I’m finally sitting down to write about Louder Than Life 2024, but I’m not actually gonna talk about the festival itself yet. Naturally, my first instinct is to start with Day One and continue chronologically, but there’s a fair amount of backstory that helps every day of the festival make more sense, plus it’ll be easier to move forward if I cover some if it now, so it seems like starting before the beginning might be a better idea. And I’m aware that “starting before the beginning” may sound like nonsense, but time is clearly an illusion, and this is my blog, after all, so I suppose I’ll start wherever I doggone well feel like starting.

Louder Than Life 2024 officially began on September 28, 2023, approximately one week after Louder Than Life 2023 ended. On the 27th, we received an email telling us we were on the Early Bird List, and that in just two days, we would be among the First People on Earth to get the chance to purchase tickets to a 4-day music festival where we had no idea who would be performing. We were pumped!

Listen: I spent one football season in elementary school making Monday Night Football bets on the bus, and I had a pretty good run overall, even though I knew almost nothing about football. As an adult, I enjoy playing slots occasionally; I even won 200 bucks one time, and that was pretty neat. And one Sunday night several years back, I even tried my hand at blackjack, craps, and roulette when the table minimum was $5 (I did not do well). But if you’d told me even six years ago that I’d ever gamble on something as big as weekend passes to a four-day music festival without knowing a single band in advance, I’d have called you dadgum liar.

The thing is, when Danny Wimmer Presents puts on a festival, you know the lineup is gonna be solid. It’s always a mixed bag, but for every steaming turd like Falling in Reverse or Ghostmane, you get a delicious morsel like Clutch, Suicidal Tendencies, Green Day, Cypress Hill, or Pennywise. Occasionally you’ll get one of those rare French chocolates wrapped with edible gold, like Metallica playing two unique sets on two nights, or one of only three reunion shows of the year by Fuckin Slayer. And even when there are steaming turds on stage, there are other stages to check out. And even if all the other stages have turds steaming on them at the same time (uncommon), there’s other stuff to do, and the people watching is just aces.

Anyway, the next day (9/28) I got another email telling me that extra-special fancy-pants packages were now available, so we took the plunge and splurged on “The Luxury Package”, which – in addition to admission to all four days of the festival, access to the exclusive Angel’s Envy Top Shelf VIP area (which we enjoyed very much in 2023), and 5 nights at the Galt House Hotel (our preferred hotel when in Lousville) – included, and I quote:

• Downtown shuttle pickup at your hotel: all 4 days
• Dedicated fast track entry and re-entry
• Access to Welcome Party
• Watch a performance from the soundboard
• $50 Louder Than Life merch voucher
• Artist-signed festival poster
• Louder Than Life mini-guitar
• Commemorative lanyard

End quote.

Considering we were planning to get TSVIP passes, stay at the Galt House, and use the Pegasus Transportation shuttles anyway, it seemed like a big ol no doi for us. Plus we were able to pay it off in installments! I’ll get to most of the perks later, but a couple of them came into play before the fest actually started, and that’s what we’re here to talk about this time (more or less).

A quick aside: Our accommodations were fuckin brilliant. The Galt House is always at least very good, and most times it’s great. The staff is friendly and helpful, the restaurants and bars are great, it’s close to lots of cool restaurants, shops, museums, and live performance venues, and it’s very easily accessible by automobile. I cannot recommend it enough if you’re staying in downtown Louisville. I digress.

Look, I know I said earlier that LTL2K24 officially began on September 28, 2023, but I was being dramatic. For us, it actually began on February 21, 2024, when the full lineup was released. We have a System when the lineup gets released, see? I’ll make a list of all the bands, and on Saturday nights over the next few months, we’ll spend a chunk of time watching videos from all the bands. We’ll usually start with either the newest song or the song with the most plays on YouTube, and we’ll work our way through the lineup over the course of a month or two. When we’ve made it through all four days, we’ll go back through and watch a second video of each band, this time focusing on older songs when possible/as needed. After we’ve finished a second run-through, we’ll go through the whole list once more, this time watching live performances from each band.

The System isn’t perfect, but it’s getting better each year, and it’s helped us discover some really kick-ass bands and artists in previous years, like Ho99o9, Amigo the Devil, Mannequin Pussy, and Gnome, to name a few.

