Raleigh Is the New Portland

For those of you keeping score at home, I'm still grieving and more than a little disappointed about the decision to scale back Portland's MusicFest NorthWest to a single-weekend, single-venue event that bears little to no resemblance to the week-long, multi-venue event of years past.  Not only did I really enjoy my time there, but after several years I was getting pretty good at navigating around the mammoth schedule and maximizing my experience.  In a way, the event even got tied into my sense of self identity ("I'm that guy who goes out and kicks MFNW's ass every year"), but now it's just some bleachers out in the sun for 18 bands on a mid-August weekend.

Before the announcement was made, I had already purchased tickets to Seattle's Bumbershoot for Labor Day Weekend, the weekend before the traditional start of MFNW (oh yeah, they changed the dates, too), so I still plan on visiting the Great Northwest on Labor Day Weekend, but instead of travelling from Seattle to Portland after Bumbershoot as I'd done in years past, I'll just be going up for Labor Day Weekend this year.  So what shall I do for that first week of September?

Today, the organizers of Raleigh, North Carolina's Hopscotch Festival released their initial list of performers, and it's pretty strong - Spoon, St. Vincent, Sun Kil Moon, Mastodon, Prince Rama, Mutual Benefit, and many more. What's more, I realized that, like the old MFNW, it's a multi-venue event but in downtown Raleigh instead of all over Portland, and that it's on the Thursday through Saturday after Labor Day Weekend.

So, theoretically, and I'm just spitballing out ideas here, I could return home from Bumbershoot on the Tuesday after Labor Day, take the 6-hour drive to Raleigh on Wednesday, enjoy the three days of Hopscotch, return home on Sunday, and be back at work the next Monday.

Okay, it's only three days, not six like MFNW had ballooned out to before the cut-back, but given travel logistics and new responsibilities at my new job, the schedule actually works better for me (I wouldn't have gotten back from Portland until the following Monday if MFNW had kept to their old schedule).  The venues seem to be more closely spaced and centrally located for Hopscotch than they were for MFNW (a lot of time was spent each night getting from one venue to another), and even though "only" 115 of the 155 or so bands for Hopscotch have been announced so far, the lineup is still pretty strong.  There's even headliner events planned for Raleigh City Square, similar to MFNW's Pioneer Courthouse Square concerts. 

So now I'm wondering, who really needs Portland, anyway?