New Milwaukee Summer Festival Sponsored By Summerfest

As if Summerfest Milwaukee 2010 wasn't cool enough, there is a new game in town. Milwaukee World Festival Inc, has created a festival of Alternative and Modern rock. The show dates will be June 4th and 5th. The name of the festival has yet to be determined. FM102 will be a radio sponsor. I'll try to keep my cynical views in check until after the lineup is announced.

I must ask one question. Has anyone taken note of the weather in Milwaukee for the first few days of June? It rains. Not only does it rain, it floods. Torrents of water fall from the sky nearly every year in early June. As long as the festival is under cover, it might be ok. With Riversplash mysteriously out of the way, the new festival is the only game in town. Was some back door deal made between city powers and Summerfest, or is MWF a smart cookie?

Riversplash and the future

I went down to Riversplash on Friday night to see Independent Idols at the Rosie's stage. As the sun set, the crowd got bigger. The Rosie's tent had plenty of room for the fans, but along Water street, the mass of humans was almost too much. Still, I thought it was a nice enough gathering of people.

It was the first festival of the summer, and the weather was perfect. Sadly, there were crowd control issues on Saturday night. Someone got shot; perhaps it was the owner of the gun himself. Some bottles were thrown at the cops. It got ugly.

The hammer came down on Monday night when city officials declared that the future of the festival is up in the air. If 60,000 people attended the festival like they say, and 7 of those folks got arrested, wouldn't that seem like a low number of arrests? What if the idiot who fired a bullet into his foot managed to keep the gun in his pants and didn't fire the shot? Would we be having this situation? I wasn't there on Saturday night, but a friend who was there on both nights said it was a mob scene. Give the Riversplash sponsors a chance to do some crowd control for 2009. Don't pull the plug just yet. Heck, it usually rains that weekend.

Riversplash Milwaukee 2008

Riversplash is ramping up the music. Over 10 stages, placed along the downtown Milwaukee area will feature some original acts. Yes, the usual cover bands will be performing too. Milwaukee can't seem to shake that cover band virus. The Love Monkeys will mimic real musical artists on Saturday on the Miller Lite stage. U2Zoo will be in full mime, and The Five Card Studs will don their wigs and play the same night. Now, what I think will be interesting is that Riversplash has fireworks at 10pm. Do the bands take a break while the crap is blowing off above their heads? In previous years, I found it to be more fun to get a burger at John Hawks and watch the boats go by. Perhaps this infusion of original acts like Brother Louie and Willie Porter, coupled with the craptastic cover artists will draw me away from my burger-and-boatspotting fun.