What a great show! The opening bands were better than anticipated. Even the band full of adorable teenagers playing old-school 80's style metal. :) FOA was super fun, all punked out, and Black Oil was pretty awesome. Great stage presence.
The whole Soulfly set was fraught with venue security drama. It was ridiculous. The first song, the crowd was just warming up, pogoing, etc. When the second song started, a couple of kids started to open up a pit, and security guards pounced on them. The guards clearly didn't understand that moshing is NOT fighting. One of them actually said to my boyfriend, "no mosh pits in MY club." But, as you can imagine, even 8 burly men can't stop a whole club floor from moshing if that's what they're there to do. So they gave up after a few songs. Especially after Max was clearly getting irritated and encouraged the crowd to go crazy.
The security guards formed a line at the back of the pit and after a while, most of them got into it and were smiling and laughing as they pushed crazy whirling kids back into the mess. It was awesome to watch their transformation from angry haters to willing participants. I leaned forward at one point and asked one of them, "Is this your first pit?" He said yes and I told him that he was doing what I usually do. I told him to just keep his arms up and shove people back in when they came flying at him. It was pretty funny. These giant men taking pointers from a girl.
It could have been an awful show, if security had keps throwing people out for trying to mosh. What is usually an atmosphere of cooperation in the pit was being poisioned by the guards who were trying to make it a fight. But it turned out great! Once they started to realize that everyone in that mess of people was having FUN, they relaxed.
Max was a terrific frontman as usual, and the band was awesome. I loved the brazilian drums and singing the "oway oway" soccer song in the middle of all that metal. All in all, a great show!