Rockford is only about an hour away from Chicago, so I was able to convince my mom to drive Karl and I there fairly easily. MTX were playing at this huge festival (it had 8 different stages) on the "rock" stage. The amazing Groovie Ghoulies played that day too, but unfortunately we got there too late to see them play.We got there in the early afternoon, and it was unbearably hot. MTX didn't arrive until a few hours later, so Karl and I wandered around aimlessly. Unfortunately there really wasn't anything to do there (the other bands that played that day weren't very good). Finally, MTX arrived. We brought Frank a bottle of Coke 2 as a present (whether a bottle of Coke 2 is a nice thing to give a person I'm not really sure) because we'd had a discussion about it at the Chicago show. None of us had ever tried it, but we came to discover that it tastes like a watered down version of Pepsi. (I later came to learn that Coke 2 was a marketing ploy used to target teenagers who surveys show prefer the taste of Pepsi over Coke.) We made Frank try it, and he got the funniest look on his face! I can't even describe it...but it was damn funny. Before tasting the revolting beverage, he said, "Ben Weasel wouldn't do this." Apparently Ben is rather paranoid about his fans. One time a couple girls brought MTX brownies, and Ben insisted that they not eat them, because they could be poisoness. Uh-huh...
A little later MTX played, and it was absolutely mind-blowing, as always. I remember being amazed as I heard them play "Now we are Twenty-One" for the first time, due to the fact that I had never fathomed that Frank, nearly 32 at the time, would still play that song. Speaking of Frank's age, we had a kind of interesting disscusion with him about it. We were talking about the fact that his birthday was coming up, and whether he felt old. His reply is that he never feels too old, because he'll always be younger than Joe Queer. In addition, he can always feel confident in the fact that he's the same age as heart-throb Keanu Reeves.
One of the more revolting parts of the show was seeing girls coming up to MTX wanting them to sign various body parts, (One girl wanted Joel to sign her stomach. Yuck!). Other then that the show was really great. Karl and I had to leave fairly shortly after MTX's set though, because we were driving home that night and my mom was anxious to leave. The only possitive thing that came out of that was missing Goldfinger...heh...
The trip home was a bit eventful in itself. It seemed that between the three of us (Karl, my mom, and I) we had a total of ten dollars or so with which to get home, and the gas tank was already 3/4 empty. We had a gas card, but with our luck, we didnt reach a gas station that accepted our card until well into Michigan. We had to stop to return pop cans to put an extra dollar worth of gas in the car. It was quite scary. None the less we made it home safe and sound.