In its inaugural year, Independent Weekly’s Hopscotch Music Festival skirted all doubts as it brought 120 bands spread across 10 venues throughout the heart of Downtown Raleigh.
Each of the festival’s three-nights was brimming with extraordinary talent. And every venue struggled to contain the massive crowds, with concert goers often bleeding onto the sidewalks — the perfect examples being Best Coast at Tir Na Nog and Spider Bags at Slim’s.
Hopscotch certainly proved doubters wrong as VIP wristbands sold out in less than a week, and all wristbands sold out before the festival started. So the next hurdle was to top the previous year.
Although the festival reportedly lost $50,000, the Independent Weekly was quick to get behind a second year.
“Hopscotch lost money — about $50,000 at first count. But I’ll just call that money the Indy‘s gift to the musicians, to the clubs, to Raleigh, to music fans from the Triangle and all over,” Independent Weekly founder Steve Schewel wrote just days after last summer’s festival.
Schewel added, “Besides, next year Greg and Grayson will know what the heck they’re doing, and I figure we’ll make that money back.”
For its sophomore year, set for September 8- 10, Hopscotch founders Greg Lowenhagen and Grayson Currin expanded the festival to an awe-inspiring 135 bands, and upped the number of venues to 12 — adding White Collar Crime and the beautiful Fletcher Opera Theater.
Still, the festival will remain within walking distance of the Hopscotch epicenter: City Plaza.
“Our biggest goal is to prevent that island effect at night where you walk over to see a show and miss another show because you had to walk so far,” Currin explained. “If we can, in the future, make essentially another hub for the festival, that’s the path we want to take.”
With the added venues came the opportunity to host more bands and “the opportunity for increasingly diverse programming.” Among those bands will be the influential and newly reformed post-punk band Swans.
“As we were booking the inaugural Hopscotch Music Festival, Michael Gira announced that he would, for the first time in nearly a decade, make music and tour with Swans,” Currin said. “[W]e tried to book Swans, but they weren’t scheduled to start rehearsing until the week after Hopscotch 2010 ended. We didn’t have the ideal room for them, either.”
There’s certainly excitement surrounding these added venues — especially Fletcher with Swans, Rhys Chatham, Lost in the Trees, The Necks and Julianna Barwick, among many others — but the greatest anticipation surrounds Hopscotch’s City Plaza headliners.
Like last year, City Plaza serves as ground zero with show stealing headliners Friday and Saturday nights. In year one, those headliners were Broken Social Scene, Panda Bear and Public Enemy with support from No Age, The Rosebuds and The Love Language.
For year two, Currin, the festival’s curator, had to up the ante.
“The way we choose the headliners is by a few set guidelines,” Lowenhagen explained. “We look at bands we like, bands that can fill the space or would be a good fit for the space in the Plaza. And then we start talking to their agents and we determine one-by-one if they’re available, how much they might cost, does it seem like a good fit for Hopscotch overall.”
“Friday night we will start out with the Dodos, who are a pop trio from San Francisco,” Currin said. “Then Drive-By Truckers, who is the best southern rock band in decades, will be playing.”
And Friday night’s headliner? Currin said, “The original bellwether indie rock lineup, Guided by Voices.”
Meanwhile, Saturday night is set to take a turn for the weird — or at least the psychedelic.
“On Saturday night we’ll have The Light Pines, who are a band from Chapel Hill who is finishing their debut record right now. It will be out on a big indie label that we can’t name,” Currin explained. “And Superchunk, who are of course the founders of Merge Records, will be playing.”
And while it may have been an April Fools prank on the part of New Raleigh, they were closer than they realized to spoiling Hopscotch II’s big headliner.
“The Flaming Lips — who are legends, geniuses, crazy,” Currin said. “They are a great psychedelic rock band; they float in bubbles, douse the crowd in confetti, have people dressed up as animals on the stage, lasers, fake blood — it’s beautiful.”
The remainder of the 124 bands is an impressive list of national and local acts, less than a dozen of which are repeats from last year.
“The repeats are largely local; the two national repeats are Futures Islands from Baltimore and All Tiny Creatures from Wisconsin,” Currin said. “The local repeats are Old Bricks, The Love Language, DJ THIEN, DJ SPCL GST, Spider Bags, and there aren’t many more — maybe one or two more.”
Currin added, “We knew as soon as last year’s festival was over that number would be small. There are a lot of bands we love, and I wish we could book more bands than we have this year.”
“What’s interesting in terms of turnover is we probably could have invited all of those bands back, but then all of a sudden there are all these other local bands that either didn’t get to play last year or we want to play it this year,” Lowenhagen said.
