Godsmack have stood in front of some enormous crowds over the years, but nothing in Sully Erna‘s career had prepared him for what he saw in Poland last week. The band headlined the 32nd edition of the Pol’and’Rock Festival, the sprawling, free open-air event once known as Woodstock Festival Poland, on Thursday, July 30 at the Czaplinek-Broczyno airfield, and the sheer human scale of it left the frontman genuinely shaken.
A day later, on July 31, Erna hopped onto social media with a video message he clearly needed to get off his chest. He began by praising the band’s broader European run before landing on the number that had knocked him sideways. Erna said in part (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“I had to tell you guys about this show that we did last night. And although all of Europe has been really lighting up for us, and we’re so happy about that because we’ve been doing a lot of work out here, and they are showing up by the thousands in every country, and all these countries have been great. Athens, Serbia, Bulgaria, top-notch everywhere we’ve played. But last night, we did a show in Poland at the Pol’and’Rock fest, and we headlined this festival that drew seven hundred thousand people. That’s a real f**king number. You can look it up. And, yeah, so pretty surreal. Not even sure it even happened, but it did. And I just gotta say, holy f**king s**t. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Insanity.”
What struck Erna most, though, wasn’t the size of the crowd — it was the reason all those people were there in the first place. He recounted a conversation with the man behind the festival, who explained how the whole thing came to be:
“The most heartfelt part about this for me is when I was speaking to the promoter and the owner of the festival, he was telling me how this whole thing started, and he visited some children’s hospitals, and these kids were on the floor. They didn’t even have furniture, and he kind of got together with everybody, and he just said, ‘You know what? As a community, we can’t allow this to happen. It’s not who we are as people. It’s not who we are as a country.’ And he started reaching out to all these sponsorships. So this entire festival every year that draws more than a half a million people is completely free to the fans, and a hundred percent of the proceeds above that goes to all the children’s hospitals. I don’t know if it gets any more honorable than that for me.”
From there, Erna turned his awe into a kind of challenge to the wider industry, holding the festival up as proof that music events don’t have to be built around profit:
“So I just wanna say props to the Pol’and’Rock fest and Jurek [Taborowski] for doing such an amazing job. This is a top-notch festival, and I could not believe how big this was. It was two and a half miles deep, the audience. And I’m only saying this because I’ve never f**king seen anything like that in my life, and I’m pretty sure I never will again in my career. So I hope this sets a standard to the other promoters out there and helps teach them how this doesn’t always have to be about money and huge profit. Sometimes it’s about the communities getting together, doing the right thing and sharing this beautiful gift of music that we have to share with all these people. And when you do it right, they show up in the hundreds of thousands. Even Woodstock back in ’99 was two hundred and fifty thousand people. I thought that was gonna be the biggest crowd we ever played in front of — until last night.”
The festival Erna is describing is one of Europe’s great cultural phenomena. Pol’and’Rock was founded in 1995 by Jerzy Owsiak, who came home to Poland fired up after attending Woodstock ’94 in upstate New York and set out to build something with the same spirit. What started as a thank-you to the volunteers of his charity work has since ballooned into one of the largest open-air music events on the continent, drawing crowds that reach toward three-quarters of a million to the airfield in Czaplinek every summer, all of it free, with no tickets and free camping, and a program spanning rock, punk, metal and folk across multiple stages. Over three decades, it has become a byword for community and humanitarian commitment as much as for music.
Professionally shot footage of Godsmack‘s headline set, uploaded by “KręciołaTV” on YouTube, can be viewed down below.
The Polish triumph comes during a period of change behind Godsmack‘s kit. The band’s current lineup pairs Erna on vocals and guitar with bassist Robbie Merrill, guitarist Sam Koltun, and former Dream Theater drummer Mike Mangini. Mangini made his live debut with the group on June 12 at the Morton Amphitheater in Riverside, Missouri, stepping in after the sudden exit of Wade Murff. Murff himself had only joined that spring, coming aboard in early May as the replacement for longtime drummer Shannon Larkin, who walked away in late 2024 alongside guitarist Tony Rombola, with the pair citing a desire to stop touring. Murff logged more than a dozen shows with Godsmack between May 8 at the Welcome To Rockville festival in Daytona Beach, Florida and May 30 in Houston, Texas.
Godsmack recently announced another round of U.S. shows for October as part of its ongoing “The Rise Of Rock” world tour. The newly added dates will feature Dorothy as direct support and special guest throughout the run.
