But one and all will enjoy the same sonic desserts served up by such headliners as Linkin Park, Godsmack, Tesla, Slayer, Papa Roach, Volbeat, Halestorm, Breaking Benjamin and Queensryche, supported by about 80 other bands from all around the world, playing throughout the afternoons and well into the nights on Friday, Saturday and Sunday on the Catch the Fever festival grounds near Pryor.
Of special note to local fans is Oklahoma City-based Aranda, making its third Rocklahoma appearance on Sunday, opening the program on the Bud Light Main Stage at 3:50 p.m.
This heavy-metal fest — or feast, if you will — promoted as “America’s biggest Memorial Day weekend party,” drew about 60,000 fans from across the U.S. and around the world in 2014. The estimated 70,000-strong turnout for this, its ninth year, comes from Joe Litvag, senior vice president of the Los Angeles-based AEG Live, which has been helping local founding promoters Catch the Fever produce the event since 2010.
“It seems like every year it just gets bigger and bigger,” Litvag said in a recent phone interview.
Originally, Rocklahoma was intended as a nostalgic showcase for 1980s “hair bands” such as Cinderella, L.A. Guns, Warrant, Pantera, Poison and Twisted Sister.
“The main focus was to try to right the ship and get the thing turned in the right direction,” Litvag said. “It took us a good couple of years. We had to change a lot of things while keeping the soul of the festival. We had to change the booking strategy and several other things. And after 2011 things really started to take leaps and bounds forward.”
A walk in the ‘Park’
Broadening the scope of the festival seemed to do the trick, moving beyond the ’80s to take in more contemporary groups such as Linkin Park, a Los Angeles-based band that was formed in 1996, which has made a big success out of combining elements of metal, hip-hop and electronica. The band, which closes the Bud Light Main Stage at 10:40 p.m. Saturday, turned toward a more straightforward rock approach on its sixth album, 2014’s “The Hunting Party.”
“Those songs were written with the live setting in mind,” said Linkin Park bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell. “A lot of people draw a correlation between ‘The Hunting Party’ as an album and maybe ‘Hybrid Theory’ and ‘Meteora.’ All those records were written from the perspective of what would be the most fun way to present a song in a live setting. When you’re starting out as a band, every song you write is going to transition and be some part of your live set.
“For this most recent record, we kind of returned back to that mentality, that ethos of a real live setting — what’s gonna be exciting as an audience member, what’s the best choice to make step by step in the writing of a song, to be able to really have it translate in the live setting, the live environment.”
The difference between playing arenas and performing festival gigs is vast, according to Farrell, and he said the band always looks forward to playing the outdoor gigs when many other acts are on the bill.
“They definitely have different atmospheres and each offer their own great things,” he said. “I think the outdoor summer festivals are really unique in the energy that they’re able to create. You can’t get such an awesome energy and atmosphere in an arena as you can at one of these festivals where people just, you get there early enough, you can get close and it turns out to be lots of excitement, a lot of energy in a crowd and its own unique thing.”
This 2015 gig will mark the first time Linkin Park has played Rocklahoma, and Farrell has heard from musicians who have played the event that it’s “the best festival they’ve ever played, with the best audience.”
“That’s one of the coolest parts about a festival in general,” Farrell said. “There’s such a big and broad lineup usually, that you can expect to play for people who might not normally come out to your concert, might not normally come out to your show, or maybe they’ve never gotten a chance to see you. That makes it kind of reinvigorating for us, makes it exciting and definitely something to look forward to.”
Local ties
For Dameon Aranda, meanwhile, it’s a return to the stage after an 18-month layoff for Aranda, the band he’s been running with younger brother Gabe since around 2001 (although they’ve been fooling around in bands since the 1990s in OKC). During that off time, the brothers have recorded a new album on Wind-Up Records, “Not the Same,” due out June 30.
“‘Not the Same,’ obviously the title can mean a bunch of different things,” Dameon Aranda said in a phone interview, “but really it’s, man, we’re a little older now, a little bit wiser now, and really feel like we’ve made a record this time. We didn’t have a bunch of people telling us exactly what to do as far as songwriting, and I think with ‘Stop the World’ we really concentrated on ‘we need to make a rock-radio-friendly record, and that’s what we did.”
It was radio-friendly enough to prompt Kelly Clarkson to cover a couple of songs from the record, including “All I Ever Wanted” and “Whyyawannabringmedown.”
Aranda said that, on the upcoming record, he and Gabe decided to play to their strengths, being their vocals and guitar work, and their classic rock sensibilities.
“This album has more of a classic rock kind of feel to it,” Dameon Aranda said. “The cool thing is we took a lot of time on it. We think this is the best record we’ve done just simply from a songwriting standpoint, just because we really dug in and wrote a ton of songs ... So these were the 11 songs that actually made the cut. It’s definitely not as heavy of a record as ‘Stop the World’ was. And there’s a ton of styles of music on it. So if you don’t like the first song, just wait until the second song, because it’s gonna be different.”
Weather, man
So, there we have a little bit of what attendees can look forward to at this year’s Rocklahoma. And those who are worried about the recently unpredictable Oklahoma weather? Or maybe even the drunken tendencies of large crowds of heavy-metal headbangers? Well, here’s what Mr. Litvag has to say.
“I think this crowd sometimes gets a bad rap,” he said. “The crowd that comes to these hard-rock festivals is actually a very well-behaved crowd overall. Generally they certainly like to drink and, you know, party, have a good time. But they typically take care of each other and they actually follow the rules, you know, most of the time. And when they’re asked to do something by the festival or security, they listen.
“Obviously, you’re always going to have a couple of bad apples that are gonna cause a few problems at any festival in any genre,” Litvag said. “So for the most part the crowd is very well-behaved and respectful and that’s part of what makes us successful. We have enough security employees present to cover the crowds that continue to grow each year. But that’s good planning and, knock on wood, we haven’t had any significant problems to speak of.”
As for the weather, Litvag said, “We take everyone’s safety very seriously. We have emergency plans put in place. On the festival side we work very closely with local law enforcement to have emergency plans and evacuation plans. Myself and a couple of other key people on my team typically at these festivals are glued to computers looking at Doppler radar on real time. At Rocklahoma, particularly, we also have a meteorologist on-site with a full set-up of gear to keep an eye on things in real-time, so we’ve got emergency plans in place, God forbid, if we get to a point where we have to use one.”
So the music plays on, no matter the weather. But umbrellas are not a bad idea.