, I have fluctuated between 180 and 190 pounds. I’ve gone from a 42 inch waist to a 36 inch waist, and my knees don’t ache anymore.

This isn’t a diet recommendation, necessarily. Low carb eating worked for me, but then again I never really like potatoes and bread all that much. So it’s pretty easy for me to have an extra helping of meat and skip the fries. The point of the story isn’t about diets, though. The thing that I find interesting about this story is that I was somewhere else, somewhere away from home when I finally understood I was fat.

It is often the secret goal of travelers to have some sort of understanding about themselves and the world, to have revealed to them some secret of the universe, and to have that revelation change them. This was my grand revelation, and it came in the most unexpected place and time. The trip that I really expected to learn a lot about the world and myself was my 8-week backpacking adventure around South America. While I did learn on the South America trip, the lessons were nothing to compare against that one moment, listening to U2 in the background and looking in a full-length closet mirror. I was fat, and I needed to do something about.