Fresno Famous

Right now, at this moment, you couldn’t stop it if you tried.

Things have been set in motion. Bands (more than 20 of them) are booked. There are posters up in storefronts and on light poles, even though that’s surely illegal. There’s a Web site with a full schedule and a Myspace page — Facebook got left out for some reason.
The press has been notified.

Point is, Saturday afternoon the Fresno Urban Sound Experience is happening, whether I like it or not (for sake of full disclosure, I’m helping organize the one-day music festival).

As events go, this isn’t a big one. It isn’t Beyonce at the Save Mart Center, or the Rumble in the Park, which radio spots say sold out and turned away 1,500 people. If there’s any money made it’s going back to the bands. There are no sponsorship opportunities here.

This is what you’d call the down-and-dirty. Which is important mostly because it’s the way things start in Fresno. It’s why we have a Swede Festival (submissions are due midnight Nov. 17) and a first-rate gay and lesbian film festival. And downtown housing.

The idea of a Fresno music festival isn’t new. It’s been floating around amongst FUSE organizers for years, at least since Rock of the Tower II, and that was in 2005. And we aren’t alone. Only Mike Osegueda called us out on it. Not individually, of course, but collectively. As a city. As stewards of the everything cool there within.

That turned up the pressure, because the man had a point.
Visalia has a music festival.
Modesto has one too — they’ve even started a satellite festival in Las Vegas.

So, why not us?
The answer to that is a story in itself, and has something to do with the fact that Fresno is a city with a major inferiority complex and a bad case of sprawl. Also, we’ve got a crisis of identity. We’re so busy talking about what we aren’t, that we forget who we are. Or, at very least, who we could be. It’s why we refer the latest ultra-swanky-lounge-whatever as “so not Fresno.”

But that has little to do with this.
This has to do with months of meetings — which means sitting in the back room at Sequoia Brewing Company, drinking beer and talking about this great thing we were going to do.

And then doing nothing.
This is about that “someday,” event, the one where we close off a section of Kern Street and set up four stages and have marching bands down the street. Just so you know, the FUSE is not that.

It hit me at The Undercurrent’s second anniversary party in May that there’s a distinction between action and words. I don’t remember who was on stage, but it was still light out and there was a decent crowd and 10 or so bands left to play and the voice in my head sounded like a bad Adam Sandler movie: “You can do eet.”

Indeed.
It probably won’t be exactly what you planned. And maybe you end up doing it mostly out of spite, just to get it over with, just to say it’s done.
And this should matter to you because there are other ideas still floating around in the Fresno ether.
Someone still needs to bring back the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Someone needs to start a guerrilla movie night on the back wall of some downtown building.

So, to borrow from a slightly overweight redneck comedian, “git ’er done.”