Sep 5, 2002

The 3rd year of southern Ontario's largest music festival expanded to 3 days in 2002. A great mixed venue of "Rock meets Country" included Supertramp, The Barenaked Ladies, Brooks & Dunn, Blue Rodeo, Jann Arden, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Carolyn Dawn Johnson, Keith Urban, Paul Brandt, Tragically Hip and others. This all happened on September's Labour Day weekend, August 31st - Sept. 2nd, 2002. Over the weekend, a total of over 45,000 fans went through the gates at Walkerton, Ontario's ball diamonds

That's Country was there to review the country portion of the festival, which took place on Sunday.  The entertainment was top notch but there were many complaints of over-crowding by early afternoon.  The area wasn't large enough to accommodate the enthusiastic crowd and there were soon many complaints from the fans.  Many found it difficult to get any food or drinks unless you were very close to the refreshment tent.  Fans who had brought their children were concerned about safety, since the aisles were soon closing in, which made it difficult to get anywhere in a hurry.  Many people were so far away, they had no choice but to view the concert from the video screens, since they couldn't see the stage at all. 

From a personal view.......

The media area was at the furthest point from any refreshments and it took us over an hour to get anything to eat or drink not to mention the fact that we had to carry all of our equipment with us through the crowd.  This turned out to be pretty frustrating what with Molson's VIP area right beside us with food and water only steps away.  We did manage to get something from the VIP area though.....they threw their garbage into our small area and by early evening, we had to climb over it to get in!

Since we could only photograph during the first three songs of the acts, excluding Brooks & Dunn and Barenaked Ladies (which we didn't know about until we were herded out of the pit after B&D's first song), we remained pretty "waterless" over the day.  We also found it pretty much impossible to review the show, since we didn't want to risk damaging our expensive equipment in the crowd.  I'm sure this was an oversight on the part of Next Presentations, who brought us Watershed 3. 

I choose to believe the organizers didn't foresee a lot of the problems which arose, and are already at work trying to make this event enjoyable for all for next year.  After all, it is now one of the biggest music festivals in Canada!