10 year anniversary of GEEKFEST!
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"10 year GEEKFEST anniversary shows August 24-27!"
EL SOBRANTE, California
United States
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| 10 year anniversary of GEEKFEST!: General Info
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| Member Since | 8/21/2006 | | Band Website | ALL SHOWS ARE FREE AND ALL AGES! Call 510 BAD SMUT | | Band Members | Longstanding collective members included: Corbett Redford, John Mink, Dan Abbott, Dylan McPuke, Stephanie Culhane, Julia Booz-Ullrey, Anthony Marchitiello, Robert Eggplant, D.G. Merrimeyer, Jason Hanski, Gregg Semen, and more...Geekfest Anniversary largely being pulled together with the help of Mr. Micah Sapp | | Influences | Teenage (and barely post-) suburban ennui, excessive self-education, simmering resentment, shit jobs, rebellion against "the scene", lack of fashion sense, D.I.Y. because no one else is going to do it for you, desire to not be a part of gentrification of the inner cities, soft drugs. | | Sounds Like | Hours and hours of bands you'd never think would play together.
For the upcoming 10-year anniversary event:
Robocop 3, Gunpowder, The Shudders, Hey Girl!, Bob Weirdos, Japanther, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, Ghost Family, Western Graves, Deuce Boldy, Brothers and Sisters, The Honeyfuckits, I Will Kill You Fucker, Omnesia, Choose Your Own Adventure, Fuckstrobe, Methbird, Triclops, Acts of Sedition, The Missing Pages, Abi Yoyos, Street Eaters, Dory Tourette and the Skirtheads, Bikini Weekend, Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits, The Cars The Doors, Skitzo, Kreamy 'Lectric Santa, Rock-N-Roll Adventure Kids, David Copperfuck, The Most, Drinker's Purgatory, The Icky Girlfriends, The Sun Machine, Detox Disaster, 4 Quarters, Baby Jail, Jingletown, Bike Fight, Tofu, Ooo, Finky Binks, Up The Voltage, Strip Mall Seizures, Evil Wykkyd Warrior, Tulsa, Uberkunst, Day Of The Zombie, The Janes, Songs For Mom, Rhinoceros, and more!!!! | | Record Label | S.P.A.M. Records (1996-2003, R.I.P.) | | Type of Label | Indie |
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10 year anniversary of GEEKFEST!'s Latest Blog Entry
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| About 10 year anniversary of GEEKFEST! |
[From online open-source encyclopedia www.wikipedia.org]
Geekfest was the name of a series of free, all-ages concerts organized by California indie label S.P.A.M. Records during the 1990s. The first Geekfest was held in June 1996 on the shoreline at Point Molate in Richmond, California. This site, a former Navy fuel depot at the foot of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, became the default location for dozens of Geekfests, though other locations were eventually used.
In the mid-1990s, local ordinances and economic considerations led to difficult times for San Francisco Bay Area bands whose members were under 21. Several bars and nightclubs were driven out by the bustling dot-com economy. Others, fearful of losing their liquor licenses, stopped allowing minors to attend or perform on their stages.
By 1996, there was only one all-ages music venue in the East Bay - 924 Gilman Street. With the rise of Green Day, Rancid, and other former underground bands making punk rock a commodity, Gilman had become an insular community, rejecting those who did not fit an increasingly narrow definition of punk. Though Gilman was not by design exclusively punk rock (they were and are explicitly devoted to independent music and arts), a combination of internal politics and aesthetic tastes of the Gilman staff kept other types of music off the stage.
The S.P.A.M. Records crew, a group of underage musicians and artists from Pinole, California, became frustrated with this situation. Their bands, most notably Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits, had been rejected by the punk scene for what, to their minds, were superficial differences in dress and musical style. They decided, in a DIY spirit, to create their own venue, one where nobody would be rejected for having the wrong fashion sense.
The name "Geekfest" was chosen partly because the S.P.A.M. collective saw themselves as geeks; they realized their idiosyncrasies made them unpopular at parties, but made no effort to change. Their rejection by the punk scene was viewed as just another chapter in a long history of being uncool; they had learned to embrace the things that set them apart, while keeping a sense of humor and perspective.
First Geekfest
First, S.P.A.M. founder John Geek (now vocalist for punk band Fleshies) set up a hotline, (510) BAD-SMUT, to disseminate information. In many ways, Geekfest applied the guerrilla tactics of raves to live music. Photocopied handbills listed a telephone number, but not the location of the event, to try to stop the shows being shut down by law enforcement.
Point Molate was selected as a location partly because it was already in use one Sunday a month for free outdoor "Sunset raves". It was far from any residential area, beneath a large bridge, and under confused jurisdiction as a Navy Superfund site. Technically, it was in Richmond, which had one of the nation's highest murder rates at the time. Local law <
Politically, the concept of Geekfest took an anarchist bent. It addressed issues of public land use, the role of the audience in art (since much of the time, the audience consisted of the other bands playing that day), and issues of hierarchy in a supposedly egalitarian punk scene.
