The Tempe festival put Atmosphere, De La Soul and Yelawolf on the same weekend as Stephen Marley, Steel Pulse and Rebelution. The crowd treated the crossover like the most natural thing in the world. Because, historically, it is.
The Reggae Rise Up Arizona festival took place April 17 to 19 in Tempe, with Rebelution, Stephen Marley, Dirty Heads, SOJA, Protoje, Slightly Stoopid and Steel Pulse among the many acts slugging it out in the blistering hot Sonoran Desert.
It didn’t start off as planned, at least not for me. Flying out of Denver, we were hit with a blizzard and forced to wait on a plane from Vail, so my flight was delayed four hours. I finally landed in Phoenix around 4 p.m. and was scheduled to interview Jamaican reggae star Protoje at 5:30 p.m., but they were en route to their hotel and asked me to meet them there. I obliged and drove to the address they provided. After observing the toothless front desk woman, lack of a bathroom in the lobby and various shopping carts filled with junk outside, I had an unsettling feeling.
My first thought was, “Did they really put Protoje up in this place?” That was followed by, “Wow, you truly don’t know what life is like as a touring musician.” After a pit stop in a random Burger King bathroom (an employee had to buzz you in), I went back and waited. Nobody came.
As suspected, they had sent me to the wrong hotel. We rescheduled the interview for Zoom a few weeks later. By the time I cleared media credentials at Tempe Beach Park and pushed through the wall of weed and cigarette smoke at the gate, it was already 6:30 p.m.
Then the music started, and everything else stopped mattering.
On the …
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Author: Kyle Eustice / High Times
