We were standing around, shivering on a cold afternoon. “Is there anything to DO?” I groaned. Now, a music freak would have jumped all down my craw: “What the h— do you THINK you’re supposed to do at a music festival?” 

And I would have answered, “You mean, besides drink?”

Let’s face it. There are times when whatever’s on the music menu isn’t to your taste. And judging by the scantness of the early crowds, I wasn’t the only person wandering aimlessly without a mud-free place to sit my booty.

If I could ask one accommodation of Memphis in May it would be to allow folding chairs. But then, you know what would happen. People would show up at dawn, create a No Man’s Land of folding chairs in front of the stages and then yell “sit down!” at those who dared rise to dance, and if there’s anything worse than not being able to sit down it’s not being able to stand up. Annoying folding chair sitters: hate them. 

So with a dearth of bands I’d stand for, my pal Barry and I perused the part of the festival that nobody really blogs about: the sponsor exhibits. There, swag is traded for e-mail addresses. 

Our first stop was a trailer with a combined marketing campaign of Sharp televisions and major league baseball. It provided one alternative to music: video games.

An employee offered to take a special photo of Barry and I. Then she gave us a card to visit a website and retrieve our free picture. To get the free picture I needed to provide my e-mail address, and as I’d prefer less rather than more spam, the pic is destined to be swallowed by the matrix unless some great person would like to retrieve it for me by going to www.sharp.fotozap.com and enter the following code: 354-3013158. Barry thanks you.

The BP trailer has a more utilitarian function. Bathrooms. Nice(r) ones than those provided by the Fest. The idea is that BP’s bathrooms are better than Port-a-Johns. When ya gotta go, go in style. 

And when the bathrooms run out of toilet paper, you can request one of the t-shirts they were giving away. Let me describe it: a man in a pink car, flowers spewing from its tailpipe, drives circles around your torso. You figure out the target demographic. I never wear green and I never wear pink, so if there’s some emo kid out there who wants this…

Our music critic Bob Mehr says it’s really “British.”