Photo Gallery: Rockstar Mayhem Festival at Superpages.com Center (July 25)

by Kenneth Smith of 2K7 Photography

Friday marked the Dallas stop of the first annual (hopefully annual, at least) Rockstar Mayhem Festival. The brainchild of Warped Tour and Taste Of Chaos founders Kevin Lyman & John Reese, this tour came at the best possible time. With Ozzfest all but gone (unless you are lucky enough to live here in Dallas this year), most of the United States would be pretty much void of a summer tour boasting such great metal acts as Mayhem has assembled.

The tour is set up much like Ozzfest, with a main stage that starts around 5 p.m. and smaller stages set up in the Superpages.com Center parking lot that run earlier in the day. The Jagermeister and Hot Topic stages housed acts such as Walls of Jericho, Suicide Silence, Machine Head, 36 Crazyfists and Underoath (amongst others). Mastodon, Dragonforce, Disturbed, and Slipknot all played main stage which lasted until around 11 p.m.

"Hot" was definitely the word of the day. With temperatures soaring well above 326 degrees, its amazing more people weren't passing out . The crowd didn't seem to mind the hellish heat too much, as sunburned skin was pretty much visible everywhere you looked. The bands talked of how amazing the tour had been thus-far, which hopefully means we'll see it again next year.

With plenty to see and do, and superb sets by all bands involved, I would say this is most certainly the new "must see" tour and will probably be around for many years to come.