This summer’s Jeep World Outside Festival is not a celebration of the hip hop/turntable genre “jeep beats”, but a package tour sponsored by an auto manufacturer and a outdoors magazine. That this pop/rock festival, which stopped at Merriweather Post Pavilion Saturday night, is one of the season’s more interesting tours says more about the dull and splintered state of commercial pop than it does about the talent of the musical acts on the bill.
A healthy crowd --- the kind of suburban, upper-middle class and clean cut group one might encounter at a Dave Matthews show --- was on hand for two stages worth of music and panoply of outdoorsy booths and sports demonstrations. Unfortunately, most of the music offered as much creativity and excitement as the average strip mall. The second-stage events climaxed with the thoroughly bland rock moves of Tonic, though a preceding set by Howie Day was better, mixing judicious use of sampler with yearning folk-rock melodies.
The tasteful pop/reggae Ziggy Marley got the main stage events started and gave way to Rockville, Maryland natives O.A.R., whose nondescript strains of pop-rock and reggae in songs like “That Was A Crazy Game of Poker” were met with peppy cheers from local fans. San Francisco outfit Train was up next, displaying their gift for deftly rewriting classic rock melodies, singer Patrick Monahan turning them into easily digestible pieces like “Meet Virginia” and “She’s on Fire”. Unless they were part of some secret-word challenge, Train’s covers of Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” and Aerosmith’s “Dream On” were rather pointless, though Monahan proved a charismatic copyist.
Sheryl Crow ended the festival with a set that at least showed some melodic vigor and invention, her saucy persona and tight, guitar-driven band handled songs like “Steve McQueen”, “Strong Enough” and “You’re An Original” with brisk aplomb. By the time Crow kicked her band into a version of The Who’s “Can’t Explain” she had thankfully saved Jeep World from being an entirely forgettable affair.
Washington Post, 2002
