Wasting Light at the Eichenring

The Hurricane Festival lineup for June 2011 reads now like a specific kind of wish list—the kind you make when you’re convinced that the right combination of stages and weather can make everything feel briefly solved. Foo Fighters headlining on the back of Wasting Light, probably the most direct and physical thing Dave Grohl had made in years. Chemical Brothers. Arctic Monkeys at a real peak. Lykke Li somewhere between Youth Novels and Wounded Rhymes and at her most magnetic live. Incubus, Sum 41, Blood Red Shoes, Crystal Fighters deep in the bill. The kind of lineup where you’re already doing the stage-time math before you’ve even packed a bag.

Hurricane has run every year near Scheeßel in Lower Saxony since 1997, which gives it the kind of mythology that only comes with repetition—stories that begin with "the year it rained for three straight days" or "the year I somehow ended up front row for the Chemical Brothers set and lost a shoe." The Eichenring site is flat and wide and dusty in summer, and the sound carries across the field in a way that makes even the mid-afternoon slots feel like they matter.

That 2011 edition sold out, which in retrospect makes complete sense. The Foo Fighters were touring an album that sounded like it was recorded in a garage where the walls were bleeding. The Arctic Monkeys had become something bigger than anyone had quite anticipated. And there’s something about a field in northern Germany on a warm June night, surrounded by people who drove three hours to be there, that makes even familiar songs sound like they’re being played for the first time. I remember thinking a bill like that doesn’t come together by accident.