Tom Morello's Power to the People Festival took over Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland on Saturday, October 3, after selling out within minutes when tickets went on sale four months earlier, per WMAR 2 News. According to List Wire, the show started at 1 p.m. ET and ran for more than nine and a half hours, ending with an all-star finale. The day's most surprising moment came when Jack Black's Black Sabbath tribute band Jack Sabbath — featuring Morello's son Roman on guitar, Scott Ian's son Revel on bass, teenage drummer Yoyoka Soma, and keyboardist Hugo Weiss — played a three-song set that closed with actual Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler emerging to play 'War Pigs' with them, as Rolling Stone reports.

A cover band sharing a stage with a founding member of the band it honors is the kind of collision devoted fans rarely see. According to Rolling Stone (via Yahoo Entertainment), the tribute act opened with Ozzy Osbourne's 'Mr. Crowley' and Black Sabbath's 'The Wizard' before Butler joined for 'War Pigs,' and Butler later praised teenage drummer Yoyoka Soma on social media, calling her 'an amazing drummer.' Rolling Stone also traces the band's odd origin: Jack Sabbath debuted in 2023 playing 'Mr. Crowley' at the 100th birthday party of Tom Morello's mother, Mary, and in 2025 recreated the 'Mr. Crowley' video for Osbourne's Back to the Beginning farewell concert, with Black delivering Osbourne's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech in between.

njarts.net reports Bruce Springsteen sang Bob Dylan's 'Chimes of Freedom' with Joan Baez, calling her 'one of my great inspirations' and 'a woman who has been a fighting and positive voice for social change, for justice and equality, in every decade since the 1960s.' Per njarts.net, Springsteen's eight-song sequence included 'Clampdown' and 'The Ghost of Tom Joad' with Morello, 'Fortunate Son' with Dave Matthews and Nathaniel Rateliff, and 'Rockin' in the Free World' with Dave Grohl — during which Matthews sang rewritten lyrics referring to President Trump as 'a liar and a thief.' Rolling Stone's gallery also captures surprise guest Stephen Stills joining 'For What It's Worth,' a moment njarts.net notes as a highlight, before dozens of performers closed with John Lennon's 'Power to the People.'

This was billed as more than a concert. According to WMAR 2 News, VoteRiders CEO Lauren Kunis said the organization would put 'every dollar we raise on Saturday to immediate use,' and the group aimed to reach 10 million voters ahead of November, including a letter-writing campaign to first-time voters in Pennsylvania held during the festival. Per Rolling Stone, HeadCount was also on site helping fans register, making the sold-out crowd itself part of the event's purpose.

For fans who missed it, WMAR 2 News reports MSNOW livestreamed the festival on YouTube starting at 1 p.m., meaning the Jack Sabbath moment and the Springsteen finale remain watchable online. Whether Butler's cameo signals further on-stage pairings between legacy metal figures and the tribute bands that keep their catalogs alive is unknown, but the festival's formula of surprise guests and civic tie-ins is one Morello has now demonstrably pulled off, and the ticket-revenue pipeline to VoteRiders and HeadCount gives any future edition a template to build on.