Central Track Contributor
The Toadies Are Bringing Their Namesake Festival Home to Fort Worth.
Remember that announcement that the Toadies were supposed to make during the happy hour they hosted out in Fort Worth at Lola's Saloon yesterday? Well, they made it. And then they sent out a press release about it.
Long story short: After five years of hosting Dia De Los Toadies in mostly remote locations (see: New Braunfels and, fittingly, Possum Kingdom Lake) the sixth installment of the festival will be held, for the first time, in the band's hometown Fort Worth.
The event will take place on September 13 and 14 at Panther Island Pavilion. No bands have yet been announced (aside from The Toadies, duh), but $30 tickets go on sale on Friday, February 15, through Prekindle anyway.
Embrace the fest life, Fort Worth: This, after all, is the second big festival that has been announced as taking place in Panther City this week
Below, check out in full the press release announcing Dia's move to the Fort.
TOADIES BRING DIA DO LOS TOADIES FESTIVAL HOME
A DOZEN BANDS TO PLAY ACROSSS TWO STAGE AT PANTHER ISLAND PAVILION SEPTEMBER 13th AND 14th AT SIXTH ANNUAL DIA DE LOS TOADIES FESTIVAL.
FORT WORTH — After five years of hosting their annual end-of-summer throwdown at various locations throughout the state, the Toadies are taking their sixth Dia de los Toadies festival to their hometown of Fort Worth in 2013.
This year's festival, set to feature a dozen bands performing across two stages, will take place on Saturday, September 14, at Panther Island Pavilion, just minutes from Downtown Fort Worth. Per tradition, the band will also host an intimate “fireside/almost acoustic” showcase on Friday, September 13, the evening before their day-long bash.
Since Dia de los Toadies' 2008 debut in conjunction with the band’s return-to-the-spotlight No Deliverance LP, the festival has evolved into one of the most hotly anticipated events on Texas’ yearly music calendar — a carefully curated and reliably rocking affair that’s seen memorable performances from such celebrated acts as Ben Kweller, Black Angels, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, Bowling for Soup, Centro-matic, Heartless Bastards, Helmet, Mariachi El Bronx, Riverboat Gamblers, The Secret Machines and The Sword, plus dozens of up-and-coming, underground acts from the Toadies’ home turf of Texas.
“It's been great moving the Dia festival around Texas, but at a certain point, we realized that we need to share it with our hometown, Fort Worth, where the band is still based. We played Billy Bob’s last year and it reminded us what a hometown crowd is like, so moving the festival made perfect sense,” says Toadies guitarist Clark Vogeler,
Bringing this year's celebration to Fort Worth for the first time affords the band the opportunity to further show its pride for the Texas music scene — a sentiment near and dear to the band’s drive since performing its first-ever hometown show at The Axis in 1989. It was at that venue and others like it across North Texas where the Toadies cut their teeth and refined their craft before their 1994 Rubberneck debut earned the band national radio play and an immediate place in Texas rock lore thanks to such adored singles as “Tyler,” “Away” and the iconic “Possum Kingdom.” That seminal full-length was followed by band's 2001, critically acclaimed Hell Below/Stars Above LP — a years-in-the-making release that saw the band pushing both the boundaries of its Texas swing inspiration and, in part due to label frustrations, the buttons of its members. In 2002, the Toadies called things quits. Four years later, though, the band returned — more revered than ever — for a successful string of reunion dates that so rekindled the Toadies' creative fire that the band has since released three more lauded full-lengths for Dallas-based independent label Kirtland Records, outpacing the output of their first run as a band, and in an even shorter timeframe.
These days, there's no end in sight for either the band or their venerable fest, which has been hailed by the Austin Chronicle as “Willie's picnic for a new generation” and by the Dallas Observer as “a mutual head-nod from artist to artist, from one rock generation to another.” These days, Dia's become a tradition all its own.
And, in 2013, that tradition comes home.
