The Street Fair In Des Moines

Recently, I bitched about the lack of promotion of Iowa’s first music festival with an indie-rock bent and, more to the point, of how I was left off the mailing list when it came time for comp passes to the event.
In an almost spiritual manner, a pair of tickets to the event mysteriously arrived at the Totale household, which then prompted another logistical matter: what to do with the kids. Thanks to some flexible grandparents, one of the two nights that the festival was running became open, allowing the wife and me to check out The Flaming Lips on the opening night of the inaugural 80/35 Music Festival.
On that aforementioned post, I also complained about how the festival organizers seemed to be excluding the rest of the state, not only with some poor promotion outside of the Des Moines metro area, but also in advising outsiders how to get there.
We found this out first hand, following the directions to the event verbatim and still having to stop by a Quick Trip to get directions. The 80/35 website provided wonderful directions on how to get to the zoo, but failed to put in a critical “turn left at Ingersoll” in their text in order for anyone to get to the festival from the East side of the state. I guess they didn’t want the ruffians dirtying up their gentrified downtown district.
Which is, by the way, most awesome. Downtown Des Moines has transformed itself into a fairly hip little urban center where the beautiful people and disenchanted youth can come to play, hang out, and smoke cigarettes. I’m a little jealous of the way it turned out and hope that, thanks to our recent water damage, our own city leaders will model their own urban renewal projects after the Des Moines area. At the same time, the Des Moines area was planned well before we ever thought that floods could be severe enough that they could actually reach some of the landmark buildings, so who knows what Cedar Rapids will consider during their quest to rebuild.
The festival itself consisted of three stages: one a free stage with local talent, the other with more recognizable acts (Cracker played at this one when we arrived) and the main stage that was sectioned off, as it required a ticket to get in. Throughout the streets (which were closed off) were vendors of varying degree (Homer Records had a booth) and youngsters between 18-34 in varying degrees of intoxication. This was promoted as a family event, and while we didn’t bring ours, many interesting people brought their own kids so that they could intermingle with the drunk young adults.
The show itself was well attended and most of the drunks were well behaved. Having been to a few festival shows before, I can safely say that I am too old for such shenanigans as managing around a wide birth of drunks isn’t necessarily my bag. It won’t be the last time that I’m in such a predicament, I’m sure, but if there’s a good movie on television and a semi-popular band that I may be remotely interested in seeing live, it will be a close vote on which choice gets my presence.
The Flaming Lips are more than a band that I’m remotely interested in; they’ve been a part of my own soundtrack for over twenty years. So we braved the drunks, laughed at their retardness, and even on a few occasions, poked them with sticks. They all were fairly placid and we only witness one young woman being escorted out of the festival. Although I tend to despise drunks, I dislike smokers even more. Since my wife and I are both former smokers, cutting the habit has turned us into Nazi’s. We’re not afraid to glare at those that cross our paths and we were anticipating Iowa’s recent cigarette ban to mean that nobody can smoke anywhere. I explained to my wife that perhaps the government considers being outdoors as a smoker’s reprieve, but we still gave the hairy eyeball to the tattooed douchbag standing next to us that was insistent on chain smoking throughout the night.
Smokers, drunks and silly youthful exuberance aside, we both agreed that the trip was $4 a gallon worthy and would attend again…provided that 80/35 can maintain a high caliber of participating bands.
It also seems to be competing with another festival that was going on at the same time: Lazerfest. My wife knew about that one, and was actually excited at the idea of a Stone Temple Pilots reunion. I guess that she wasn’t alone as I overheard another concertgoer lament that he wouldn’t be attending the Saturday night festivities because his friends were dragging him to the Lazerfest show in the area. While these two events are polar opposite of each other musically, one would think that they’d want to pace the festivals properly as to not take potential audiences away from each other.
Another complaint: I kept repeating the phrase “plenty of free-parking” over and over because the festival’s website gave no directions to parking ramps or anything, coyly suggesting that there was ample parking around the event. Actually, there was, but thanks to some endless construction downtown, blocked streets, and a zany layout, we circled the event a few times just to find a suitable parking garage. Ironically, it wasn’t that far from the main drag, so would it have killed them to provide a few lines for direction or, at the very least, an address to where the public parking ramp was?
Again, it seems to be another example of the clique behavior that the organizers seemed to maintain for this festival (the initials “DSM” fit prominently between the “80” and “35” in their stupid little banner). If we ever get our shit together here in Eastern Iowa, lets hope that we can be a little more inclusive in our hospitality, a little more generous in our marketing, and a little more detailed in our directions.
Until then, we’ll still have to contend with those creeps in the capital city.
The picture above is the dude that stood in front of us. If that ain’t enough to creep you out, consider that halfway through the show, he went topless. The reason why is because some twisted fuck who thought he was being clever offered him $20 for the shirt. The offer was good enough for him to accept even though the rest of us who had to witness this dude shirtless afterwards should have been equally compensated.