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Rockers at Sea
By Joe Levy
- March 30, 2012
THINGS were a little weird from the moment I stepped onto the Weezer Cruise. Like a lot of my fellow passengers — indie-rock fans who had signed up for a three-day voyage full of bands and beverages — I’d never been on a cruise before. So I don’t know whether most of them begin with a staff member high-fiving each and every person who comes off the gangway. But I’m relatively certain most don’t have a welcome center with a D.J. playing a reggae version of Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box.”
“I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black,” Little Roy sang while I tried to figure out where my cabin was. Welcome aboard!
Of course, this was a music cruise, a floating rock festival grafted onto a passenger ship, and a quietly thriving corner of the music and cruise industries. While the music business has been in decline for over a decade and traditional cruise lines have never quite figured out how to attract the cool crowd, music cruises are both profitable and proliferating.
Fans willing to pony up somewhere between $900 and $1,400 — not including airfare or bar tab — can rub shoulders with their favorite acts and enjoy three to five days of food, music, Caribbean sunshine and extras like a photo with the band (no autographs, please).
Everyone from oldies acts like Frankie Avalon to current artists like R. Kelly and Blake Shelton are taking to the seas. Did the fourth annual New Kids on the Block cruise really sell out in four hours? Of course it did! Can death-metal fans really enjoy Cannibal Corpse and 31 other doom merchants while sailing from Miami to the Grand Caymans? They don’t call it 70,000 Tons of Metal for nothing.
If there’s one thing metalheads know, though, it’s how to party. I was less certain about the Weezer Cruise. The headliners — Weezer and Dinosaur Jr. — were alt rock acts that had turned the sound of disconnection into an audience almost two decades ago. Exactly how that was going to mesh with blue skies and umbrella drinks wasn’t clear to me. But as has long been known by vacation planners, piña coladas are a universal solvent. As the sun set that first afternoon and the Carnival Destiny steamed out of Miami, Weezer took the stage outdoors on the Lido Deck to the ecstatic hoots and hollers of die-hard fans. I lingered with seven new friends from Chicago on a back balcony, where concert attendees waiting to be convinced traditionally congregate. The more we drank, the farther up front we gravitated. I finished the show a few feet from the stage.
The Carnival Destiny does not usually host rock concerts, so in the six or so hours it had been in port, a stage had been erected over a swimming pool. On either side were hot tubs; opposite was a two-story water slide. Halfway through the first of the band’s two sets, the frontman Rivers Cuomo put on a yacht cap handed to him from the crowd (they were on sale at the merchandise table), declared himself Captain Cuomo, and walked through the enraptured crowd to the top of the slide to survey his vessel. During the second set, the group played the entirety of their debut, known as the Blue Album, released in 1994 when Mr. Cuomo was 23.
In song after song, his romantic longing was countered by heroic pop melodies and guitars that tapped the unbridled machismo of Kiss — Mr. Cuomo’s favorite band growing up — in ways that were far less ironic than most of us imagined 18 years ago. The crowd pogoed up and down, and though there were many couples almost everywhere I looked, bearded, shirtless men sang to each other with complete abandon and obvious delight. Once again it was weird. But it was awesome.
And so it went for the next three days, as we sailed to Cozumel, Mexico, and back. There were 16 acts in all and 2,200 cruisegoers. Most had come for Weezer, and in return got a chance to see their favorite band play two nights and field questions from fans, lead shuffleboard tournaments and host midnight movie screenings.
But not all cruisers were passionate Weezer fans. Many had come for the floating music festival, a chance to pack the afternoons and evenings listening to bands they knew, or to discover new ones. Along with the main acts there were younger bands like Free Energy and Yuck, who had learned much of their sound from the headliners, along with an assortment of indie up-and-comers, whose sounds ran from the sun-baked buzz pop of Wavves to the spacey art-rock of the Antlers.
There were two to three bands playing at most times, starting at 1 in the afternoon; stages ranged from the outdoor space on the Lido Deck to a midsize theater and a small lounge, both right out of “The Love Boat.”
And that wasn’t the only way this was unlike any music festival I’d ever been to. At most performances, no matter how packed, it was easy to walk right up to the front of the stage if you wanted. There were no $5 bottles of water, and no lines for the bathroom or the beer tent. In fact, waiters came offering buckets of beer, frozen drinks or whatever you wanted. Freed from the necessity of driving home after the show, what many people wanted turned out to be: everything, especially if it came in a commemorative coconut.
