The “Rock” in BottleRock was in full force Saturday. From Pearl Jam Headlining to My Morning Jacket, Cold War Kids all the way down to the opening acts at noon.
Weather was warm and sunny with barely any clouds. Thankfully there was a cool breeze consistently through the day making the conditions tolerable.
I kicked off my BottleRock Day 2 at the Verizon Stage where Grace McKagan was performing at noon. Grace is the 26-year-old daughter of Guns N Roses bassist Duff McKagan. As I was watching her set I couldn’t help but think of how she has a young Courtenay Love-like aura on stage with both her look and music. It definitely drew early festival goers to the stage as the set started with only a few dozen people, but the audience grew quite a bit in the GA side by the end of the third song.
McKagan performed a second time in the late afternoon at the VIP Village.
Opening the main stage for day 2 was Linka Moja. Linka Moja, aka Lake Tahoe California singer-songwriter Emma Routhier was discovered by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. She was the first act to perfor at Vedder’s Ohana Festival in September 2023. It was fitting that she opened the day of BottleRock that Pearl Jam would headline.
At one point she told the audience after performing a cover song that she loves performing covers of great band, but she hopes someday bands will be covering her music. She looked to be having a blast, but you can tell she’s still relatively new to performing on big stages.
One random observation I had was with both Linka Moja and Grace McKagan having overlapping set times, both happened to be wearing oversized white shirts.
14-year-old Naima performed a solo acoustic performance in the VIP Village a little after 1pm. The Oakland, California teen is only in high school, but she had three sets on BottleRock Weekend playing mostly originals.
More female fronted alt-rock was over at the Truly Stage with The Aquadolls. It was at this point after running to four different stages to photograph artists with in an hour in the afternoon sun, I needed to get some water and shade. That meant I couldn’t stick around long enough to comment about their show.
After a break for some water and a bag of chips in the media room, Holly Humberstone was next back at the Verizon Stage. Humberstone has some Olivia Rodrigo stylistic vibes, which makes sense as she has opened for Rodrigo in the past. Her set showed why she won a Brit Award for Rising Star in 2022. She has great stage presence and her music is catchy and seems to have an appeal to wide demographic.
Back over on the JaM Cellars main stage, Cold War Kids performed an early afternoon set. It’s hard to believe their breakout single ‘Hang Me Up to Dry’ was released 17 years ago. Now promoting their 10th studio album, the band still put on an great show. From a photographer’s perspective I loved how the band members weren’t miles away from each other. Their stage set up was closer together than most main stage acts. Bassist Matt Maust commanded attention moving around the stage interacting with bandmates and staring at the audience and media photographers.
Los Angeles rock band Momma were next on my list to see. They technically started at the same time as Holly Humberstone and overlapped Cold War Kids’ timeslot, but I managed to catch a couple songs toward the end of their set. Their music sounds heavily influenced by 90s alt-rock with Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten’s vocals having a slight Veruca Salt tone at times.
I again had to quickly leave to catch the only opportunity I had to cover the Culinary Stage where Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka and RuPaul’s Drag Race season 6 winner Bianca Del Rio were celebrity guests for a cooking demonstration. Due to more set time constraints, I could only catch the intros and missed the actual cooking.
The master of auto-tune, T-Pain was next on the docket over on the Verizon Stage. T-Pain came out in front of space visuals in the LED screen and kicked off his set with ‘Take Your Shirt Off’. He bounded around the stage getting the large audience hyped. I think my only disappointment is that he was just dressed with a black t-shirt and ball cap. I was hoping for one of his more flashy looks with a top hat.
After quickly photographing T-Pain I had to run over to the main stage for My Morning Jacket. The Louisville, Kentucky rock band treated the media photographers with three long songs in ‘Mahgeetah’, ‘Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 1’ and ‘Spring (Among The Living)’ that filled about 18 minutes of their set. They ended their show bringing up the USC Marching Band for their performance of ‘Wordless Chorus’. Unfortunately I missed seeing that in person.
I popped into the small venue the festival calls ‘The Club’ for a brief five minutes. The BottleRock phone app listed the five o’clock time slot as ‘Special Guest’. Friday’s special guest was Mix Master Mike, so I was curious who Saturday’s guest would be. Walking in that small room was like walking into a sauna. It was hot, humid and hazy from the smoke machines. I could barely see who was DJing and with me not following electronic music very closly I couldn’t recognize who it was.
Maybe it was the all the artificial fog I inhaled, but I forgot about actor Bradley Cooper and Golden State Warrior Steph Curry were on the Culinary Stage. I tried to walk over, but a large number of security and volunteers had created a human wall blocking people from getting into the area of the stage because it was becoming overcrowded at that small section of the grounds.
So instead of covering that, it was time to get weird with Oliver Tree at the Verizon Stage. Prior to the set starting the audience were chanting, “Ol-i-ver! Ol-i-ver!”
He came on stage on a kick scooter wearing an 80s era bright ski jacket and sporting a bowl cut. His two bandmates were dressed the same with the same hair style (clearly it was wigs). The set was about as bizarre as you’d expect if you’ve ever seen his music videos. His visuals on the big screen were either from or inspired from those music vids. He even broke out a keytar.
Deep Sea Diver performed on the Truly Stage. The Seattle indie rock band has been opening for Pearl Jam on the current leg of the Dark Matter tour. Lead singer Jessica Dobson is also known for playing lead guitar with The Shins and also being a touring musician with Beck, Conor Oberst, Spoon and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Like a lot of the artists on Saturday’s lineup, Dobson told the audience this was the first time they’ve played in Napa.
Pearl Jam closed out the Jam Cellars main stage with a 2-hour set starting at 7:45. They kicked of the show with their 1-minute song ‘Lukin’ before breaking into a few songs casual Pearl Jam fans recognize from their ‘Ten’, ‘Vs.’ and ‘Vitolagy’ albums.
During a break between songs Eddie Vedder told the audience this was their first time performing in Napa. He then went to the side of the stage to get a bottle of wine, looked at the label and exclaimed, “This is good stuff. Why haven’t we played here before?”
This was the first festival headlining show on the band’s Dark Matter Tour. They performed six songs from the new album including what seems to be a favourite among die hard Pearl Jam fans in ‘Waiting for Stevie’.
For a group of musicians that are nearing 60 and have been together for 33 years Pearl Jam still rock and they’re still having fun on stage. Lead guitarist Mike McCready was a standout during the set with some stellar solos.
That being said, the mosh pits and crowd surfing of the grunge era are a thing of the past with the band’s audience being more mature now plus the fact the festival itself tends to be more relaxed in general. The one thing that sucked was that the audience was a little to relaxed during the encore break. There was no loud chorus of cheering or chanting demanding the band return to the stage. People just stood around chatting and waiting for the inevitable continuation of the concert.
Vedder returned to the stage by himself and performed an acoustic version of ‘Last Kiss’. He then invited a surprise guest in actor Bradley Cooper, who was in the lineup for the Culinary Stage earlier in the day, to perform a duet of Jason Isbell’s ‘Maybe It’s Time’. The song was featured in the movie ‘A Star is Born’. If you’re wondering what the relationship is between Bradley and Eddie, Cooper spent a few days with Vedder to ask questions about the music industry and being a major musician while researching how to play his character in the film.
Cooper would later return to the stage during the finale of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ singing backup vocals, hitting a tambourine and bounding around the stage with the rest of the band.
One final note about the day, I had intended on covering Australian rapper The Kid Laroi and Latin crossover artist Kali Uchis, but the photo pit was closed to all media for both their sets.