We just (7/28/15) received the following bad news from Weedeater's booking agent, Erik Jarvis from Tone Deaf Touring:
"All of us in Weedeater camp sincerely regret that we cannot make it to Total Fest this year. The organizers were great and we were very much looking forward, however for reasons beyond our control we had to postpone our whole western tour, including this show. We know it will be a fantastic time and we hope to see you there next year!"
Something about the south and the doom. It's like Birmingham in the late sixties or something. What is it? The zeitgeist? The water? Fried food? The air? Other elements? I, mean, it's the people, obviously, but you know what I'm saying. What else? I guess humidity, whiskey distilleries, good pot growing conditions, disaffection, and strong musical traditions and you've got some of the country's most fertile, err, topsoil for this stuff.
I think filthy Jim Anderson's responsible playing me my first Weedeater. It was their .... And Justice For Y'all record, which still kills me.
Weedeater basically are about slab after hefty slab of riff, pounded home with drums, bass and growled over by a man possessed. They're from Wilmington, NC. They've been at it solidly since 1998, have got through some lineup changes, but really it's steadily been the same, deeply satisfying stuff since they started, and they've just mined deeper and deeper into the riffs.
Lots of good interviews out there with "Dixie" Dave Collins, who also was in the weird and excellent 90's group Buzzov'en, who along with some other southern groups like Eyehategod and Acid Bath, etc. were some of the first to get called "sludge" metal. You know, if you're into the historical side of all this stuff. You can still get passes for Total Fest here. We'll see you in August, right?
We've just released our first set of fifty passes for Total Fest XIV, August 20-22 in Missoula, Montana. We've announced about 3/4 of the lineup, and we've got some doozies still to come. You can click on the "Purchase Tickets" tab above, or use this link right here to get there. Your choice.
To honor that this is our fourteenth and final year, and to give those of you who have been with us for all of it, or most of it a sweet deal, we've put the first fifty passes up for $50 apiece. These are selling through fast, so we encourage folks not to snooze, eh?
Additionally, we've built a couple of packages, with shirts/records of Total Fest bands, to kind of give you the full experience. Eventually, if we haven't sold through everything with passes, we will put up single show and single-day tickets, however, from an ease of operation and cost standpoint, our passes are really structured for maximum, uh, (I really want to say "Overdrive" here...) maximum efficiency.
Some of the background on Total Fest from a financial standpoint is that the folks who organize the festival do that as volunteers, and all the sponsorships, pass and ticket sales go to pay the bands who play. There's no other thing we do with dollars that come in. It's a pretty solid amount of work, but we love it. We count to a huge degree on the fact that folks "take the journey" with us, and whether or not you know all these bands, you trust that we were thoughtful about selecting the bands and performers, and kept an eye on programming a diverse festival that blows minds. We'll see you in August!
Dedicating a few paragraphs here to a band like Volumen is a kind of ridiculous thing in a number of ways, here's why: I can't think of any other Missoula band over the last roughly 20 years that inspired the same kind of love, had the same kind of weird pockets of mostly upper-teenage boys willing to put duct tape Vs on themselves and offer their allegiance, and that's released as great a body of music. Like the Fireballs of Freedom, there are probably thousands of stories to go along with the band, and they're better told in person where the inflections, facial expressions, hand gestures, Prince impersonations all can get their due.
Volumen started at some point in the middle-latish '90s when childhood friends Shane Hickey and Doug Smith decided to end their Laramie, Wyoming band (Some Kind of Cream) and move to a weird mountain hamlet called Missoula, Montana. Shane and Doug used to play along with a drum machine, drew as much inspiration from Motherbaugh/Casale as they did Gene/Dean, and Bowie. Shane was and is a science fiction reader and Doug used to be a member of Up With People. Like a lot of bands without legitimate, human rhythm sections, their audience was "under capitalized."
Volumen a Total Fest IV in 2005.
Luck would intervene in the form of three individuals, Bryan Hickey, Bob Marshall and Chris Bacon who would help to form a five-piece band with five of the most psychically-meant-to-be-playing-music-together individuals that really I've ever encountered. From there, lots of things would happen in quick succession: They'd record their first official output, How Do You Spell, go on tour, and begin regularly playing at Jay's Upstairs often, using an ironing board as keyboard stand. That all would continue for a lot of years. They would purchase an old ambulance with a working light rack, install an Atari and drive it around, getting approximately 9 miles to the gallon. They'd regularly record, tour, play in Missoula, and around the region etc.
Food shopping in Estonia.
In 2002, at the urging of Bryan Giles from then Last of the Juanitas, now Red Fang (who said something like, "they're like the Beatles, man. You should put something out!"), I encouraged the band to go record with Tim Green in San Francisco, and released a kind of 30 minute mini-LP of their stuff called Cries From Space. I still love how Tim recorded them. In 2003, Andy Smetanka and I helped book/roadie for an Eastern European (Baltic) tour, that started in Finland and went as far south as Vilnius Lithuania. they learned the Finish and Latvian National Anthems and played them amazingly, in a highly-engineered (by Smetanka and me) attempt to win the interest of a stoic audiences. It turned out not to be terribly necessary, but was fun to watch regardless. As time went on lives became filled with different family and work responsibilities, and I don't know what the official word was, but they stopped playing much, and then altogether in 2009 about six years ago.
