Did I ever tell you about the time that I saw Jack White twice in 48 hours and Against Me! twice in 12 hours – all in the same weekend? When I music festival, I music festival HARD and follow artists from city to city and venue to venue. In hindsight, this method is probably why I had a wicked cold the weekend of Osheaga 2014 – which I easily remedied with copious amounts of alcohol.
Beer cures colds, I swear by it.
Osheaga 2014 ran from August 1-3 in Montreal, Quebec, and had a wicked line-up. Outkast, Jack White, The Arctic Monkeys, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, The Replacements (with surprise guest Billie Joe Armstrong), Gogol Bordello, Against Me!, Awolnation, The Kooks, etc.
These are a few of my favorite things…
I had so much of my cold remedy that I started modelling this bean-bag octopus.
I have been to a few music festivals in my day, and Osheaga stood out in a few ways:
- Water Stations – I find it incredible that some music festival organizers still think it’s unnecessary to provide free water refilling stations for their patrons during summer festivals. Osheaga, however, doesn’t have this problem. Not only do they provide water stations, but the stations are everywhere and usually don’t have huge lineups. Additionally, they had giant sprinkler-type-deals for people to run through. Hydration in the face of summer heat is key to preventing unwarranted health issues, a fact that should be common knowledge.
- Crowd Control – Osheaga is held at Parc Jean Drapeau, which is basically a huge island in the middle of Montreal. Given that Osheaga has free-reign over the park and there are six stage areas, people are fairly spread out. There are woodsy-lounge areas for when patrons need a rest, and set-times are adequately staggered. My only hint of advice to festival-goers on this is to not leave directly after the last set of the day. You will get caught in a human traffic jam. Chill out for a half hour before you decide to leave.
- Food Options – Poutine! Poutine! Poutine! Just kidding, there is poutine, but I was also quite impressed by the diversity of food vendors at Osheaga. Of course you have to plan to spend a small fortune at any of these festivals to keep yourself fed, but at Osheaga at least you have lots of choices!
