Saturday night, tens of thousands of people filled San Bernardino's Glen Helen Amphitheater to hear Tool play a song about California sinking into the sea. While the band hasn't released a note of new music in 11 years, their audience has only snowballed, and the group used a date on their current tour to play their largest non-festival headlining show ever. For their part, they delivered a whopping 15-song set – their longest of the tour.

This victory lunge also meant a long parade of high-profile alterna-metal opening acts that played from the broiling afternoon to just around sundown. These bands, like Tool, found unlikely success in the unlikely Nineties performing headbanger fare with varying degrees of uncompromising strangeness.

...Tool's visuals had to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and, luckily, they only get better as the band's popularity catches up to their song durations. Blue lights shot into the night sky for "The Grudge," lasers scattered into chaos for "Ænema," kaleidoscopic animations throbbed in time to the screams and car alarm guitar of "Third Eye." [Christopher R. Weingarten for Rolling Stone]