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From the Vault: Top 20 Reasons Why Monterey Pop Was Better Than Today’s Music Festivals

Posted in Concert Reviews, Essays, Reviews with tags Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Mayhem Festival, Monterey Pop Festival on 10/01/2025 by Kurt Orzeck

[This article was originally published in 2009 on IndiePit.]

So IndiePit will be at the Mayhem festival this weekend. Yeah, yeah, keep snickering, buster. Look, we all have guilty pleasures, and one of ours happens to be Mushroomhead, OK? Kidding, kidding … but Job for a Cowboy, Behemoth and Slayer? Not a terrible way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Sure beats mowing lawns.

Obviously, Mayhem is only one of about a gazillion festivals, hootenannies, throwdowns, hoedowns, showdowns and mow-downs (?) happening this “summer,” that wacky, wet and wild season that began oh, some 18 days ago and will last until September 22. At that point, autumn will swoop in, wrest the reins from its rival season and pulverize it into oblivion … for nine months or so, anyway.

Getting a little off-topic, are we? Oh, yes. Music. Sweet music. Since it is the summer and all, attention naturally gravitates toward festivals, those bastions of sweat-soaked sods, misplaced mods, knuckle-dragging clods, Christopher Dodds and other odds and ends.

They can be fun — if you’ve got buckets of patience, nary a phobia and an active-enough imagination to keep you distracted from all the dirt, heat, smoke and slick flesh sliding up against yours. But they can also be torturous and confining, like being helplessly strapped to a chair, at the mercy of a dentist from hell.

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Nirvana’s In Utero: Un Vínculo Progresivo Entre Los Mundos Del Rock Mainstream Y Rock Independiente

Posted in Essays, Features with tags Black Sabbath, Courtney Love, Dave Grohl, Dinosaur Jr., Germs, Jimi Hendrix, Krist Novoselic, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, Ozzy Osbourne, Pat Smear, Pavement, Scream, Sebadoh, Sonic Youth, Steve Albini, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground on 12/30/2009 by Kurt Orzeck

Eleven years ago, I studied for five months in Santiago, Chile. As part of my education regiment, I chose a class on the history of rock and roll. You might think that’s as much as a cop-out as taking a class in bowling or frisbee golf. But as someone who had mostly shunned classic rock till that point, I actually learned a lot. My teacher was obsessed with Deep Purple and Cream, and explained to us how Ozzy Osbourne was rock’s first psicótico.

I like to think I returned him the favor by teaching him a bit about Nirvana, of whom he wasn’t much aware, in my final paper. The self-generated topic: How Nirvana ushered indie-rock, rougher production values and anti-corporate attitudes into the mainstream with In Utero. El profesor told me I worked harder than any of his Chilean students in the class, and that I nailed the exam (70 out of 70), too.

These days, my Spanish is a bit rusty, so I couldn’t tell you what most of the paper means. But here it is for your archival viewing pleasure. PDFs are included in case the images are too taxing on yer eyes: