Live Review: Power to the People Festival @ Merriweather Post Pavilion — 10/3/26

Tom Morello has spent most of his career arguing that music can do more than entertain. At the inaugural Power to the People Festival, held Oct. 3 at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, he put that idea into practice on a scale large enough to bring together several generations of rock, hip-hop and protest music for a marathon day built as much around civic engagement as the performances themselves.

Curated by Morello and billed as a nonpartisan celebration of peace, love, justice, music, and community action, Power to the People arrived roughly a month before the 2026 midterm elections. The premise was straightforward: ordinary people have the ability to shape their communities and country not only on Election Day, but through organizing, art, and direct participation throughout the year.

Performances were split between Merriweather’s main Pavilion stage and the Chrysalis stage, with a lineup spanning genres and generations. Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and Stephen Stills shared the bill with Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, Killer Mike, Dropkick Murphys, Brittany Howard, The Linda Lindas, and Morello himself.

The size of the names on the poster was impressive, but the real character of the day came from how freely those names mixed together. Traditional artist-by-artist festival boundaries regularly disappeared.

Jack Black fronted a group of young musicians as Jack Sabbath, a Black Sabbath tribute that eventually brought original Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler to the stage. Members of Cypress Hill, Public Enemy and Run-DMC flowed into Morello’s afternoon set alongside Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, grandson, and Dave Grohl. A one-off ensemble dubbed Suns of Soundgarden brought together Taylor Momsen, Mike McCready, Matt Cameron, Robbie Mangano, and Morello for a compact three-song Soundgarden tribute.

Later in the day, Joan Baez, Nathaniel Rateliff, Dave Matthews, and Stephen Stills turned individual sets into collaborations of their own before Springsteen closed the night with an expanding cast of musicians.

That collaborative approach was no accident. Morello has long treated rock, punk, hip-hop and folk protest traditions as branches of the same family tree, and Power to the People made those connections literal.

During Morello’s afternoon set, the stage could shift from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave material into Run-DMC’s “It’s Tricky,” the Aerosmith/Run-DMC crossover “Walk This Way,” Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” and, with Grohl joining the party, KISS’ “Rock and Roll All Nite.” It felt less like a conventional festival set than a live history lesson in the ways rock and hip-hop have borrowed from one another, challenged one another and, at their best, pushed audiences toward the same kind of communal release.

But Power to the People was designed so that the activism did not stop at the edge of the stage.

Behind Merriweather’s lawn, the festival’s Freedom Village brought nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, and community partners together in an area devoted to voter participation, grassroots organizing, education, mutual aid, and other forms of civic involvement. Rather than simply telling the audience to get involved, the festival put organizations in front of them that offered concrete ways to do it.

The causes represented in Freedom Village were broad. HeadCount, VoteRiders, and Rock the Vote focused on voter registration and participation. The ACLU represented civil liberties, while the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights and We Are CASA focused on immigrant and working-class communities. Reproductive-rights organizations included the DC Abortion Fund and Noise for Now, while The Sentencing Project addressed criminal-justice reform and Trans Maryland represented Maryland’s transgender community.

Other participating organizations worked on suicide prevention, food insecurity, domestic workers’ rights, youth homelessness, climate issues, national parks, government accountability, and support for family farmers.

A portion of proceeds from festival tickets, along with 100 percent of net VIP-ticket proceeds, was designated for VoteRiders and HeadCount. The broader Power to the People Festival Fund was established to support organizations working in civic engagement, social justice, and human rights.

Musically, that philosophy produced a day in which history kept colliding with the present.

Watch the incredible All-Star Jam finale of the inaugural Power to the People Festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD via YouTube. (Courtesy of Rick Stiene – The Concert Guy! YouTube channel)

Joan Baez could share a stage with artists born decades after she first became synonymous with protest music. Stephen Stills could return to “For What It’s Worth” nearly 60 years after Buffalo Springfield recorded it. Public Enemy’s East Coast hip-hop could collide with Cypress Hill’s West Coast sound inside a Tom Morello set. And Springsteen could finish the night with Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and John Lennon’s “Power to the People,” surrounded by musicians who had spent the previous nine hours moving on and off those same stages.

For a festival built around the idea of collective action, that may have been the most effective statement it made. Power to the People was not presented as one artist delivering a message to an audience. It was a day of artists, activists, and fans sharing the same space, with the music serving as the common language.

What follows is a chronological look at some of what passed in front of my camera. (All images are copyrighted and courtesy of Ari Strauss)