Reflections on Street Scene: San Diego’s original music fest was vital precursor to Coachella, Wonderfront, CRSSD, KAABOO and more
A small start. A big impact. A far-reaching, if sometimes underappreciated, legacy.
Coachella, Wonderfront, Gator by the Bay, the Tijuana Jazz & Blues Festival, CRSSD, North Park Music Fest and KAABOO are just some of the music festivals that were at least partly inspired by San Diego’s Street Scene music festival.
The event’s 25-year run, which concluded in 2009, helped revitalize San Diego’s once-seedy and largely deserted Gaslamp Quarter, drawing hundreds of thousands of local and out-of-town attendees to enjoy a wonderfully diverse array of music.
Launched by Rob Hagey as a fundraiser for his nonprofit San Diego Jazz Festival, the first Street Scene was held May 12, 1984. The fledgling event took place on two stages on a single block in the Gaslamp. It was an area few at the time willingly ventured into, day or night, other than those seeking out XXX adult bookstores.
Presented in conjunction with the short-lived San Diego Festival of the Arts, Street Scene’s debut lineup featured five young bands: Los Lobos, The Blasters, Joey Harris & The Speedsters, Rebel Rockers and King Biscuit Blues Band.
It was so successful — drawing an inaugural sold-out audience of 5,000 — that a second edition of Street Scene was quickly organized. Held at the same location as the first on Aug. 18, 1984, it featured the Neville Brothers, X, Robert Cray, the Beat Farmers and Jack Mack & The Heart Attack.
Despite unseasonable rains that day, it also sold out. The festival’s first two editions were advertised identically: Five hours. Five bands. Five bucks.
“There was no plan for Street Scene; it just kind of grew organically,” Hagey, 73, recalled. “And it was like: ‘Wow! This really works and it’s a lot of fun’.”
(Eduardo Contreras)
Defying the odds
The first and second edition of Street Scene in 1984 had a budget of $33,000 each, a fraction of the event’s million-dollar-plus budget in its later years. Because those first two editions took place on two stages on Fifth Avenue between J and K streets, when one band finished playing, the audience turned around to face the other stage.
The sole food vendor at the first Street Scene in 1984 was a man who happened to walk by with an ice cream and soft-drink cart just before the show started. He quickly sold out his entire stock.
“In 1985, we made a deal with a guy with a hot dog cart!” Hagey recalled in a 2003 Union-Tribune interview. “We didn’t know what we were getting into.”
Together, the first two Street Scenes drew a combined 10,000 people to a part of downtown that could then charitably be described as rundown and dicey. This influx of young music fans did not go unnoticed. Partners for Livable Places gave the festival two 1984 civic awards in recognition of its first-year successes.
Much more was to come for Street Scene, which was sponsored for its first decade by Michelob beer. The event’s sold-out, two-stage 1986 edition attracted 7,500 people and an MTV “Amuck in America” film crew. The lineup featured The Smithereens, The Call, Delbert McClinton, the Beat Farmers, Omar & The Howlers, The Paladins and the Washington D.C. go-go band Trouble Funk.
Soon thereafter, Hagey added zydeco, Cajun, gospel and various World Music styles to his event’s menu. His festival’s popularity soared ever higher.
The initial sell-outs for Street Scene laid a solid foundation for what became an increasingly eclectic and popular event. At its peak as a three-day weekend event, the festival drew more than 100,000 attendees and had performances on 17 stages.
The national norm for new music festivals, concert series and venues is that it takes three to five years just to break even and begin to turn a profit, as was the case for Coachella. Street Scene proved to be a happy anomaly.
(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Array of music legends
The artists featured at Street Scene over the years included James Brown, Patti Smith, John Lee Hooker, Kanye West, Sheryl Crow, Nigeria’s King Sunny Ade & The African Beats, Etta James, Flaming Lips, Buckwheat Zydeco, Cheap Trick, The Killers, Tool, Brazil’s Ivan Lins and many more. Other area live-music promoters of that time refrained from booking concerts the same weekend as Street Scene, which drew attendees from across Southern California and Arizona, and as far away as Montreal and Europe.
The event’s allure grew so great that leading performers would pop up, unannounced, to do guest spots with their musical pals. They included Pearl Jam singer (and former San Diegan) Eddie Vedder, who sang with R.E.M. at the festival’s 2003 edition, and guitar great Ry Cooder, who memorably duetted for an hour with Malian six-string innovator Ali Farka Toure at the 1993 Street Scene.
