St. Louis Rock and Roll Action
May 1st, 2008 — Twitter
Powered by Twitter Tools.
May 1st, 2008 — Articles
I just realized that this October will mark the tenth anniversary of the last Midwest Regional Music Festival (a.k.a. “MRMF,” or “Mr. Motherfucker” fest, as it some of us liked to call it). That’s the one that featured some 200 bands from all over the country playing in venues all over town that (supposedly) rivaled SXSW at the time. Its primary organizer/promoter was the Riverfront Times, back in the days when it was an independent local weekly entertainment rag with a much larger focus on local music than it has today. When the New Times bought the paper in 1999, giving Mr. Motherfucker the old heave-ho was one of its first major accomplishments (you might remember that was also when they moved the publication’s great local music section to the back… the old show listings used to be right in the centerfold and it was once a lot easier to just flip the paper open to it). Dead and buried, after only six years. So ever since then, St. Louis has been without a big, local, annual music festival that had the potential to attract bands and music lovers of every stripe from all over the country (and beyond). True, we still have some good local music festivals here every year (I even foolishly attempted to promote my own last fall, as you may recall), but none of them match MRMF in overall scope, size, magnitude, and potential as far as really putting St. Louis on the map as both a regional and national music mecca, and that’s sad, I think. If those of us that are part of the St. Louis music scene want to help put ourselves back on the national map, we should make a concerted effort to bring this festival back from the grave, or create a new one that’s similar. That would obviously need to be done without the (free) promotional and organizational assistance of the Riverfront Times (unless they, of course, could somehow convince the New Times to let them do it again). But now, ten years later, with the advent of blogging, podcasting and plenty of other new local music publications (not to mention a great new local record store in Apop), it seems to me there could be enough of the right kind of people here to make this happen again… that is, if we WANT to make it happen badly enough. What do YOU think?
May 1st, 2008 — News
There hasn’t been much to blog about here lately, or at least not much for ME to blog about here lately. Running GaragePunk.com as well as my own personal life is keeping me pretty busy, so I really have less and less time to devote to this thing, much less run out and see shows these days (I managed to make it out to ONE in the last three months, so that should give you an idea of how involved I’m going to be in the future). Also, a month or two back I invited a few other local music fiends to contribute to this blog, and each expressed interest in doing so… even going so far as to register themselves as contributors here, but I haven’t seen anything from any of them since. There’s nothing complicated to figure out, guys. If you wanna write something, by all means, log in and post! Cuz, ya see, I was hoping to make this thing more of a team effort than simply me posting about stuff that I think is interesting (and I’m sure people are tired of hearing me shoot my mouth off, anyway). But if I can’t even get a few other people involved, then I’m not sure what the future of this blog will hold, and frankly, it obviously ain’t that promising. That’s not me being negative; it’s just the facts, ma’am. So please don’t hold your breath expecting great things, daily insightful posts about local rock’n'roll, record reviews, etc., at least not until some of these others come forth to help out. I was also promised a new episode of the TIRC Podcast a couple of months back, but that, too, has yet to surface. So then about a week ago I got the idea to set up a TIRC account on Twitter, which gives me a quick way to post about upcoming shows, and I also located a plugin that allows those updates to be posted daily right here on the blog automatically. Anyone that wants to follow the account can get the updates, so it’s not intrusive by any means, yet still provides a sort of service to the local music community that (so far, anyway) hasn’t been made available by anyone else. So I’ll keep doing that, and post about shows and stuff here from time to time when my schedule allows, but please don’t expect a whole lot until things change. Thanks for reading, and rock on!
