That’s right, we are back! The Gathering of the Juggalos celebrated their 25th anniversary and somehow I am celebrating my 15th anniversary of attending the festival. How time flies. The Gathering was packed this year and had a better lineup than the last few years since this was the “Gathering of Legends”. It was also a particularly weird one for me because I had some personal life shit going on which slightly affected my coverage, but I still shot nearly 4000 photos in four days so I don’t think you should complain too much.
But yeah things didn’t start great as my flight got delayed three times and for some reason my rental car place closed at 5:30pm so I had to spend way more than planned on a fucking rental car. By the time I got to the festival I was just super fucking grumpy and I probably took a dozen photos in the first hour I was there. Luckily I ran into a bunch of the juggalo friends I have made over the last 15 years and that really cheered me up. A lot of times I tell myself I keep going back because I don’t want to miss a year before I publish my juggalo book, but I know a huge part of it is just getting to see the same insane clowns every year.
The first musician I photographed was Lardi B who I took some pretty fun photos of last year, but since I started my website over from scratch you can’t actually see them on here, but they are probably on Brooklyn Vegan if you do some digging. (That being said, if you are looking for any of my NSFW juggalo photos they are all on my paysite Girls of DBB.) Anyway, Lardi B was pretty fun and then I got to photograph Onyx again. I photographed them several times because I fucking love Onyx. I loved them when I was 13 and I still listen to them all the time to this day. The photos I took kinda suck cause the stage lighting at the Gathering is terrible and also I am a bad photographer, but like, I had a blast.
The first night was headlined by RA The Rugged Man who I have also photographed a bunch of times. I only know a couple of his songs but we got some mutual friends and he puts on a hell of a show always. You only get to photograph the musicians for three songs at the Gathering (and most festivals) but he pulled a bunch of juggalos up on stage during his fourth song so I just went up there and shot some more photos and they ended up being some of the most fun photos of the night.
The Chapter 17 party was late night that night so I had to stick around for that because my old pal Kev Buc was DJing with Ouija Mac. I love both those guys so of course I was gonna go, but I had an hour to kill so I went over to “Juggalesque” which as you would imagine is a portmanteau of juggalo and burlesque and it is exactly what you would expect. I was too tired to put any effort into that so I just hung out backstage and took photos of the girls back there and took a couple shots from the side of the stage. It’s fine. I made it about an hour into the Chapter 17 party before I had to go to sleep but I did have a good time hanging out with that crew.
Currently I am at a Bob Evans in the Columbus Ohio Suburbs eating a salad with a pancake side because it came with bread and they let me substitute for a stack of pancakes which is absolutely reckless. I don’t know why I told you that except to let you know that I gotta go to the airport now so you get to go look at a bunch of photos now. Just a heads up some of these are mildly NSFW. I am gonna paywall all the actual nudity but maybe don’t look at these in public. Gonna try and get (almost) everything up by Wednesday because I am going on vacation and I want this off my plate so expect a lot of rapid fire posts.
Now without further ado, I present you with about 150 photos from day one of the 25th annual Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH!