In 1989, four years after he founded the for-profit company Rob Hagey Presents — specifically to book and produce Street Scene — Hagey made a major pivot. He put his artistically acclaimed, but financially challenged, San Diego Jazz Festival on the shelf to focus full time on Street Scene.
It was a prudent move.
By the time the festival’s 10th edition was held in 1993, with a budget of more than $1 million, Street Scene had become a two-day affair. It drew 50,000 people that year to hear Los Lobos, B.B. King, indie songstress Juliana Hatfield, gospel favorites The Mighty Clouds of Joy, zydeco ace Zachary Richard and jazz drum legend Tony Williams. The lineup also featured two bands, X and San Diego roots-rock pioneers the Beat Farmers, that had performed at the second Street Scene in 1984.
The 1993 edition of Street Scene was held on 24 blocks of the Gaslamp Quarter — 23 more blocks than the festival’s first two editions. Thanks in part to Street Scene’s eye-opening, award-winning success, by 1993 the once-deserted quarter was filling with new restaurants, live-music clubs, lofts, condos, retail stores and hotels that were packed with festival attendees.
By comparison, the Lollapalooza festival was just two years old in 1993. Coachella, which lost more than a million dollars its first time out in 1999, was still six years away from launching as a two-day event.
“Other festivals that came along a decade or two later were inspired by Street Scene,” said Joey Harris. He performed at its debut edition with his band, The Speedsters, and multiple times thereafter with the pioneering San Diego roots-rock band the Beat Farmers, which toured the U.S. and Europe multiple times.
(Janice Gordon/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
‘Incredible!’
The Beat Farmers performed at Street Scene more than any other act, including at the 1995 edition at which Harris and his wife, Vicki Killpack, were married on stage during the band’s performance. Their wedding was officiated by Country Dick Montana, the band’s drummer and deep-voiced singer, who died barely two months later during a Beat Farmers’ show in Canada.
“What Street Scene accomplished, for music and San Diego, was incredible!” Harris continued. “And it was all due to Rob Hagey.”
Killpack, Harris’ wife, is equally enthusiastic.
“I saw Joey perform at the first Street Scene in 1984, when I was 19, and I still have my festival T-shirt from it,” she said. “Street Scene had all my favorite bands. I miss it.”
The 1994 edition of the festival brought $6 million in revenues to the city of San Diego, which never provided any funding for the event. “And $4.3 million of that ($6 million) was new money that wouldn’t have come to the area otherwise,” Street Scene attorney Mike McDade — who was also a San Diego port commissioner — told the Union-Tribune at the time.
The event expanded to three days in 1995. That year also saw Street Scene introduce a “Women in Blues” stage and a “Rock Espanol” stage, which spotlighted such top Latin rock bands as Maldita Vecindad, La Lupita, Fobia and former San Diego resident Sergio Arau.
That year, Street Scene broadened its popular “festivals within a festival” food, drink and visual art offerings, and it also debuted performance stages sponsored (and partly underwritten) by the prominent national record labels Blue Note and Rounder to spotlight their artists.
The festival’s 2003 edition drew a record 103,000 people. The lineup included R.E.M., Wilco, the Allman Brothers Band, the reunited Sex Pistols, Macy Gray, De La Soul, X, Tijuana’s Nortec Collective, San Diego’s Nickel Creek and Mojo Nixon, and dozens more.
“To this day, I bring up Street Scene in different circles and people still fondly remember it,” said Michael Trimble, the executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association. He was involved with Street Scene from its start in 1984 until its final 2009 edition.
“Street Scene introduced people to a lot of great music artists they probably wouldn’t have heard here otherwise, like Buckwheat Zydeco and Zap Mama.” Trimble noted. “And Rob Hagey is a big reason for the Gaslamp coming alive — and for downtown San Diego becoming a lot more than it was when he started Street Scene.”
A vital catalyst
(Courtesy Rob Hagey)
The event’s growth and popularity became a key impetus in the renaissance of the Gaslamp Quarter. That may be the event’s biggest accomplishment beyond the wealth of music it spotlighted.
“In 1984, the same year Street Scene started, I moved into a loft in the Showley Candy Factory building that, 20 years later, was moved to Petco Park,” said former San Diego Jazz Festival board president John Meyer, who made many of Street Scene’s distinctive on-stage banners.
