Annual event brings bands to six downtown stages
It’s like music to the ears of Columbia’s scene junkies. The Vista’s bar crawl hooks up with the best of all genres, bringing together the headliners from the city’s signature music spots for just one day — or, this year, two days.
Saturday will mark the official start to the 12th annual Free Times Music Crawl. There are six stages, 37 bands and just about every genre or musical whim represented in the lineup.
“Columbia’s scene is more dynamic, more diverse and offers more to all genres of listeners than it ever has before,” said Patrick Wall, Free Times music editor. “We have everything from super crazy, super weird, no time stamp to verse, chorus, verse, chorus pop/rock.”
Art Bar, Flying Saucer, Kelly’s, Tin Roof and Moda Lounge will host the crawl’s acts, with six or seven bands playing each stage from 7 p.m. to almost 2 a.m. Wet Willie’s, which was one of the original crawl stages was replaced with Moda Lounge Thursday.
Art Bar’s outdoor stage — the venue will also house an indoor stage — boasts a lineup of younger local acts like Haley Dreis, Death of Paris, kemp ridley and Magnetic Flowers, while the Tin Roof lists Lundy & the Lucky 13, Frontier Sons and the Casual Kings.
But Wall said even though the stages do tend to bring together the same genres, there is some diversity in the setup.
“We want to stay away from ‘I’m only interested in hard rock, I’m just going to stand here,’” Wall said. “It defeats the purpose of the crawl.”
Moda Lounge’s stage — in the one admitted genre hub of the night — centers on hip-hop, with Sweet Vans, Fat Rat da Czar and Ben G.
Wall teamed up with Non-Stop Hip-Hop Live to create just that — a nonstop hip-hop event complete with DJs spinning records during inter-band set changes.
“Fayth Hope is all soul, and Sweet Vans is kind of like a parody version of The Roots,” Wall said. “It’s just going to be continuous from point A to point B at Moda Lounge.”
Although all the Music Crawl scheduling is done in-house, there are open applications from May to July. Wall said he usually receives anywhere from 60 to 100 applications each year for the event, and in his most humorous but hardest turndown, he had to send a rejection letter to a band he used to play in.
“I sent the letter to our bass player, and he framed it and hung it on the refrigerator,” Wall said. “It’s not the Free Times Patrick Wall Music Crawl.’”
And that’s the point Wall emphasizes: It’s not his music crawl; it’s the city’s showing.
“I always get, ‘These are what you think are the best bands in Columbia, right?’” Wall said. “I try to give a cross section of what’s going on in Columbia’s music scene.”
For the first year ever, the Music Crawl has teamed up with the Columbia Museum of Art for its Arts and Draughts staple.
The museum will kick off Friday night at 7 p.m. with the Lumineers, a folk rock band from Denver, on its outdoor Boyd Plaza stage.
This will be the museum’s first time using the outdoor area as a stage, said the museum’s public programs coordinator Shannon Burke.
“Arts and Draughts is the time for us to branch out to the community,” Burke said. “We worked with Free Times to figure out what kind of sound we wanted. There aren’t a lot of out-of-town bands in the crawl, but they’ll be on the stage tomorrow night.”
The Arts and Draughts meets Music Crawl event will also invite attendees to bring gallery images to life by striking their best poses in photo booths. There will also be button making and decorating projects and Mad Libs postcards.
Shovels and Rope, featuring Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent, will close the Arts and Draughts music stage.
“The beginning of the night is going to be just as fun as the end of the night,” Burke said.
There will be $13 tickets available for admission to both Arts and Draughts and the Music Crawl, or single Arts and Draught admission tickets for $8.
Individual Music Crawl tickets are available for $8, and the event is 21 and older.