With Full Force 2009: 10 Years Ago Today!

Continuing my ramblings about misadventures a decade gone brings us to the biggest show that I did during my 9 years with Reno Divorce: the With Full Force festival in Germany.

I had heard of With Full Force as many of my favorite metal and punk bands played there every year. With Reno Divorce being a punk n’ roll style band, I didn’t imagine we would ever get to grace that bill. I was proven wrong when one of the very first tour dates on our European Tears Before Breakfast tour that came in was With Full Force. The 2009 edition was like my CD collection in a live setting: Sepultura, Amon Amarth, Suicidal Tendencies, Soulfly, Motorhead, Carcass, Asphyx, Hatebreed, Pestilence, Down, Dimmu Borgir, Social Distortion, and so many more.

With Full Force 2009 line-up.

Through a stroke of good luck on our part, and a stroke of extremely bad luck on the part of another band on the I Scream Records roster, we were awarded a sweet slot on the bill: the first band to play the second stage immediately after main stage headliners Hatebreed finished. Because another I Scream band had to pull out of the festival, and we were the hot new band for both the label and for booking agency MAD Tourbooking, we got the slot.

I was ecstatic when I discovered that we would play on July 4th, the same day as Sepultura, Amon Amarth, and Suicidal Tendencies and only hoped we could get there early enough to catch those bands since we were going on so late.

We played a small club the night before in Rostock, Germany to somewhere between 10 and 20 people. It was quite a jump to be playing for 20,000 the next day!

We arrived at the festival early in the day to find a sweet spread of food awaiting us and many of my favorite musicians milling about in the bands-only area. The food spread included a pasta bar and a chocolate fountain. Yeah, a chocolate fountain, backstage, at the metal festival. It felt like we were Bon Jovi, not some punk rock band from Denver.

Chocolate fountain and a giant cheese wheel!

Mouth still full of food, leaving the food tent in search of photos to bomb.

At first, I was shy to talk to my heavy metal idols and tried taking sneaky pics with them like this one:

Andreas Kisser from Sepultura with his back to us and a ponytail, Olvai Mikkonen from Amon Amarth with blonde ponytail and hat, and then me.

Then, I got more brave, introducing myself first to Andreas Kisser of Sepultura. I told him nervously how I’d been a fan since I was 13 and they were one of my favorite bands and my band was playing later tonight and blah blah blah. He humored me and politely posed for a pic, but I felt a little bit like I’d annoyed him. Sorry, Andreas!

With Andreas Kisser from Sepultura.

I also convinced Paulo Xisto from Sepultura to pose with me. He was super friendly.

With Paulo Xisto from Sepultura.

Tim and I also got a picture with Paulo and Jean Dolabella, Sepultura’s drummer. Rhythm sections unite!

L-R: Paulo Xisto (Sepultura), Tim Jadowski (Reno Divorce), Jean Dolabella (Sepultura), and me.

Unable to find the Amon Amarth guys for a photo, I instead took my pic in front of their dressing “container.” Each band got what was essentially a shipping container that served as our dressing room. We had to share ours since we were a second stage band, but the bigger bands got an all day shipping container of their very own. Metal band in a metal container. How metal is THAT?

Has anybody seen my invisible oranges? They were just here…

We had a LONG day ahead of us and it was time to go see some bands play. We checked out Suicidal Tendencies, who were unreal. They had Eric Moore on drums, who is an absolute badass. It seemed like they gave him a drum solo on just about every other song and it was well deserved. I ran into Eric several times backstage and he was always smiling and saying hi. Super sweet dude. Didn’t get a pic with him, unfortunately. He plays with Bell Biv DeVoe these days. Versatile cat.

After Suicidal Tendencies, we were pinned down by a journalist from Rock Hard Magazine to do a video interview. Of course I wanted to play rockstar and do a video interview, but could we please hurry it up because Sepultura had just started on the main stage and I was missing them!

Say something cool for the interview. Wait, is Sepultura playing and I’m MISSING it?!

Interview done, I ran to witness the mighty Sepultura and was not disappointed. At this time they were touring on the A-Lex album, their first to not feature either of the Cavalera brothers, and it was a badass album with something to prove. And prove it they did, both on album and on stage.

Raging while Sepultura plays!

After Sepultura played, I got to meet their singer Derrick Green. This guy was SO nice. I gave him a Reno Divorce shirt or something and told him that we had a day off near where they would be playing on their tour in about a week and we wanted to see them play. He gave me his contact info and told me to hit him up the day before the show and he would put us on the guest list. Wait, what?! I just met this dude! Fast forward to that show, he totally put us on the list, backstage passes, the whole deal. And then he got me in to 2 or 3 more Sepultura shows later on. Every time I went, all the guys in the band were so graceful and friendly. It was absolutely surreal as I had pictures of these guys on my wall when I was a kid and now they were giving me bro hugs whenever they saw me and I was on their guest list.

With Derrick Green from Sepultura.

After Sepultura‘s set, we still had a LONG time before we played. I ended up with Mike Clarke from Suicidal Tendencies and Derrick Green at the Jaegermeister tent, taking shots. That was crazy. I only took 2 shots because I still had a set to play and hadn’t eaten since the food tent experience hours before.

