When Puppets And Holograms Make The News At Music Festivals

Ronnie James Dio Hologram

Festivals are becoming weirder each year, may be because people lose interest into the regular gathering of the same old bands, how many festivals headlined by Kendrick Lamar, LCD Soundsystem, Lana Del Rey or Radiohead do you really need?

That’s why I woke up with two news, that may inject new blood into the music festival circuit. First, the Muppets played at Outside Lands in San Francisco this past weekend, it was their first-ever live performance and they stole the show! Dr. Teeth & The Electric Mayhem is actually a great name for a puppet band covering the Mowglis, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, the Band and the Beatles, while taking some liberty with the lyrics. It was a winning situation with these familiar hippie puppets and in particular Animal the drummer, a character I have always had a sweet spot for. The whole set was recorded and you can watch it below, they even have a talk about San Francisco’s recent gentrification, and watch it till the end to see the joyous band joined by the Oakland Tabernacle Choir for the finale, ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’. They certainly go overboard on this one, and puppets have never been more relevant.

So that’s a premiere, but another festival took on another idea, an old one since it has been done before: holograms! At Germany’s heavy metal festival Wacken Open Air, people witnessed a theatrical performance by Dio in hologram form. It looked very real according to the people there, and Jeff Pezziti, the CEO of Eyellusion, the company that made the hologram, said he was inspired by Michael Jackson’s hologram at the Billboard Music Awards in 2014. Tupac was also resurrected at Coachella in 2012, but this new one is sort of a premier too, as it was the first live rock band using a hologram.

The company hopes to launch the Dio tour in 2017 with up to 14 songs so they can have a real live set, and this is just the beginning of a new form of performance. So far no live recording of the show has been posted!

I guess I have seen the future, puppets and holograms will headline festivals in 2020, or may be even before that, and I am not sure it’s a good thing after all.