My 4th of July weekend was a lot of fun. Nathan and i walked down to Des Moines’s second-annual 80/35 music festival, so named for the intersection of those two major interstates in the city. There were three stages, two of them free to the public and the main stage requiring tickets, lots of food vendors, street performers, and a fireworks display at the end on Saturday night.
Here are some photos of my favorite performances:
Tilly & The Wall, photo by Matt Sorensen for Rock Iowa
Girl In A Coma, photo by Laura Lou09
The Envy Corps, photo by britrockatthetop
In all, we saw:
Tilly And The Wall
Modern Skirts
Maps And Atlases
Girl In A Coma
Man Man (Nathan loved this one 
)
Wild Sweet Orange (disappointing)
Margo and the Nuclear So-And-Sos
Broken Social Scene (I was most looking forward to this one – pretty sweet)
The Envy Corps
Ben Harper (from afar)
Girl In A Coma took me by surprise. They’ve got a punk-y*/’90s alternative sound that i loved, and a lead vocalist with such a great voice.
To say nothing of the rain, the festival was full of people so colorful that for a moment i felt like i was back in Eugene, Oregon. There was a booth selling tie-dye, an all-vegetarian food vendor from whom i bought the most delightful coffee frappe, and a bunch of girls walking around wearing nothing but denim shorts and paint. These “painted ladies” were meant, as the artist herself said, to be “living decorations”, which i found to be terribly demeaning, but i guess it takes all kinds.
It rained lightly all day Friday and continued to be overcast on Independence Day, but by the end of The Envy Corps’s set all the dreariness had been chased away. That band never disappoints me. The crowd really got into it at this show, which can be partly attributed to the fact that by 8pm when they played, most patrons were half-saturated with Old Main beer. They put a few bars of “I Want You Back” into “Story Time” in honor, of course, of Michael Jackson, and that made me pretty happy. The fireworks display after Ben Harper was decent, and a vast improvement over the blunder last year which caused me to miss all fireworks displays altogether on the 4th.
*BTW – by “punk” i mean the original genre which arose underground in the eighties and all that sort of thing, not the whiny bands who flaunt too much eyeliner and feign a damn-the-man attitude while selling records on major RIAA-controlled labels which some people for whatever reason use the term to refer to. 
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 2:44 pm • des moines, music
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July 21st, 2009 at 9:51 pm
I’m so sad I missed that this year. Never again!