It's Official!

MusicFest NW (MFNW, RIP) is still dead.

Okay, I'll admit there are a few decent bands on the bill.  I'd love to see Beirut again, and I'd still like to catch Modest Mouse (rain and the crowds drove me away from the Shaky Knees festival last year before MM took the stage) and The Tallest Man on Earth (who's playing Buckhead Theater on May 26), but after the headliners, the pickings are pretty thin.  Certainly nothing to fly cross-country for (like I did in 2011, 2012, and 2013), and certainly nothing worth standing in the sun for three days in Waterfront Park, even if one happened to be in Portland at the time, anyway.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!  Compare the 2015 line-up to the 6-day lineup from 2013 (note the "and many more" at the end of the line-up):  

I couldn't even begin to imagine the logistical nightmare involved in booking that many bands, and at approximately a dozen different venues, too, and I almost sympathized with the promoters last year when they downsized the festival to a single weekend at a single venue.  But okay, they've had almost two years to rest now - time to bring back the full enchilada.  

Or so I had hoped.  But even the 2014, scaled-down, two-day version of MFNW had a better line up (below) than this year's three-day version.  We've gone from great, to bad, to worse.

Back in 2011, I had little patience for those people complaining about that year's lineup for Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival.  Now, four years later, I've become one of those persons, in my case, complaining about Portland's MFNW. 

In more positive news, yesterday I drove around the new site (Central Park and vicinity) of this year's Shaky Knees festival, using the map on the new festival app as my guide to where the stages will be, and am happy to report that it looks like there will be a lot more room and a lot more shade than last year's festival in the parking lot for Atlantic Station.