View of the Bluegrass Festival from the center of Rose Park. Photo by Michelle Gerdes.
While chances are you didn’t get out to both, I hope you made it out to at least one of the Long Beach music festivals that happened last weekend, because each came off famously.
But if you took in the pair, you just had a truly unique musical weekend—an odd combination that might have broad appeal to those whose personal recipe includes variety as the spice of life.
Saturday was Long Beach Funk Fest, the penultimate event of our fourth annual Summer And Music (SAM) series. This year Funk Fest soared to new heights and by nightfall, the space between 3rd Street and Broadway encompassing Pine Avenue and the Promenade had gone a bit Burning Man (albeit funkadelic, more PG-rated and with stuff for sale).
Then came the second annual Rose Park Bluegrass Festival, a wholesome Middle American block party with silly contests (moustache, pie-eating) and music that is pure Americana. No sophomore jinx here, to be sure.
It was an interesting one-two punch, the cleansing of down-home afternoon after the freaks came out at night. Where else can you find such a juxtaposition?
Or more importantly: Can you market it?
Long Beach is always on the hunt for ways to attract out-of-towners. So how about making the Rose Park Bluegrass Festival part of SAM, taking place every year on the Sunday after Funk Fest? Perhaps hotels could offer a special Funk/Bluegrass package that includes shuttle service to Rose Park. Maybe a Friday component could be tacked on, such as a wine or beer-tasting tour of downtown? It isn’t like there aren’t fine such establishments here for the sampling.
I’m no marketing guru (hell, I stole this idea from a friend), but you have to be a lot more oblivious than I am of dollars and sense not to realize that Long Beach has too few big attractors. And so while the long-term ideal is for our erstwhile Iowa by the Sea to fashion itself into a mini-metropolis dynamic enough to be a destination location by dint of its everyday charisma, in the short term we should garner as much attention as we can by growing our big events bigger.
Funk and bluegrass make for unusual bedfellows. But the unusual has an attractive power. Can we get creative enough to harness it? I’d like to see us try, because by sheer coincidence, Long Beach just hosted a unique musical weekend that too few people would ever have thought to take as a whole.
Funk Fest viewed from the Promenade. Photo by Greggory Moore.