While pounding away on the rock radio festival circuit, the men of Third Eye Blind have their eyes on the real prize: their upcoming summer tour.

After hitting a fistful of radio shows (most of them on the West Coast), Third Eye Blind will team up with Vertical Horizon for the "Red Summer Sun" tour, which kicks off July 7 setting a course for dozens of 5,000-10,000 seat venues.

"Hopefully, there won't be seats though because I think that summer has this innate festival kind of atmosphere and there's this sense of the Bacchanalian, fertility, hippie-dippy kind of vibe," 3EB frontman Stephen Jenkins told MTV News last week of the tour. "That's what we're going to have on this tour. It's going to be that kind of feeling. It's going to be really a positive, joyful kind of festival atmosphere.

I think they'll fit

in well with that." [RealAudio]

That vibe would be drastically different from what the band is finding so far on its string of radio station sponsored shows. Third Eye Blind played one of the season's biggest such get-togethers, Washington, DC's HFStival, on Memorial Day weekend, and was smack dab in the middle of a hard-hitting lineup that included Rage Against The Machine, Slipknot, the Deftones, Godsmack, and other full-throttle acts.

Alternative radio has pretty much decided to not be alternative radio anymore. It wants to be new metal," Jenkins noted. "That kind of music really thrives on velocity, and Third Eye Blind is about a lot of things, but I think our thrust comes from melody and arrangement and songwriting.

Despite the differences, or perhaps because of them, 3EB's set was well received by the previously moshing crowd at the HFStival. "When you're coming off of the sonic attack of Slipknot or Cypress Hill, who played a straight-up hardcore

set, and GodsmackŠ I think we had the sense of being beloved. I think that the place lifted for us in a way we didn't expect.

While the band went over well with the crowd, the vibe was just as jovial backstage where Jenkins and his 3EB cohorts mingled and bonded with the rest of the bill. While the experience was a rewarding one, 3EB has six more radio show stops, and some are bound to be more enjoyable than others. "Some of them are necessary evils, and some radio shows are really fun. Some of them are things where you owe somebody a favor or something so you are fulfilling an obligation," Jenkins explained. "The HFStival was just all these bands hanging out together in a hotel lobby bar with a wedding going on nearby.

Once those obligations are out of the way, Third Eye Blind will hit the road with Vertical Horizon for the "Red Summer Sun" tour on July 7. Here's where to catch it (as always, all tour dates are subject to change):

• 7/7 - St. Paul, MN @ Roy

Wilkins Auditorium