“At the time, there were only three or four restaurants downtown that you could go to,” he continued. “As Street Scene grew, restaurants, bars and all kinds of businesses opened and the Gaslamp became a year-round destination. And the festival, thanks to Rob, was the catalyst for that.
“The big irony is that the popularity of Street Scene — which made downtown a desirable place to be — pushed the festival out of the area. Because all the parking lots and vacant lots where performance stages were set up became residential buildings and businesses. Street Scene became a victim of its own success.”
In 2005 and 2006, Street Scene was held in the massive Qualcomm Stadium parking lot in Mission Valley. In 2007, Hagey teamed for one year with concert industry giant Live Nation, which moved the festival to a venue it owned, Chula Vista’s Coors Amphitheatre (now North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre).
Attendance plummeted, in part because Street Scene’s gradual shift towards alternative and mainstream rock acts, hip-hop and electronic music acts did not differentiate it from many of the other, even larger festivals that, inspired in part by Street Scene, had spring up in California and across the nation.
Street Scene’s final two editions in 2008 and 2009 were held primarily in the large parking lot to the immediate south of Petco Park. The downtown baseball stadium opened in 1994 on a wide swath of downtown that had previously housed much of Street Scene.
Regardless of the new location, the 2009 attendance of 32,000 was just half of what Hagey — who funded the festival independently on his own — had hoped to attract. He liquidated the assets of his Rob Hagey Presents company in order to pay an estimated $2.8 million to creditors and his groundbreaking festival came to an end.
“Other festivals, like KAABOO and Wonderfront, have tried to do what Street Scene successfully did for most of its 25 years,” former San Diego Jazz Festival board president Meyer said.
“KAABOO and Wonderfront have both struggled, even with big corporate money and city funding behind them. Rob didn’t have any of that support.”
“I didn’t have financial backing,” agreed Hagey, who is now 73 and lives in semi-retirement near Santa Fe.
“But people still remember me as ‘the guy behind Street Scene,’ and that kind of recognition is wonderful.”
Singing Street Scene’s praises
How many music festivals has Street Scene inspired?
Over the years, the producers of nearly every subsequent festival in this area have cited Street Scene as an inspiration in interviews with the Union-Tribune. Here are some of their comments.
Coachella festival co-founder Paul Tollett: “I really liked Street Scene. I booked (Jamaican dub-music poet) Linton Kwesi Johnson for (the 2008) Coachella after hearing him at Street Scene (in 2002).
CRSSD Festival co-founder Tyson Ziebarth (who performed as DJ Virgin Tears — at the 2002 edition of Street Scene): “The tie, to me, between CRSSD and Street Scene is that both have a strong attachment to this city. People can say San Diego is behind the curve, but if you give them something new, they’ll move forward, and what Street Scene was doing was forward-looking. So it’s all been a progression for me.”
Gator by the Bay co-founder Peter Oliver: “I loved Street Scene in the early days. It was so wonderful and it provided the kind of inspiration that kept us driven to do Gator.”
Tijuana Jazz & Blues Festival founder and San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival co-founder Julian Plascencia: “I went to Street Scene many times and it was great. We actually talked about Street Scene with other promoters in Tijuana that something like Street Scene should happen here. Street Scene made the city of San Diego feel more intimate — and it was, for sure, always a reference for me with my festival in Tijuana.”
Wonderfront co-founder Ernie Hahn Jr.: “Rob Hagey created this great festival. Street Scene was about San Diegans doing an event for San Diegans, in the heart of San Diego. It’s exactly what we want to do with Wonderfront… a ‘Street Scene on the Bay’ vibe.”
KAABOO Del Mar co-founder Bryan E. Gordon: “The San Diego community seems to miss Street Scene in a lot of ways, and there’s a void in what is a vibrant, very active metropolitan area. So, from our vantage point, while it’s obviously too bad for the city and the producers of Street Scene that it fell by the wayside, it’s encouraging for us that there is an appetite for such an event in San Diego… And, hopefully, we can take that legacy and build on it.”
Your turn!
What are your favorite San Diego Street Scene memories that you would like to share with the San Diego Union-Tribune and its readers? Send your responses to george.varga@sduniontribune.com. Please include your name and where you live (not your address, but the area, such as Chula Vista, North Park or Santee).
george.varga@sduniontribune.com
