Young Fans Eat Up Weenie Roast’s Nasty Offerings

There were devils in the outfield where the Angels usually play as the annual KROQ-FM (106.7) Weenie Roast moved to spacious Edison Field in Anaheim on Saturday. They were tattooed, foulmouthed and loud, loud, loud--and in the case of Korn’s Jonathan Davis during the headlining set, sometimes speaking in tongues.

But it was heaven for these young rock fans, and not just because afternoon cloud cover kept it from being hellishly hot. It was from the more than 10 hours of nearly nonstop music, most of it aggressive, macho chest-beating that had the roughly 45,000 fans (about a third of whom were on the no-chairs, general-admission field-turned-mosh-pit) going from the engaging early-afternoon opening of Calabasas’ Incubus to Korn’s closing well past midnight.

At the two extremes--an appropriate word for this roster--were Korn, with Davis’ tortured quests for big answers to big questions, and Limp Bizkit, with Fred Durst’s Neanderthal, confrontational posturing never looking for answers to any questions deeper than “Wazzup?”

The latter resorted to such boorish, bottom-feeding gestures as having fans raise their middle fingers and shout the f-word--things that were lame when he did them at last year’s Weenie Roast at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre. Following the social satire and commentary of Orange County punk band Offspring, Durst was a sour caricature.

In this crowd, Ozzy Osbourne--who’s actually been accused of being in league with Satan--came off as a regular guy. Arguably, on this Father’s Day weekend he was the show’s father figure. And his short set of Gothic diversions, performed first with his own young band and then with the original lineup of Black Sabbath, seemed honest and unaffected sandwiched between Bizkit and Korn.

Given the hard-rock orientation, it’s no surprise that almost totally missing from a day also including rap trio Cypress Hill (powered solidly by a backing rock band), smart punk-rooted Everclear, faceless Creed, power-pop quartet Lit and overly earnest Third Eye Blind were any sister figures. It made for an environment that, if not exactly hostile to women, was certainly unenlightened--a day when the most encouraged female role seemed to be to bare breasts when the giant video screens’ camera roved the crowd.

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The good news is that three of the artists on the bill stood up against the day’s male domination, though only one of them was wearing a dress--and that wasn’t hometown No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani, the lone woman on the bill.

Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland opened his band’s mid-show set wearing a shiny, silver mini-dress, flame-red wig and fishnet stockings, telling the crowd that he wanted to show solidarity with Stefani. And with that glam-rock edge, Weiland and band showed that you don’t have to ooze testosterone to have power, eliciting the crowd’s spontaneous chant of “STP”--a solid and deserved welcome back for a band sidetracked in recent years by the in-recovery Weiland’s drug-related problems.

No Doubt followed with a slick but involving set of ska-tinged pop and rock that stood apart from most of the bill as much as Stefani’s gender. Her bubbly personality, though, carried it for the receptive crowd.

Moby, whose electronic-based dance music was the biggest anomaly on the bill, capped off the anti-macho stretch with several barbed comments at the “frat boys” in the audience. Knowing that he was never going to win them over, he instead stuck with his strengths and focused on those in the crowd receptive to his bracing, rich run of good vibes and feet-moving beats.