This year I fine tuned The System a bit more. We assigned a letter grade (A-F) for each video, and then a couple of weeks before leaving this year, I went through and made a short list of bands who averaged a B- or higher, double-checked each one on Spotfiy (one C-/D+ band almost made it through – yikes!), and made a playlist with two songs from each band. Then the day before, I mapped out a guideline schedule for each day so we could keep track of who was playing where and when without having to consult the app, thereby draining our phone batteries.

This ended up being somewhat handy, but there are always last-minute changes that’ll muck things up, like for instance Jigsaw Youth and KNEECAP‘s times being pushed back after I made this schedule, due to Veil of Maya dropping off the festival on the morning of Day One. And a cursory glance at said schedule will reveal lots of overlapping set times, so we ended up having to make difficult choices, like for instance I had to decide between watching KNEECAP on the Loudmouth Stage and watching Bob Vylan on the Decibel Stage. Spoiler alert: I chose KNEECAP, but that hasn’t happened yet in this timeline, plus I haven’t even actually started talking about Day Zero yet, so I’ll save that for the next post.

Fast-forward to September 13, when I received an email about our Soundboard Experience. Sheila and I had both forgotten about that, so it was a very exciting email to receive. Imagine my dismay when I got down to the important part:

Look: I try not to yuck anybody else’s yums, but Falling in Reverse is easily my least favorite band that I’ve ever heard, that has also played at Louder Than Life. I just do not get the love for that band. I was sad. I responded thusly:

The next day, they responded with this:

I was even sadder. Plus it seemed like they didn’t really understand what I was trying to relate to them even though I thought I’d made it extremely clear and easy to follow, which I just found kind of disappointing. Sheila was concerned that this meant our artist-signed festival poster would also be affiliated with Falling in Reverse, but I soothed her concerns by pointing out that if we did receive a poster with Ronny Radke’s autograph on it, we’d at least be able to get a li’l money from it on ebay. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself again; there’s more to the Soundboard Experience, but it’s not Saturday yet.

Let’s move on to Wednesday the 25th, shall we?

I spent the morning getting a few last-minute supplies and gassing up and packing the car while Sheila worked a half-day. We stopped for lunch at Tumbleweed in Floyd’s Knobs, IN, and it was great as always. My “B- or Better” playlist served us well on the drive.

We checked into the hotel, unpacked, freshened up, and had a drink and a snack at Jockey Silks, the bourbon bar in the hotel. We then made our way toward Tavern on 4th (home of the Official Welcome Party), with a brief detour to the Bluegrass Brewing Company for a pint of their delicious Altbier. We arrived at Tavern on 4th and took our place in line behind a couple we sincerely hoped we wouldn’t find ourselves in close proximity to once we got inside. They were turned away at the door because the guy didn’t realize they each needed a ticket, and therefore only bought one, so everybody ended up winning, except for them.

The Welcome Party promised snacks, and an open bar, so we got a couple of drinks and located the snacks. We were definitely glad we had a snack at the hotel bar, as the only vegetarian food we could locate were some pretzel bites with beer cheese. They were tasty enough, but we were expecting a bit more.

We ended up striking up a conversation with a couple that seemed kinda like us, but a few years older, and they were cool, but all I can really remember about them at this point is that the lady was extremely stoked to see Bob Vylan (as was Sheila), and the guy was wearing a Beastie Boys Check Your Head t-shirt. He actually appeared next to us while the DJ was playing a Beastie Boys song (way too loud, I might add). I’m aware of the irony of a dude who loves live music as much as I do being such a cantankerous old curmudgeon about loud music in other situations, but I can’t be alone in thinking that music shouldn’t be so fuckin loud when people are in a situation where talking is encouraged. Also, I’m very quickly becoming a cantankerous old curmudgeon, so it’s only natural.

We also hung out with this guy for a while. He was cool, and we never saw him again. These are the days of our lives.

The rest of the night is less clear, on account of the open bar, the lack of vegetarian food, and the anticipation. I know we had fun, and I know we made it back to the hotel safely. We woke up the next day ready for an adventure, and we were not disappointed, other than having to choose between KNEECAP and Bob Vylan, which I mentioned previously, but again, that’s in the future, at least relative to this story, which ends here.

Speaking of the future, Part Two of this multi-part concoction will be here (relatively) soon. It’ll cover Day One and possibly Day Two, if I can manage to keep myself on something resembling a track. Until then, go on and git. And thanks for reading.