We sailed on Thursday afternoon, spent Friday at sea, and were in port in Cozumel on Saturday. In most respects, I imagine it was like a lot of other cruises: tiny but comfortable cabins, which on this cruise might be crammed with three to five people using fold-out couches and rollaway beds; grand dining rooms and buffet lines with an endless supply of food. ( It is doubtful the buffet staff has ever been asked, “Is this vegetarian?” quite so many times.)
Mornings were spent in recovery, which included one outdoor yoga session, but mostly centered on baking in the sea air and sun. You could try your luck at trivia contests, beer tastings or belly flop competitions. The combination of fun-in-the-sun party ship and rock ’n’ roll made for odd tableaus. On Saturday morning, lounging on a deck chair next to me was a guy in a wool ski cap, shades, a T-shirt, shorts and sandals, enjoying a soft-serve ice cream cone and a Coors Light.
Once the music took over, the oddness ebbed. But it never completely went away. For Saturday evening’s sunset show, as the Carnival Destiny pulled out of Cozumel, we gathered topside to watch Dinosaur Jr., a three-piece known for a combination of misty-mountaintop folk rock and violent hardcore-punk volume. As I drained a Foster’s Lager and talked with two guys who’d been born around the time Dinosaur Jr.’s 1985 debut came out, the band played “Repulsion,” a song I’d always thought summed up their hermetic worldview. “The world drips down like gravy,” the guitarist J. Mascis sang while people around me took photos of a pink-streaked sky. “Everyone’s idea of fun. Repulsion.”
Of course, music about alienation isn’t really made to increase the alienation of its audience but to relieve it, or at least give it expression. Still, something about the transition of this music from darkened clubs and concert halls to bright Caribbean waters seemed surprising, like waking up one day to find the math club out on the football field and winning.
THE woes of the music industry over the last decade have become legendary, often a bigger and better-known story than the music itself. But during 10 years of cratering numbers for recorded music sales and up-and-down concert ticket revenues, the rise of the music cruise has been an unexpected bright spot. It remains a surprise to many people that for somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 a day, you can vacation with your favorite rock stars for a few days, lie in the sun and eat as much as you want, but there is an ever-expanding roster of music cruises.
Sixthman, the Atlanta-based promoter that organized the Weezer Cruise, runs excursions with Kid Rock, Kiss and the Barenaked Ladies, all acts with dedicated audiences capable of filling a ship with more than 2,000 fans. But Sixthman also organizes trips around genres, like Cayamo (featuring NPR-friendly singer-songwriters like Lucinda Williams, John Prine and Lyle Lovett), and VH1’s Best Cruise Ever (for people who know the name of the lead singer of Train).
Sixthman is the industry leader — the Weezer Cruise was the company’s 40th charter since 2000 — but outside the Sixthman roster, smaller promoters make sure there’s a boat for everyone and then some, from Kenny G fans to lovers of traditional blues.
For the artists themselves, these cruises are somewhere between work and a vacation. “I had such a good time,” said Weezer’s drummer, Pat Wilson, who brought along his wife, his two sons and his wife’s nephew and his girlfriend. For Mr. Wilson, playing outside that first evening as the ship set sail “was just mind-blowing.”
“Being on the deck, looking at the stars,” he continued, “I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Kid Rock, who took his first charter out in 2010. “I thought this is either going to be the greatest thing ever, or a nightmare,” he said. “But it turned out to be one of the funnest times of my life — and as I think you know, I’ve had some fun on all different levels.”
Kid Rock says that on the first night of that maiden voyage he led attendees in a spontaneous late-night party on the main deck, and his fans drank the ship dry of Jim Beam. The third annual Kid Rock’s Chillin’ the Most Cruise departs on April 26, and culminates with two days on 55 acres of a private island in the Bahamas renamed Redneck Paradise for the occasion.
The money is good — a headliner of Kid Rock’s stature can earn more than $1 million. Still, artists and managers insist the real draw is the same as for the fans: the once-in-a-lifetime nature of the event. “You’re playing to a couple of thousand people who love what you do, the hardest-core fans,” Kid Rock said. “There’s not one song they don’t know. This is their vacation, and it makes you feel warm and fuzzy that they want to spend it with you.”
