There are two weekends that I look forward to every year more than any other: Wrestlemania weekend and Rock On The Range. For those that don’t know, Rock On The Range is an annual rock and heavy metal festival held in Columbus Ohio the third weekend of May. What began as a one day event with 14 bands has grown into a three day goliath featuring 60 bands! If you’re a rock or heavy metal fan you can’t do much better than an event like Rock On The Range and it’s an event that I’ve loved the past eight years! Sadly this year I wasn’t able to go, but since Rock On The Range is this weekend I thought it’d be fun to rank each year by the quality of their lineup! For this ranking I’m going by overall quality not quantity. Some of the older shows that had fewer bands will outrank the newer ones. More isn’t always better! Also, this is just my personal opinion, musical taste is obviously completely subjective so if you read this and think “Wow this moron got the list totally wrong” that’s cool! Just comment on what lineups you think are the best! Finally, I haven’t gone to Rock On The Range every year since it started, but I know of like 90% of the bands that played all these years so I’m basing the ranking not on their performances at the show but rather how good/bad I perceive them to be!
12.
This was the very first Rock On The Range and only featured 14 bands. Although there are some great bands on the lineup such as ZZ Top, Evanescence, Papa Roach, and Breaking Benjamin there are just as many bands that you look at and either think, “Who?” or “Oh God no.” The big names in this lineup though were enough to bring enough fans though and started the fandom that would create the largest rock festival in the country!
11.
The second Rock On The Range had a major improvement in the lineup! So much so that it spanned into two days! Some of my absolute favorites played this year such as Disturbed, Shinedown, and Seether. The thing that drags this down the most for though are the headliners. Kid Rock and Stone Temple Pilots? No thanks. Stone Temple Pilots have had an amazing career don’t get me wrong, but they just don’t do anything for me personally.
10.
OK, the list stops going in chronological order after this I promise! This is where Rock On The Range really started taking off in my opinion. The two headliners are absolute legends (Slipknot and Motley Crue) and then when you look down the list there are still a lot of talented bands that although weren’t big in 2009, grew in fame and are some of the biggest names in rock and metal now! This festival could be one of the reasons why! You know you’ve got a good lineup when bands like Korn, Avenged Sevenfold, and Alice In Chains are opening acts!
9.
This year had a lot of heavy hitters like Avenged Sevenfold (they show up a lot) and Slayer, but again two of the three headlining bands are pretty lousy. Kid Rock just doesn’t fit into this kind of festival to me and Guns and Roses aren’t the best live. I’m sure some are disgusted at reading that but again this is just my opinion! There’s lots of good lesser known bands here too that help even out the two less than stellar headliners. Also this Rock On The Range featured Staind which I THINK was the last year before their singer Aaron Lewis left to pursue a country music career (*shudders*). It’s been years Aaron please come back! I miss your angry depressing songs!
8. 2018
There’s two main reasons why I didn’t go to Rock On The Range this year.
- I’m still poor from my Wrestlemania Weekend (worth it).
- The lineup this year is pretty much garbage.
That is of course except for the headliners. There’s A7X AGAIN (them being here is a running joke for Rangers) along with grunge legends Alice In Chains, and they even got the almost mythical band Tool to come out of hiding! Heck, they got Maynard Keenan’s other band A Perfect Circle to even play! After you look at the first two rows of each day though the lineups are pretty bad. I always look forward to the lesser known bands because they normally end up being pleasant surprises. With a few exceptions like The Fever 333, there really aren’t any particularly great smaller bands. Although Rock On The Range is like a tradition for me, I was OK with missing out this year.
7.
This was the first Rock On The Range to span into a three day event! Although Friday only featured a few bands and was more of a pregame than anything. Incubus is the main reason this year isn’t higher up on the list. Don’t get me wrong I like a lot of their songs, but they are so different live. They had ZERO energy when they closed their night out and I can’t think of another time I saw a closing band make so many fans leave the show early. This year though was the one that converted me into a Rob Zombie fan. Having never seen him live before, I stuck around because I thought surely he would put on a better show than Incubus, and hot damn was I surprised. He knocked my socks off with his theatrics, pyrotechnics and catchy songs. Also lots of great bands as you read down the list so you can blame the halfway ranking on Incubus.
