Death Angel @ Getaway Rock Festival 2011
I would have really liked to have witnessed Death Angel again on their current tour. Alas, they bypassed Southern Oregon, like most bands do, and played in Portland to start the tour and will play in Reno to end it. Too bad they didn’t add Ashland or Medford to the beginning or the end of the tour. Today’s photo is from this past summer in Sweden.
Rob Cavestany of Death Angel @ Getaway Rock Festival 2011
Every incarnation of Death Angel has featured Rob Cavestany on lead guitar. He is a good guy and a superb guitarist. Although he rarely sings lead in Death Angel, I enjoyed his vocals during The Organization years too.
Mark Osegueda
I know, I said a band a day a couple days ago, but I haven’t had a chance to process many images yet. I’ve only looked at my Death Angel photos (and a few others). I’ll probably have another dozen or so from Death Angel at some point, but tomorrow I will move on to another band.
Rob Cavestany of Death Angel at Getaway Rock Festival 2011
The only two problems with the Death Angel set were the aforementioned time/day placement of them in the lineup and the amount of time they were given to play (just 45 minutes). I could have used a good 90 minutes (or more) of Death Angel.
Rob and Mark - Gävle, Sweden
After their set I wandered over to the t-shirt booth. I noticed this Asian guy wearing a shirt from the Club Citta gig in Kawasaki, Japan that I had wanted to go to but couldn’t because it happened after I left Japan. I figured he was Japanese so I started talking to him in Japanese only to find out he was Korean. Whoops!
Korean fan of Death Angel travels to Sweden to the Getaway Rock Festival 2011
We chatted for a while. I asked him who he most wanted to see at the Getaway Rock Festival and, of course, tops on his list was Death Angel. Why wasn’t Death Angel given more than an hour during a prime time slot in the evening? Why?
Death Angel at Getaway Rock Festival 2011, Gävle Sweden
Mark Osegueda on lead vocals
Rob Cavestany on lead guitar
I’m off to Norway for four days beginning tomorrow so maybe I will pre-blog bands from Norway that were at Getaway while I’m gone.
Mark Oseguenda and Damien Sisson of Death Angel have a hair competition. Mark wins!
Death Angel was one of my main reasons for traveling 7 hours to go to the Getaway Rock Festival. I hadn’t seen Death Angel perform live since 1987. Plus, they scored me a photo pass so that sealed the deal. I was going to Sweden.
Death Angel at Getaway Rock Festival 2011
When the lineup times were finally announced I was horrified to see that Death Angel had landed an early slot on the first day. Who created this schedule? There were a bunch of crappy bands at Getaway, with virtually no following, that had better time slots. Oh well. Lucky for me there was an early train from Copenhagen that was scheduled to get me to the festival in plenty of time. Or so I thought.
Ted Aguilar of Death Angel
I woke up at 3 a.m., got ready, and made it to the train station by 4 for my 4:13 a.m. departure. The train station was closed with a sign saying to enter from the other side. No problem. Luckily I had 13 minutes to spare. I got to the other side by about 4:07. There were no signs saying which platform my train was to leave from. None of the monitors at the station were turned on yet leaving me, and the 50 or so other people looking to take the same train, very confused.
Rob Cavestany (Death Angel's founding member)
4:13 comes and goes. No train, no announcements, nobody from the train company to explain things. Great. Some people panicked (I felt sick inside myself) as they had to catch a plane. They hopped into taxi cabs to get to the airport. I couldn’t take a taxi to Sweden–way too expensive. Finally, at 4:30 I found an employee who told me, and some others, that we needed to find a bus to the airport and maybe I could catch a train from there.
Will Carroll (Death Angel's newest member) can really bring it on the drums.
I found a bus and got on. It didn’t go anywhere for 25 minutes. Now I knew I had missed my connecting train from Malmo to Stockholm, which also meant I would miss my train from Stockholm to Galve. I was beginning to think I would miss Death Angel too. Anguish set in. The bus stopped five times on the way to the airport, each time waiting for 5 minutes or more for passengers that didn’t get on. By the time we finally got to the airport it was past 6 a.m., passengers sprinted from the bus to try to catch their planes, and I headed to the trains to see if any were going to Sweden.
