Concert news: Harriet Island music festival will have
Dave Matthews Band and Tool
The Dave Matthews Band and Tool will headline River's Edge Music Festival, the new outdoor music festival planned June 23 and 24 on Harriet Island in downtown St. Paul.
Two-day tickets are $99 through April 20 and will go on sale at at 10 a.m. April 13 through Ticketmaster. Representatives from the City of St. Paul and concert promoters Live Nation revealed the details in an afternoon press conference Thursday, April 5, after nearly four months of silence that followed the announcement of the festival itself.
Live Nation is aiming for a crowd in the 40,000 to 50,000 range for the festival, which is meant to become an annual event. The festival will feature more than 30 acts in addition to the headliners, including
the Flaming Lips, Brand New, Polica, Motion City Soundtrack, Puscifer, Coheed & Cambria, Diplo, Scissor Sisters, Datsik, MuteMath, Delta Spirit, Blaqstarr, Kinky, Mexican Institute of Sound, Civil Twilight and Quietdrive.
The headliners both emerged in the '90s and have since become major players in the industry.
Singer/guitarist/South Africa native Dave Matthews formed his band in Virginia more than 20 years ago, when he was just another bartender with big dreams. He hand-picked players from the local jazz scene and, by 1993, had amassed a strong regional following. That led to a major-label deal and a series of hit singles, including "What Would You Say," "Crash into Me," "Crush" and "The Space Between."
But the group's biggest success has come on the road, where their improv-heavy shows are now a coming-of-age tradition. The Dave Matthews Band sold more concert tickets than any other musical act from 2000 to 2009, some 11 million total for a gross of more than a half-billion dollars. Given the band's wide appeal, they tend to play more festivals and outdoor amphitheaters than indoor arenas. That said, they drew more than 17,000 to the Xcel Energy Center in September 2010 and a similar number to the Target Center in November 2005.
Los Angeles art-metal act Tool are a much more enigmatic group, preferring to promote themselves through complex songs and inventive concert staging rather than more traditional, personality-based methods. Vocalist Maynard James Keenan has only started to make substantial public appearances in recent years, surprising fans by starring in 2010's "Blood Into Wine," a documentary about his side business in winemaking. During Tool concerts, Keenan still tends to spend most of the show singing from the back of the stage, hiding in darkness rather than hogging the spotlight.
In 20 years, Tool has issued just four studio albums, which have sold more than 10 million copies combined. The band's most recent local tour stop attracted about 13,000 fans to the Xcel Energy Center in July 2010, despite the fact Tool's last new music to date was released back in 2006.
For more info, go to riversedgemusicfestival.com.
Rivers Edge - A New Minnesota Festival
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