And spend it with the artists they do. On the Weezer Cruise, members of the various bands were everywhere — watching other acts, at the bars, on the buffet line, in the gym (“I hate those,” Weezer’s bassist Scott Shriner told me as I struggled through some side planks, shortly before he turned himself upside down and knocked out a series of perfect inverted push-ups).
Superfans abounded, and still the atmosphere was relaxed. “I was on the top deck in the back, drinking beer and talking with people, seeing bands,” Mr. Wilson said. “Nobody was pushy. Nobody was overbearing. They all were just genuinely surprised that I’d be willing to hang out.”
Though privacy can be an issue on some cruises — Hal Roseman, who books the New Kids on the Block cruise, told me the group members need security guards because fans ferret out the location of their cabins and camp outside — on the Weezer Cruise it clearly wasn’t much of a problem. “Just went snorkeling with some fans,” Rivers Cuomo tweeted during our day ashore in Cozumel. “Had to change into my suit in front of some Weezer-bros.”
Those bros, and their sisters, came in all ages. I met Weezer cruisers who’d discovered the band in college, high school and even grade school. A self-described “mom from Ohio” whose husband had sent her on the cruise with a friend produced a Weezer fan club membership card from 1994. Three Iraq War vets were such passionate music fans, and so eager to take the Weezer cruise, that they had signed up for a presale ticket offer. A couple from Orlando explained this was their third Sixthman cruise in less than a year — they liked the Weezer Cruise, but thought Rombello (headlined last September by G. Love and Michael Franti and Spearhead) was better.
Andy Levine, the founder and chief executive of Sixthman, said that more than 50 percent of attendees re-up for his cruises. According to Mr. Levine, his average passenger is 35 years old, more than a decade younger than 48, the average age of cruisers reported by the Cruise Lines International Association, an industry trade organization.
“The cruise industry is blown away that we can get people in their 30s on board a cruise ship,” he said. “And we’re getting them to pay two to three times what they’re charging. They’re scratching their heads.” (The average per-day rate for most cruises, according to the cruise line association, is about $214, including airfare and onboard expenses. Sixthman puts its per-day average between $175 and $350, not including airfare and expenses.)
As he sees it, Sixthman isn’t in the concert business, it’s in the vacation business, and thus the stakes are elevated. “We learned early on that when people are spending this kind of money and this kind of time, their expectations are so high,” he said. “They could have bought a washing machine or made a down payment on a car. They didn’t. They chose to be with us.”
What keeps them coming back is how the cruise rolls everything — rock ’n’ roll, hotel, bar, pool, sunshine — into one easy package. “You can stand there listening to music and think, ‘I’m 100 feet from my food, I’m 100 feet from my bed, and I’m 100 feet from my favorite band.’ ”
The final night aboard the Weezer Cruise, I went to see Lou Barlow — who plays in both Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh — do a solo acoustic show in the Criterion Lounge. I came in late and stood off to the side until a group of women at a table motioned for me to take a seat with them right at the front. Mr. Barlow strummed brokenhearted song after brokenhearted song, while a self-described stalker who’d been shouting requests at him for the last four nights kept up her end of the bargain. Toward the end, Mr. Barlow played “Natural One,” from yet another Barlow group, the Folk Implosion, which had capped off the grunge era as a fluke Top 40 success in 1995. He preceded it with a cover of an obscure indie classic called “A Hit,” by the one-man band Smog, about the impossibility of this sort of music ever achieving success.
Irony achieved on many levels, it seemed like a perfect ending to a strange voyage, and I headed back to my cabin. But passing through the casino, I saw a crowd around the tiny stage there gathered to see Free Energy, and I got sucked in. The band was crawling on their amps, banging their heads on the ceiling, and serenading the slot machines with bouncy, crunchy rock songs that spiraled backward to the ’70s and forward into the future at the same time. “Isn’t this the best stage?” asked the singer Paul Sprangers. “It’s like a house party.” He was right, so I stayed a while longer. Once again, the Weezer Cruise had surprised me.
The cover article on April 1 about rock music cruises erroneously included a cruise among those organized by Sixthman, a promoter. Jam Cruise is organized by Cloud 9 Adventures, not Sixthman.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more
JOE LEVY is the editor of Billboard magazine.
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