Gainesville’s The Fest 2018: What It Is and Why It Matters

When football is away, the bands will play.

The Fest as described best by their website “is an independent multiple-day, multiple-venue underground music festival held annually in Gainesville, FL.”

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s probably because you’re extremely busy, you stay in your house all the time or you’re a massive Florida Gator football fan (more on that later).

The Fest was born in 2002, created by Tony Weinbender. In its infancy, the Fest hosted 60 bands at four venues over two days in May.

Now, Fest has exploded to include over 400 bands, comedians and wrestlers. Twenty venues play host to these talents over a three day period in Gainesville.

My clever leading line about football references the fact that Fest is held on the weekend of the Florida-Georgia football game in Jacksonville, leaving downtown G’ville rather empty. This allows a majority of bars and venues to be open exclusively to FESTers.

This is a huge boon to the economy of Gainesville (and more recently, Ybor City with the two day expansion of Pre-Fest, which started six years ago) where a lot of the money would be vacuumed out to Jacksonville.

In fact, Paul Blest of VICE wrote an article about how much Pabst Blue Ribbon beer gets consumed from convenience stores over said weekend and it’s absurd, with some places blowing through nearly 100 cases a day.  He also talks about the sentiments of the local establishments, with some saying the FESTers are angels compared to the normal football crowd.

The astounding amount of beer that is consumed is not even including all of the other goods and services purchased from local restaurants like Big Lou’s or The Top, bars like The Atlantic and Durty Nelly’s, and those in between such as Loosey’s and Boca Fiesta.

In short, The Fest is a huge draw for our little unassuming college town. In fact, 37% of attendees in 2017 were non-U.S. residents.

Punks from all over the world come to our city and support our businesses from as close as Orlando and as far away as Australia year after year.

But why? What does Fest mean to us FESTers? Read for yourself.

 

It’s community. It’s a sense of belonging. Fest brings a common interest to Gainesville in the form of entertainment—music, comedy and wrestling— but it allows so much more. Some feel isolated in a small town somewhere far away; as if on an island where a boat goes once a year. Fest is that ship.

Reuniting friends, family and all of us freaks once a year. Fest brings every small punk, metal, hardcore, ska, indie scene in the world to form one giant scene together here in one place—a Gainesville Scene 😉

I have too many memories to share from the Fests I’ve been to. I’ve lost relatives, relationships and rent money in my lifetime, but through every Fest, there’s always been that sense of community.

Unifying together from all around, like something as captivating as a schoolyard brawl. Through broken bones and broken hearts, when I reminisce about the days I was young, I’ll look at pictures and show my children.

Artist Surgill Simpson said it best in one of his songs: “I’m sure I’d give anything to go back to old Gainesville, to go back to the days that I was young.”

In creating Fest, Weindbender truly has captured lightning in a bottle and I hope that no one ever lets it out.

For more awesome photos of Fest and other punk rock shows, check out the feature photo photographer Marc Gaertner’s personal site.

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