Content area
Full Text
Surely you've played that little mind game of dreaming up the perfect concert, the one with all your favorite acts on one bill regardless of genre and style.
Ian Astbury has.
"I was sitting in the front of the tour bus one day with my notebook, thinking, `Wouldn't it be great if I could take the records in my collection and see a festival with some of the best acts?' " the lead singer of the British hard-rock band the Cult recalled while sitting in his manager's Beverly Hills office. "Why not an event where you could see all this great music?"
But where most people's fantasies remain just that, Astbury's dream is coming true. He's the force behind "The Gathering of the Tribes," a two-city/two-day festival bringing a diverse roster of rock, rap and pop acts-and their various audiences-together, first on Saturday at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in the Bay Area community of Mountain View, and then Sunday at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa.
Among those who will perform are rockers Iggy Pop, the London Quireboys and former Sex Pistol Steve Jones, rappers Public Enemy, Ice-T and Queen Latifah, and more folk-oriented Michelle Shocked and the Indigo Girls.
While telling how the event came to be, Astbury, an amiably chatty 28-year-old from Birkenhead, a town across the Mersey from Liverpool, leaped up and grabbed one of several notebooks he had with him-each labeled "Brain Bible"-and found the original entry he had made last December.
"Anticipate the moment of freedom, a festival of youth . . ." he read. ". . . Representatives from four corners of the world. . . . Relies on the commitment that we need a common ground of communication."
A neo-hippie vision indeed-Astbury readily acknowledged a fascination with the 1969 Monterey Pop Festival, which brought together rock musicians the Who, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix,...