6.
This was the first Rock On The Range I went to. I randomly saw it advertised on Facebook and was blown away by how many of my favorite bands were on the lineup. I live three hours away from Columbus, but that road trip was worth it to see bands like Disturbed, A7X, Bullet For My Valentine, Alter Bridge, and Hollywood Undead. This was a great Rock On The Range lineup the full way through, but if I’m being honest, A Perfect Circle was a pretty lousy closer for the whole weekend. Before this festival I had never heard of A Perfect Circle, but when I heard it was fronted by Tool’s singer I had high expectations. The show this band just puts on is weird and it really took all the energy out of the weekend whenever they finished the set.
5.
No A7X this year! Instead we got three excellent headliners in Disturbed, Rob Zombie, and Red Hot Chili Peppers played the festival for their first time! Bands like Deftones, Between the Buried and Me, Sixx AM, and At The Drive In were bands that either hadn’t played Rock On The Range before or hadn’t played in a long time so it was refreshing to hear some new material from well known bands! A lot of the bands towards the bottom of each day’s lineup are pretty forgettable. There are some good smaller acts though like Red Sun Rising, Avatar, and Crown The Empire. Also this lineup has the Butcher Babies which is just unforgivable.
4.
If only I had Facebook in 2010 I may have heard of Rock On The Range this year. If I had I would’ve gone in a heartbeat because this lineup is STACKED. All of the last four are epic. This was the first year to feature my absolute favorite band of all time Rise Against! To find a band I’d consider “bad” you have to go almost all the way down to the bottom of the lineup and even some of THOSE are bands I love! Limp Bizkit as the closer though is the major blemish on this lineup. I mean anyone that likes Limp Bizkit only likes them ironically right? Nookie is poetry in song form (tee hee) but besides that there’s not much to say about Limp Bizkit that’s positive.
3.
These last three get really nitpicky so I apologize for that. This year in my opinion had the best trio of headliners the festival has ever had. All three are legendary bands that’ll be remembered and loved for years to come. The bands towards the bottom of each lineup are very hit and miss though which is partly why I put this year behind the #2 and #1 spot. Also the Saturday lineup for this year definitely got the short end of the stick. With exception to Judas Priest, Godsmack, Papa Roach, and In Flames there really aren’t any “must see” bands. There are a couple good not great bands and some bands that I actively avoided this year.
2.
Last year’s Rock On The Range is one I will never forget. It started a year ago today. I was so looking forward to seeing Soundgarden headline Friday. Then the literal day before the news came: Chris Cornell took his own life. The entire festival was dedicated to him, and a lot of bands did Soundgarden, Audio Slave, and Temple of Dog covers in his memory. Sad memories aside, this lineup is incredible. From top to to bottom again there aren’t many bad bands on this lineup. This year though earns bonus points for FINALLY getting Metallica to play! Punk legends The Offspring along with the infamous Primus also made their Rock On The Range debuts. There was a good combination of long time Rock On The Range favorites, and newcomers to bring in new fans to the festival. That and the tribute to Chris Cornell made this one of the best Rock On The Range weekends of all time. However, there is one that puts this just ever so slightly better in my opinion.
1.
This was the year where Rock On The Range reached its final form and became a full three day festival experience, and the lineup pulled no punches featuring legends like Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains, and Korn. This was also the only year Soundgarden played Rock On The Range and they were an amazing end to an already epic weekend. Most probably wouldn’t pick this lineup as the best, but for me personally it’s a gold mine. Every single row, even the very bottom, feature multiple bands that I love and own music from. You can’t see every band at a festival like this, so choosing who to see and not see was incredibly difficult. It was like choosing which child you liked the most! I always have a blast at Rock On The Range, but this year was particularly good to me and my musical preferences!
So that’s my ranking of each Rock On The Range based on the quality of their lineup! Although I’m not going to this year’s festival I’m already thinking about how great next year will be! I’ll just rob a bank or something so I can go to both Rock On The Range and Wrestlemania I guess. I’ll figure it out.
The Magical World of Dids 