Imagine Dragons, Neil Young, Mumford & Sons, Santana, Pharrell Williams, Logic, Lord Huron and Flora Cash were among the musicians taking the stage at the 2019 BottleRock Napa Valley festival over Memorial Day weekend. Not even unseasonably cool weather and the threat of rain could dampen the spirits of the 40,000 fans at gathered at the Napa Valley Expo grounds.
Imagine Dragons set the tone for the weekend on Friday night by delivering an important message in between performances of hits like “Believer” and “Radioactive.” Lead singer Dan Reynolds took time between songs to talk about the normalization of depression and anxiety, encouraging anyone who suffers from them to speak with a therapist, telling the crowd that he has been seeing one since middle school.
Along with performing fun, bouncy tracks like “Happy” on the Firefox stage on Saturday night, Pharrell Williams also had something important he wanted to share — this time about the importance of women’s rights in the wake of recent anti-abortion laws. Williams gave a shout out to all of the women– mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and aunts — before closing out with a goose-bump inducing performance of “Freedom.”
Saturday night headliner Neil Young has been singing protest songs since 1970’s “Ohio” about the Kent State massacre and no one was gonna shut him up now — not even BottleRock’s strict 10 p.m. curfew. The 73-year-old rocker kept on playing 1989’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” even after festival organizers cut off the sound system, encouraging the crowd to sing along with his backing band, Promise of the Real. Young and his entourage then hugged it out on stage before making the exit of the weekend.
Woodstock alum and guitar legend Carlos Santana came armed with messages harking back to the Summer of Love, telling the Sunday night crowd to “feel your light and do something positive with it.” His wife, Cindy Blackman Santana, then delivered an epic drum solo — but it was the little kid dancing on stage with maracas in a Stephen Curry jersey who really stole the show.
While some acts took a serious stance, Sunday headliners Mumford & Sons told the crowd that they “came to have a f—ing party with you.” It seemed only fitting that the band took to the stage as the clouds cleared and a rainbow lit up the festival grounds. The British folk rockers ripped through renditions of favorites like “Little Lion Man” and “I Will Wait” with boundless energy, before closing out covering The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends.”
BottleRock is famed for its culinary events almost as much as the musical acts, along with bizarre stunts that blend the two. Sunday evening saw rocker Alice Cooper join forces with celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern in an attempt to break a word record for the most rubber chickens tossed in the air at the same time. The strange stint harked back to the infamous 1969 show when Cooper threw a live chicken into the audience, who promptly shredded it and threw the pieces back on stage. “It had wings, it had feathers, it should fly,” Cooper said behind his reasoning, adding that he soon realized “chickens don’t fly so much as they plummet.” The attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records also fell flat, as they failed to break the previous record.