The crowd was a decent size for a 2:15 start time on day one of a festival. Many bands with later times and/or better days (day two and day three) had smaller and less enthusiastic supporters.
I finally got on a train to Malmo from the Copenhagen Airport. In Malmo, Sweden I discover that I could catch a train to Stockholm and then Gavle, but I wouldn’t arrive until 1:57 p.m. Death Angel were set to go on at 2:15 p.m., but I didn’t know how to get there from the train station, how far it was, or how to get my pass. For all I knew, I could have to wait in line for an hour to get in. So the whole morning I was extremely worried and stressed.
Damien Sisson on bass for Death Angel
I found out that it was a half hour walk from the station to the festival so the second my train opened its door I ran, with a full backpack and a loaded camera bag, in the direction I thought was correct. It turns out I was going in the right direction! It was my first lucky break of the day. I arrived, covered in sweat, at 2:13, received my photo pass in quick order and ran for the stage. I hit the stage at the exact same instant that Death Angel did, and pretty much everything thereafter was smooth sailing.
Mark Osegueda of Death Angel
Gasklockorna in Gävle, Sweden - home of the Getaway Rock Festival
I just returned to Copenhagen after four days in Sweden. I spent most of the time in a place north of Stockholm called Gävle where the Getaway Rock Festival 2011 took place. Today is just a preview, as I have loads of photos (about 3,000) and video (half a dozen or so) from the event (most of which I haven’t even looked at yet).
Rob Cavestany and Mark Osegueda of Death Angel at Getaway Rock Festival 2011
I was supposed to have a photo pass for just Death Angel and Opeth, but they gave me a press pass with access to the front of the stage for all of the bands. I didn’t protest. Nor did I abuse the priviledge. I used it only for the ten or so bands (of 70 performing) I wanted to see.
Enslaved at Getaway Rock Festival 2011
I think I’ll break things down by band and feature a band a day, starting tomorrow, for a week or two.
Wolf Hoffmann of Accept
Gävle is a nice place. I’ll have some photos of it as well at some point.
Abbath Doom Occulta of Immortal
To try out my new scanner I pulled this old picture out of a photo album I had lying around.
The year was 1987. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area so the farthest I ever had to travel to a concert was about 30 miles. But in 1987 I was living in Utah and decent shows were few and far between. A buddy of mine and I hatched a plan to drive 800+ miles (each way) to see a band virtually no one had heard of but we loved, Death Angel. Their first CD (yes CDs were out in 1987), The Ultra-Violence, had recently been released and we couldn’t get enough of it.
I’m not positive of the date, but I know we listened to the Twins win the World Series on the car radio on our way back to Utah so the concert was probably on October 23 or 24 (notice the jack-o-lantern on the riser next to the drum kit). The venue was the old Mountain View Theater, which, until earlier in the same year, had been a movie theater for its first 61 years.
I did not know what the members of Death Angel looked like. I only knew that I loved their sound and that they were all younger than I. I was 19. The drummer, Andy Galeon, for instance, was only 15 at the time. So it was with great embarrassment that I struck up a conversation with Mark Osegueda, the lead singer, in the bathroom before the show while not knowing it was him. He had on a The Legacy (pre-Testament) t-shirt as you can sort of see in this photo. We were peeing next to each other, and I commented on his t-shirt. He said something like, “You like them too?” I told him I went to high school with the former drummer, Mike Ronchette, which when I saw him walk out on stage 15 minutes later and realized who I had been speaking with caused me to think I had said something really stupid.
Anyway, to make a long story shorter, the show was fantastic, and I’ve been waiting decades since for the chance to see them again. That may happen this summer when I will be in Copenhagen and they will be playing in Sweden. It may be time for another road trip.
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