Taking Back Sunday to headline Long Beach concerts

LONG BEACH, Calif. — If you’re a rock music fan, Eddie Reyes, guitarist for the popular alternative rock band Taking Back Sunday, has a message for you: “What a day Saturday will be at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach…fast, heavy rock mixed with fast, heavy speed! What more could you need?"

These words come with credibility as Taking Back Sunday is currently on a white-hot tour that is selling out Arenas and Theaters across the United States and Canada. And now race fans attending the 33rd Annual Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach will have the chance to see the multi-platinum band and enjoy their popular alternative rock sounds on Saturday night, April 14 at the Tecate Rock-N-Roar Concert Presented by the World Famous KROQ. The concert will be held on the Grand Prix’s large outdoor stage in front of the Terrace Theatre, adjacent to the Long Beach Arena at 6 p.m. It is a free concert for all Saturday race ticket holders.

Last year, the Tecate Rock-N-Roar Concert hosted Bad Religion to a record crowd. Other featured artists have included Pennywise, Everclear, Gin Blossoms, and the Goo Goo Dolls.

From Taking Back Sunday’s high-octane drumming and blazing syncopated riffs that rain down on “What’s It Feel Like to Be a Ghost"—the opening track on Louder Now—it’s clear that the album’s title couldn’t be more fitting. Faster, darker and harder than its 2004 predecessor, the best-selling Where You Want To Be, Louder Now is the album that bottles the lightning that this powerful, melodic hardcore band — whose members include Reyes, Fred Mascherino (guitarist/vocalist), Adam Lazzara (vocals), Mark O’Connell (drums) and Matt Rubano (bass) — generates whenever they hit the stage.

“We love our first two albums [Where You Want To Be and the 2002 debut Tell All Your Friends], but we were always told that our live show had more energy than the records," says Mascherino. “Our intention with Louder Now was to capture that energy. Keeping that in mind the whole time we made our record, we got some really intense results."

The band has played around “a bazillion" shows, by Mascherino’s reckoning, including the 2004 Warped Tour, British rock festivals Reading and Leeds, and a sold-out headlining tour. Things did not let up in 2005 when they did a co-headlining arena tour of North America with Jimmy Eat World and performed two sold-out shows in June at Britain’s Milton Keynes National Bowl with Green Day, each band playing to the biggest audiences of their careers.

The relentless touring has paid off with sold-out arena tours and delirious fan support. Combined, Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be have scanned more than 1.4 million copies and the latter debuted at Number Three on the Billboard Top 200, selling more than 163,000 copies its first week of release in July 2004. It has sold more than 700,000 copies to date. Effusive praise in Rolling Stone, Spin, and Entertainment Weekly soon followed, and Taking Back Sunday appeared on the cover of Alternative Press for the third time.

The Saturday concert is part of the race-weekend-long Tecate Cool Zone entertainment celebration. The Tecate Cool Zone also hosts the annual Tecate Fiesta Friday Concert presented by Super Estrella on the same stage at 6 p.m. April 13, starring Rock En Español rockers Enanitos Verdes. The Taking Back Sunday concert will immediately be followed by the Tecate Miss Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach Pageant.

Saturday ticket prices for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach begin at $40 for a Saturday-only general admission ticket that includes admission to all the day’s race events and the concert. Available for $120 is the three-day ticket option, which includes Saturday and Sunday reserved seating on upper levels of the grandstands. Limited pre-paid parking packages are available and can be purchased when ordering tickets.

In addition to the downtown walk-up service at 430 E. First Street in Long Beach, tickets can be ordered via credit card by using the toll-free ticket hotline, (888) 82-SPEED. Tickets can also be purchased on-line at www.longbeachgp.com or www.ticketmaster.com.

-TGPLB-