TOTAL FEAST!!

We're just over two weeks away from this year's Total Fest. We're extremely proud of the line-up and couldn't be more excited to see everyone again this summer. It's a testament to our mission statement that bands and people from all over the country, continent, and globe make special trips to Missoula for Total Fest each year. It's really humbling.

By now you know that we do everything that we can to keep Total Fest an all-ages, not for profit, volunteer driven festival. This requires additional costs on our part. We're not here to massage some guilt ridden sympathies from you but to acknowledge all the hard work our sponsors and volunteers put in to help keep Total Fest rolling all these years.

Our biggest fund raiser and what is essentially our Total Kick-off happens this Sunday, August 4 at BigaPizza. Between 5 and 8 PM all you have to do is pull together $10 or so and head down to Biga for one of the best deals of the summer. That's right. $10 gets you all you can eat pizza and salad. This isn't some cardboard crust, ketchup and string cheese pizza, either. Bob Marshall and his fabulous staff compose some of the most blissful creations. Try the Caramelized Goat (caramelized onions, goat cheese, fresh herbs, mozzarella, roasted garlic & olive oil), or the Fennel Marmalade , Bacon & Gouda (housemade fennel marmalade, local bacon, gouda cheese, mozzarella & olive oil), or the Mushroom and Arugula (portabella and button mushrooms, herbed mascarpone, roasted garlic, mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, arugula & olive oil), or the Meatball Verde (broccoli rabe, local beef, herbed mascarpone, mozzarella, garlic, olive oil & housemade cilantro-jalapeno sauce). Hell, with this deal you get to try them all and whatever other magical creations Biga has in store for you.

Salivate.

Bob's been a long time supporter of Total Fest. Volumen have played a handful of times, including the inaugural Total Fest that birthed all of this craziness. Bacon &Egg have played a few times over the years as well. It's been an awesome and rewarding relationship. We count on the proceeds to help us out with venue costs, extra staffing to keep things all-ages, pay bands, buy food for bands and volunteers, etc. etc. We'll also have PBR on tap for $1 per glass so save a little room for beer.

Like last year, the VFW will open up their doors for additional seating. Directly following Total Feast will be an rollicking show, featuring three local bands that have deep ties to Total Fest: The Hounds, Hammshandy, and a Bauhaus cover band. Who says Sundays are quiet?

BACON. EGG.

The excellent, weird world that Bacon and Egg inhabit is a hard thing to completely grasp. It's part jams. Part beats. Part falsetto screams. Part a lot of things. All of it, grounded in riffs, poppy metal and prog, and a weird fascination with all that awesome fantasy imagery.

This year, Bacon and Egg made the ballsy move of going into the studio for months on end to create a record that attempted to put some kind of enclosure around the hundreds of ideas that are generally contained in a single song. The resulting All In One Basket is a surprisingly cohesive, expansive piece of work. And I say that as a fan who's enjoyed Bacon and Egg since they first started 10 or so years back. I thought they were more a live band, you know. Not always translating super well to a record. But this All In One Basket, with its Priest inspired cover art, is good. It'll suck you in, and you can tell these guys worked at this, forced some edits, made hard decisions, but didn't make a spare album whatsoever. Anyhow, Bacon and Egg, man.

One of my all-time favorite moments at Total Fest was when Bacon and Egg played at Jay's Downstairs at Total Fest II. They told everybody they knew, got a crowd and started the night. They began exactly on time at 8pm, I think (which bands never really did at Jay's) and got people stoked. Said it gave 'em more time to party.  Consummate professionals.

Second Fiddle to No One: Total Fest 2012, Round 2

By now, you're bubbling as much as we are. Things are really coming together, and the line-up grows more exciting by the day. We're working hard to solidify everything. If you're waiting to hear from us -- our apologies. We'll have everything set in stone over this week.

We're up to our second blast this week. Couldn't be happier. It's an impressive list that should have your rock-fist pumping in no time. As with the last one, we'll follow this up with more detailed descriptions, observations, delusions, analogies, etc. over the following days. Stay tuned.

There are some old friends in here, stirred around with a few homegrown miscreants, shaken and topped with exotic tastes from the east and midwest. It's a list that you can't afford to gloss over. A fair blend of the weird, loud, and fun ...

Ready.

Go.

Installment number 2 forTotal Fest 2012.

Abe Coley Missoula, MT

Bacon and Egg Missoula, MT

The Best Westerns Missoula, MT

Big Eyes Seattle, WA

Bugs Portland, Or

Criminal Code Olympia, WA

Dan Deacon Baltimore, MD

The Funeral & The Twilight Minneapolis, MN

Gay Witch Abortion Minneapolis, MN

Guantanamo Baywatch Oakland, CA

Iron Lung Seattle, WA

Lecherous Gaze Bay Area, CA

Lozen Tacoma, WA

Walls Seattle, WA

White Walls Cincinatti, OH

BOARDS, CLOTHES AND SMILES: MISSOULA'S EoW SHREDS TOTAL FEST

One of the great things about the Missoula businesses that help support Total Fest is that many of them are owned and fronted by some of the same people who help craft the landscape of Missoula's music scene. Edge of the World is one of the handfuls of sponsors whose manager Chris Bacon is not only a fixture of Missoula's punk past and present (Volumen, Bacon & Egg) but also is on the front lines of Missoula and Montana's skateboarding / snowboarding culture. It's a hard gig to maintain, but Edge of the World and BOMB Sk8boards puts their best feet forward to provide a statewide support network for boarders, while also keeping them in some of the finest duds this side of the Mississippi. If you're in need of anything, you should consider stopping by EoW and having them help you equip yourself before saddling yourself into the recliner that has seen better days and perusing the internet for a quick fix.

BACON AND EGG: SIZZLING TOTAL FEST
The dudes of Bacon and Egg are a known quantity in these parts. Chris Bacon's been the president of the Missoula Skatepark Association since it's inception, and helped them raise over a million dollars to build our town's skatepark. Bacon plays keys and yelps in Volumen, and runs our skateshop, Edge of the World, too. Bob Marshall's the man behind the best Pizza in the west, Biga Pizza. Bob's also the drummer in Volumen. They've been in Missoula bands collectively for probably around 30 years.

Bacon and Egg is the band that grew out to the fact that once Volumen practices end, these guys wanted to continue rocking, and work out some of their own songs in the process. It's an excellent drum-machine driven, church keyboard fortified, guitar-blaze, replete with double vocal duties, songs about the malls and dirt bikes of their youths, and a hell of a lot of fun.