Next, we watched Amon Amarth, my favorite Viking metal band. I had seen them in the States before, but they played smaller places so I didn’t get to see the whole spectacle. The spectacle at With Full Force included fire (lots of it!) and a Viking longboat onstage. Bad-ass.

Later, we met up with Amon Amarth and they were super cool dudes, too. Johan Hegg, the singer, was giving us festival and touring advice and I got a picture with Fredrik Andersson, the drummer. These guys also spoke impeccable English. Educated Vikings!

With Fredrik Andersson from Amon Amarth.

Later we found out that Amon Amarth‘s guitarists Olvai Mikkonen and Johan Soderberg were big fans of our style of music so we gave them a few CDs.

Finally, the hour of our set was approaching. We got an hour or two inside our metal container to down some Mezzo Mix, paprika chips, and Haribo gummies (pretty much my diet on any European tour). I didn’t eat much though as I was extremely nervous to be playing in front of so many people.

Tim and I celebrating the joys of Haribo at a random German gas station mini mart.

It’s a strange kind of rush. At the same time, you are completely terrified but also excited beyond belief at what you are about to do and what you have accomplished. When I first joined Reno Divorce in March of 2001, our big gig was playing to our girlfriends on a Monday night at the 15th Street Tavern in Denver, opening for some band from Texas that had about 5 people show up to see them. To go from that to With Full Force felt amazing!

My backstage pass from With Full Force 2009.

As Hatebreed were destroying the main stage, our fearless tour manager Ralf Hartmann (aka der Wolf) herded us over to the second stage to get set up. Since it was Saturday night, they called the stage Saturday Night Fever. Get it?

So many bands were rotating through the stage that they had drumsets set up on wheeled drum risers. There were two or three of these backstage. We were bare bones on this tour and couldn’t afford to rent our own gear, so I was using whatever kit was provided to me each night. This was a decent kit, but it still wasn’t like what I had at home. I had time before they wheeled me out to arrange the kit as best I could. I was traveling with my own cymbals, sticks, bass drum pedal, and snare drum so I was able to incorporate those into the kit as well.

Once Hatebreed were done, it was time to do a quick line check. Since there were all those people out there and we were now the only entertainment to be found, we didn’t get a full soundcheck. No pressure!

I was SO nervous when they wheeled me out onto that stage on my drum riser. I could see SO MANY people up front, waiting for us to play. I’m sure most had no idea who we were, they just wanted to see a band go on. It was right around midnight and there weren’t many lights so I couldn’t see much of the crowd. I looked way back at what I thought was the end of this sea of people we were about to play to.

“That’s a LOT of people,” I thought.

Then, WAY past where I THOUGHT the end was, someone lit a cigarette and I could see a TON of people around them. And then another person surrounded by even more people lit up further back. I kept trying to find the end of this sea of people, and I finally gave up and left it at, “There’s a SHIT TON of people here.”

I started to get really scared. What if I blew it? What if I mess up and they all know? Good thing I didn’t know yet that this whole gig was being professionally filmed!

The sound guy’s voice came over the FOUR monitors I had behind me. FOUR?! Bon Jovi, dude, this was some Bon Jovi shit! He asked me in a German accent to hit the kick drum.

BOOM!! BOOM!! BOOM!!

It sounded like the sky was falling! So much power came out of that massive PA system. My nerves melted away and were replaced with a feeling of absolute rock godliness. I AM THE GOD OF ROCK THUNDER!! This was gonna be a killer gig.

My backstage pass for the 2009 European Tour, front and back.

We started our set and the place went OFF. Now of course, most people had no idea who we were, but a lot of the people in front were singing along. What?! We hadn’t been to Europe since 2004. How did these people know us?

When we played our new single, “How Long’s It Been,” everyone in the front seemed to know the words. To our brand new song that just came out! Having been there from the inception of the song, when Brent first brought it to the band and we arranged it into the song it became, that was amazing to see all these people singing along.

The rest of the show is now a blur. I didn’t want it to end, as I was having such an amazing time playing in front of this huge crowd that was digging us.

Fast forward to when we came home from the tour, Rock Hard Magazine sent us some rough video mixes of 3 songs and asked us to choose one to be put on a DVD they would package with an upcoming issue of the magazine featuring the festival. We chose “I Won’t Say No” and now that video is also available on YouTube. Please check out the video and some more pics from the show below.

In the end, this felt like the peak of my career with Reno Divorce. A year later, I had left the band and looking back it felt like With Full Force was the perfect capstone to all that we had accomplished in my time with the band. We came from nothing, having trouble getting gigs in our own city, to touring all over the US and Europe and sharing the stage with many of our heroes. Whatever circumstances that lead to the lineup of the band you see below dissolving, no one can take away from any of us that we were all a part of something bad ass and the moments we shared on the stage that night will not be forgotten by anyone who was there.

Reno Divorce circa 2009, backstage at With Full Force 2009. L-R: Me, Tye Battistella (Guitar/Vocals), Brent Loveday (Vocals/Lead Guitar), and Tim Jadowski (Bass/Vocals).

Tye Battistella (left), Brent Loveday (right) and 20,000 other people.

Brent and friends.

Making a “rock face.”

Pounding them skins.

Nice form!