I don’t know how I am supposed to keep up with all these bands! Last Saturday, a free festival, Echo Park Rising, was organized at multiple venues along Sunset & Glendale Boulevards and Alvarado street, from the Echo Country Outpost, to coffee & book shops, to galleries, to Origami Vinyl, to outdoor/indoor stages at Taix restaurant, to clubs like the Echo and Echoplex!
I was overwhelmed just looking at the schedule!! 21 locations throughout Echo park, with up to ten bands per location, and a total of more than 110 bands playing the same afternoon/evening! What am I supposed to do? Cover five of them? But which ones? I must have seen only twenty of them already, and this just shows how many there are out there…
The festival is a sort of substitute for the defunct Sunset Junction Fair, as it happens at the same date, the last weekend of August. Last year, they organized the thing at the last minute, as the fair was cancelled a few days before it was supposed to happen, but this year they had time and did it in a big way, turning the even into a sort of riot of the whole neighborhood. The big difference with the Sunset Junction Fair is that only local bands were playing, and for this reason, was more similar to an early incarnation of the SJF, which just lost its authentic neighborhood festival flavor when the organizers began to book international acts.
Echo Park Rising has really grown into gigantic proportions, and I was wondering till the last minute whom the hell I was going to see among these 110 bands!