This weekend was the inaugural Treefort Music Fest, four days of live music featuring bands mostly from this neck of the woods, plus performance art, The Boise Rock School students, food trucks, local brews, and all the hipster fun you can manage. It felt like Portland had taken over, with all the bikes, skinny jeans and giant glasses and flowy high-waisted skirts, but I didn't mind. Inspired by the community radio station that opened last year, which received all of the net proceeds from Treefort, more than 130 bands played in venues around town. The main stage featured some of the bigger acts, as well as some of the smaller ones, and food trucks fed the masses. A friend and I plotted our music binge, armed with the smart phone app that illustrated the schedule in brightly colored rectangles against a black background (each color representing a different venue) and a hand-drawn map of the route we would take from venue to venue, the distances measured to estimate the amount of time it would take to get there. We looked upon our marathon plans with excitement and exhaustion at the thought of just how much energy we would be consuming. As other friends joined in, we all dug in. But it was worth it. Not a single show was disappointing, the bands were all different and special and interesting, and the venues were comfortably crowded. As soon as one show ended, our thoughts were on the next show we would head to, sometimes revising plans and making it up as we went along. In all, we saw 13 bands in three evenings (the fourth day was just too much), danced our asses off, consumed too much alcohol, and participated with the community of music fans in celebrating the welcome presence of a small festival to rival the big ones, to prove that even a small town in this conservative state knows how to rock. And rock, we did:
Thursday: The Ascetic Junkies, Buster Blue, Pickwick, and Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside
Friday: K. Flay, The Parson Red Heads, The Maldives, Blitzen Trapper, The Soft White Sixties
Saturday: Lemolo, Shades, Flashlights, araabMUZIK
It was all made better by the company of some devoted music-loving folks, because live music is just not right unless it's enjoyed with friends. Thanks, Treefort, for the most fun I've had in a really long time. You rocked my world. Stay small but mighty. See you next year.