Approximately 12 bands played the first show, most of who were made up of minors and bands who shared S.P.A.M.'s sense of humor and disenfranchisement. S.P.A.M. members rented a gas-powered generator, and hired a local sound engineer to work the jury-rigged P.A.. In an illegal and ill-advised attempt to recoup their losses, S.P.A.M. sold cheese-filled hot dogs and cans of beer to the approximately 30 attendees. The concert lasted from about 1 p.m. until sunset.
S.P.A.M. continued putting on Geekfests, usually about one per month during the summer months and occasionally during the winter, when they could find a suitable indoor location. The locations and the bands varied widely (though many bands had repeat performances), but the shows were always free and all-ages.
This concept of inclusion was central to the Geekfest concept, and extended to the booking policy. As word spread about the festivals, bands began calling to ask for shows, and sending promotional packages to the label's P.O. box. S.P.A.M. avoided listening to demo tapes they received, booking bands on a "first-come, first-served" basis. This was done to remove the bias of musical taste that S.P.A.M. blamed for their own exclusion from Gilman. As a result, the bands were often unskilled, untalented, or conversely, so polished and professional that they seemed wildly inappropriate at a no-frills, guerrilla concert. Geekfest organizers observed the conflicts that arose between different musical subcultures with a bemused detachment.
The length of the concerts (sometimes 8 hours or more) and the inconsistent quality of the acts made Geekfest less like a traditional concert and more like a weird carnival. Since the schedule was never listed, it was difficult for people to show up to see one band in particular. People tended to stay for most of the day and began to come as much for the playful atmosphere as for the bands.
Several Geekfest organizers, including Dan Abbott and Dylan McPuke, were affiliated with the Amtgard live action role-playing game, and brought homemade foam-padded swords for attendees to battle with during concerts. From then on, random foam sword battles were an integral part of Geekfest. Between bands, organizers held costume contests, raffles, and trivia games, usually with a nod to traditionally geeky themes like Dungeons & Dragons, "Weird Al" Yankovic, or Atari games.
Gradually, Geekfest attracted a community of disparate individuals, and become something of a scene itself. Several bands made inroads in to the Gilman scene, and several Geekfests were eventually held within the Gilman club itself.
In 1997, the Geeks (as S.P.A.M./Geekfest organizers had come to be known) decided to celebrate the first anniversary of Geekfest by having a three-day campout. After a frenzied search for an appropriate site, the Geeks found Lake Ladoga, part of East Park Reservoir near Maxwell, California. It was hot, dusty, and inhospitable land under jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the lake was a man-made body used for irrigation of nearby farms. The water was noticeably filthy, but the 107 °F heat made it a welcome respite regardless. Organizers arranged the stage so that attendees could watch the bands from the relative comfort of the lake. The attendance was estimated at around 150-200 people. Drug use was rampant, mostly psychedelics, with ubiquitous drinking during the daytime. Organizers, using kitchen equipment borrowed from Food Not Bombs, fed everyone two free meals a day: gruel in the morning, spaghetti at night. BLM supervisor Bill Bird objected to the concert, but was overruled by the Sheriff and local merchants, who were happy for the increased business. In the end, nearly 40 bands performed at the Geekfest Anniversary, and the Geeks immediately began planning the next year's festival.
In the intervening year, S.P.A.M. organizers had found a kindred spirit, show promoter and artist Marcus Da Anarchist, who organized "Pirate Punx Picnics" out of San Francisco's Mission District. S.P.A.M. and the Pirate Punx collaborated on the next campout, dubbing it "Pirates vs. Geeks". John Geek (by this time known as John Geek) and Marcus each booked half the bands.
For the third anniversary, the Pirates and Geeks resumed an uneasy alliance, organizing a week-long Libertatia, after the anarchist pirate utopia on Madagascar founded by Captain Mission during the 1700s. It was also referred to as the "Week of Geek". As it had been before, it was free and all-ages, and organizers fed the roughly 400 attendees two meals a day. Although 100 bands were booked, only 82 showed up to perform. Still, each day of entertainment lasted from approximately noon until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. Several Bay Area journalists also attended, and the event received coverage in local press.
The demise of S.P.A.M. Records (closely linked to the breakup of flagship band Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits) spelled the end of Geekfests, though the Pirate Punx continue to organize Libertatia annually.
Writing about Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits a few months back in John Mink's Maxiumum Rock and Roll column seemed to generate a small wave of nostalgia from people who were involved in, or witness to, S.P.A.M. Records and Geekfest. One detailed letter from Philip Knowles (printed in the last issue of MRR), in particular, chronicled the experience of booking a show in Portland for the bizarrely-conceived (and barely attended) Geekfest tour, which lumped 12 bands into an aging school bus to tour up and down the west coast playing all-ages, free shows...
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