Volumen Army Recruits.
Like I said, Volumen inspired fan loyalty like I've never seen. And that loyalty translated to large audiences who'd regularly turn out for Volumen shows. They bankrolled the Baltic tour largely on money saved from shows. I think the fan loyalty can be attributed to simple things: 1) they're a really tight, well-rehearsed band with a great sense of melody 2) they're fun as hell to dance/sing/party along to. When I decided this would be the last Total Fest a few months ago, I also decided that having Volumen play it would help it go out with the kind of bang I wanted. Volumen played the first Total Fest in 2002, and I'd be damned if I wasn't going to ask them to consider it. Luckily, they said yes!
Some stats:
-Number of people officially enrolled in the Volumen Army: 54
-Last time in Estonia: 2003.
-Last album: Skipper of Reverses (2009)
-Last show, April 28, 2009.
-# of Volumen-owned/operated businesses that directly support Total Fest: 4
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
TOTALITY: INCOMING
Whether you are a Western Montanan, anti-government type from an enclave like Noxon (MT), or a Spokanite, looking to get away from the town with the gayest...yet weirdly anti-gayest mayor ever (or, we guess "former mayor"), Total Fest VIII is anticipating you, and awaits you with arms spread wide. Or as wide as you could expect from friendly Missoulians who spend the better part of 9 months making sure these three days rock hard as fuck.
It's hard to talk globally about a festival that goes to painstaking lengths to choose individual bands that we think represent the best shit going on in music currently, but hell, what's the harm: I honestly believe that we are proof that a festival can be thoroughly non-commercial, but feature some awesome talent that you'd be hard pressed to find at any larger/expensive/bogus fest. This year we've got rap, folk, punk, hardcore, metal and boogie rock, and everything in between and it's all unified by the same oneness of purpose: Quality. If you're these parts, please come out and bring a friend with you! Thank you, and we'll see you at the Badlander Thursday, August 20th!
Thursday, August 13, 2009
JIGGYWATTS CONFIRMS! Missoulian by birth, Spokanite by choice, James Two (AKA "James Nasset," of the musical-as-all-hell Missoula Nasset clan) is half of the hip-hop duo known as Jiggywatts. The other half, Locke (AKA "Andrew Walters") is from the gritty, self-proclaimed capital of the "Inland Empire," Spokane, Washington, the current home of Jiggywatts.
Jiggywatts' rhymes and stories flow, mesmerizingly, like a calm wind over a wheat field, or something equally E-WA. Rooted in less-serious subject matter than the solo work of Locke and James two, this group has a great knack for self-reference, and making the listener hungry for pizza. Recent tours/shows have seen Jiggywatts opening for Akil from Jurassic 5, and Crown City Rockers, among others. We're stoked to finally have hip-hop at Total Fest, and we're ultra-stoked to see Jiggywatts!
Sunday, August 9, 2009
LOZEN: IN! (This Total Transmission from Organizer Lou) These Tacoma, WA gals, Justine Valdez (drums) and Hozoji Matheson-Margullis (guitar/bass), return for a third time to Total Fest. Hooray! Prepare yourself to be lulled into a false sense of whats-to-come-next by body-swooning melody; pulsing, almost tribal, drumming. Serenity is suddenly annihilated as crushing guitar, and crashing cymbals bear down upon you. Rhythmic chanting will swerve you through sweet melodies, only to crash into more rhythmic chanting. Then there you are again, right back where it all started... with your body swaying from side to side, and left wondering if you didn’t just help summon the spirit of Lozen, herself. And like their namesake, who led hundreds of native woman and children to safety, Lozen, the band, wants to take you on a journey that is for your own good as well. Let them. You won’t be sorry.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
JAPANTHER CONFIRM! "Say you love satan! I love you mom!" Seems like a wicked combination of expletives, adjectives and other shit's always on deck when somebody's writing about Japanther, whose noise blast sound has grown into its own melodic, punk rock deal over the past three years. In 2009 they sound more like the Beach Boys and the Ramones, versus the Screamers --a band I regularly compared them to when they started. They still like to confront, get in your face, encourage behaviour changing, room-cleaning, swimming, etc. but now they are accomplished songwriters and Japanther's melodies are some of the hummed-est around this household. Start with their Skuffed Up My Huffy LP and then work through the catalog. Stop at Master of Pigeons and spin I-10, head over to Wolfenswan and get your noise-skuzz fill, work back to Operating Manual for Life on Earth and be greeted by the voice of Jimmy Carter. It's an ambitious, eclectic, varied body of work these guys have whipped up in their short career.
And the music's only about 75% of the deal with the band. Every time one turns around, there's a wild audio/video/visual/puppet art blowout going on at the Whitney or at PS122 or in Marfa... or at Art Basel and invariably, Japanther are putting something together with Dan Graham (Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty) or a handful of other seriously creative types. Japanther played Total Fest I in 2002, and since then they've gone around the world a few times, played hundreds of shows (recently with the Dillinger 4 and Against Me!), but they continue keep Total Fest and Missoula directly on their radar. We love Japanther. They play from their guts, they do what they feel, and they work like mad to make their music and art happen, and on their own terms to boot.
