Leona Laurie meets the Riot Police at Hard Fest 2009

Another treat from our recently restored archives is our highest-trafficked article of 2009: Leona Laurie’s account of the abortive Hard Fest at the LA Forum…

Well, I don’t feel stupid anymore about buying tickets to San Diego’s Street Scene after already buying tickets to see Chromeo at Hard Fest/Hard Summer in LA. Why? Because Hard Summer didn’t happen.

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I drove to LA tonight with high hopes after 3 years of missing Chromeo every time they came near me on tour. I picked up my dear friend and fellow Chromeo enthusiast, Chris, and we made it over to the Los Angeles Forum just in time for Chromeo’s 9:55pm set.

When we got inside and opted for seats instead of going down into the mob scene on the floor, Chromeo was already 20 minutes late taking the stage. It was a bad omen, but we remained optimistic, and Chris left to get us drinks. While I was alone, I watched the crowd and felt a little old and a little awesome. I thought about the likelihood that I was among a small minority of people in the room who weren’t high. I wondered why security wasn’t letting people use the stairways to get down to the floor.

Shortly after Chris returned with his tiny, $10 beer, things started going south. Time kept passing without Chromeo taking the stage. A man finally came to the mic and ordered the crowd to move out of the first five rows of seating all around the Forum because the fire marshall could shut the show down if kids kept jumping over the railing and onto the floor below. He called the jumpers “morons” and encouraged the rest of the crowd to keep being cool. This seemed unrealistic to me. The idea of moving a portion of the sold-out crowd out of the seats they’d scored (by that time) an hour earlier was somewhat ludicrous, but we all wanted to see the show, so we persevered.

Time kept passing. The man came out again and told portions of the audience that it would be their fault if the show couldn’t go on. He promised that we were minutes away from seeing some “Hot Canadian Ass,” and security kept making their way around the room, herding people out of their hard-won chairs and into the nosebleed section.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

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