“So when we talk about repeats, it’s fitting them into new spaces or they’ve got records coming out on certain labels — there’s some sort of transitional thing there.”
While this September’s festival is slightly lighter on local acts, Lowenhagen said those bands are still an integral part of Hopscotch.
“The one thing that is important from the beginning … is that when I pitched this idea to Grayson, we both agreed that we wanted it to be anywhere between 35 to 55 percent local,” Lowenhagen said. “This year is a little over 40 percent local bands playing the festival.”
Those bands include the previously mentioned Lost in the Trees, The Light Pines, Superchunk, The Love Language, Old Brick, THIEN, SPCL GST and Spider Bags, as well as Xiu Xiu, Lonnie Walker, Gross Ghost, The Foreign Exchange, Bombadil, Annuals, The Old Ceremony, The Prayers and Tears, Horseback, Mandolin Orange, Last Year’s Men, Mount Moriah, Organos, King Mez, The Tomahawks, Soft Company, and more than two dozen more.
Lowenhagen said, “We work for the Independent Weekly, Grayson is the music editor, I’m the marketing director, the paper’s been around for 28 years, it covers the local music scene perhaps as well as anyone else in the area, and it’s something that is our bread and butter 52 weeks of the year.
“So we figured with the history of the Triangle’s music scene and all these friends Grayson has and all these people I’ve met since I moved here, we wanted those bands to play it.”
Tickets for Hopscotch go on sale today (April 20) at 10 a.m. for between $32 and $155. Here’s a breakdown of the ticket and wristband options:
Complete Hopscotch Music Festival Lineup
| The Flaming Lips Guided by Voices Drive-By Truckers Superchunk The Dodos Swans Yelawolf Japanroids J Mascis Black Lips Earth Twin Shadow The Love Language Rhy Chatham The Foreign Exchange Krallice Cold Cave The Necks Toro y Moi The Budos Band John Vanderslice Weekend Oxbow Future Islands Liturgy Kort Lost in the Trees Little Scream Disappears Lower Dens Beans Julianna Barwick Xiu Xiu Royal Bangs |
Braids Bombadil Oneohtrix Point Never Beach Fossils Barn Owl Lonnie Walker Jeff the Brotherhood The Light Pines Bird Peterson Annuals Royal Baths Ford & Lopatin The Old Ceremony Generationals Cheyenne MarieMize Woodsman Reading Rainbow Mount Eerie All Tiny Creatures Frontier Ruckus The Prayers and Tears Apex Manor Bandway Fight the Big Bull Sir Richard Bishop Dinosaur Feathers Wooden Wand Des Ark Grandchildren Man/Miracle Mouthus Horseback Unknown Mortal Orchestra |
The Body Prurient Frank Fairfield Flight Gauntlet Hair William Tyler Duane Pitre Sextet Jennyanykind Spider Bags Tyvek Dawn Golden and Rosy Cross Andrew Cedermark Mandolin Orange Chip Robinson Apache Dropout Hog Last Year’s Men PC Worship Jon Lindsay The Super Vacations Onward, Soldiers Empress Hotel Steve Gunn Dustin Wong Whatever Brains David Daniell Mount Moriah Organos King Mez Apple Juice Kid THIEN Jesse Sparhawk & Eric Carbonara Invisible Hand Carlitta Durand |
Old Bricks Black Twig Pickers Dylan Gilbert The Tender Fruit Twelve Thousand Armies Filthybird Yair Yona The Tomahawks Caltrop Wesley Wolfe Shit Horse Heads on Sticks Gross Ghost Justin Robinson & The Mary Annettes Embarrassing Fruits Family Dynamics Yardwork Soft Company SPCL GST The Loners Cassis Orange Wembley Bustello L.E.G.A.C.Y. Charlie Smarts The Strugglers Jack the Radio The Moderate Peter Lamb & The Wolves Man Will Destroy Himself Dan Melchior Und Das Menace Le Weekend Oulipo D&D Sluggers The Caribbean |
Similar Posts:
Some of North Carolina’s best were recognized last night by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
In a letter to fans, friends and family, The Love Language frontman Stuart McLamb promised that his long-awaited third album should arrive this spring
Indie rock supergroup Divine Fits, featuring members of Wolf Parade and Spoon, performed at Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh
With the race for the White House just two weeks away, more celebrities are being vocal about the importance of people getting out to vote.
Passion Pit performed for a sold-out crowd at The Ritz in Raleigh
April 20th, 2011 at 8:22 am
Great lineup! Can’t wait…
May 1st, 2011 at 5:42 am
Jennyanykind & Drive by Truckers…….Heaven!
See you at the rock show!!