May 4, 2003

When the In Crowd Is 100,000 Fans Strong

HEN the Lollapalooza Festival of alternative rock packed up its multiple stages and temporary-tattoo booths in 1997 and the Lilith Fair tour of women's bands wound up its last singalong in 1999, some rock fans thought they saw the end of an era. The frenzy that ended Woodstock 1999 with vandalism, fires and looting seemed to confirm it. The summer rock festival, gathering fans of diverse bands into one giant crowd for a day or a weekend of musical overload, was becoming a relic in the United States — unlike Europe, where events like the Reading Festival in England are annual institutions.

But the summer festival wasn't obsolete. It was only getting a second wind, and it never entirely disappeared. Well-organized proponents of anarchy — namely punk rockers and metal bands — have demonstrated the continuing appetite for the touring all-day blowout. The annual punk-metal-ska Warped Tour, which started in 1994, and Ozzy Osbourne's metal-hardcore Ozzfest, started in 1996, have become mosh pits of passage for tens of thousands of adolescents. And in the 21st century, the stationary festival — where fans gather to share a weekend with a slew of bands — has made such a spectacular comeback that some young festivals are moving beyond sequels to start spinoffs.

Festivals often look like bargains on paper, with a dollars-per-band ratio that can seem cheaper than a local club date. But with the wrong lineup or the wrong atmosphere, quantity can work against quality if indifferent audiences greet many of the performers. The key to the resurgence of the big rock weekend was to make the 21st-century rock festival selective and idiosyncratic, so that a huge audience can still feel like an in-group.

Rock promoters have learned quite a bit from long-running events like jazz festivals, bluegrass festivals (among them the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado, celebrating its 30th year from June 19 to June 22), the Newport Folk Festival (Aug. 15-17) and the roots-oriented New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which ends today. They don't have to chase the latest Top 10 acts; they can recognize a niche audience without turning that niche into a cul-de-sac. But they promise that their festivals are not just booked, but thought through, so that a fan of the headliners will also find unknowns that are thoroughly compatible.

They borrowed a word from the art world: festivals are now being curated, promising the coherence of a gallery show or museum exhibition. All Tomorrow's Parties, a festival that started in England, has expanded to Los Angeles, taking place there this year from June 19 to June 22. It first used the term and continues to appoint a curator for each festival, having a single musician, group or fan choose every performer. In Los Angeles this year, the curator for All Tomorrow's Parties is Matt Groening, the cartoonist who created the Simpsons and a longtime music fan.

At a time when commercial radio stations shut out all but the most heavily promoted music, festivals offer a chance to discover what's actually hip, and to share the thrill with a few thousand strangers.

A turning point for rock festivals was the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, held in the Southern California town of Indio. It was a determinedly tasteful weekend of alternative rock that began in the spring of 2000 and returned last weekend. Unlike Woodstock 1999, Coachella has taken pride in making concertgoers comfortable, while booking a handful of million-selling bands like the Beastie Boys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers alongside others whose combined cult followings added up to a gathering of more than 30,000 people a day in the desert.

Another bellwether was the first Bonnaroo, the festival of jam bands last summer in Tennessee that sold out more than 70,000 tickets without bothering to advertise. All it needed was the word of mouth (and the rapid Internet news propagation) of the jam band infrastructure. This year's Bonnaroo, in Manchester, Tenn., on June 13-15, has expanded its scope. It's still headlined by longtime jammers like the Dead and the Allman Brothers Band, but it also includes James Brown, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Sonic Youth and Lucinda Williams. They're not exactly jam bands, but they're on similar wavelengths. Although it's only one year old, Bonnaroo has already spawned Bonnaroo N.E., to be held Aug. 8-10 near Riverhead, N.Y., with the Dead, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty.

Along with Bonnaroo N.E., Long Island also gets another major new festival this summer: the first Field Day, to be held in Calverton, N.Y., on June 7-8. Its lineup reads like an East Coast answer to Coachella or a college radio programmer's dream playlist from the 1990's and 2000's, with Radiohead, Bright Eyes, N.E.R.D., the Beastie Boys, Beck, Sigur Ros and many others.

Concerts and club dates make live music an intently focused experience: a headliner communing with its committed fans, reveling in familiarity and collective memories. Festivals trade that focus for something more scattered and more social, as audiences sample and compare bands and meet a more diverse crowd; the musicians make connections, too, breaking out of the isolation of a standard tour. It's all in the mix, and the new rock festivals are striving to perfect it.