Think the satellite ”Rally for Sanity” is the only thing going on in town this Halloween weekend? Well we don’t blame you. It’s a secret after all. The Secret Sound Festival is going down on the city’s coolest street this weekend with a crap load of indie bands. Tickets to the festival come with all the free “Oh that band? Yeah. Totally saw them play forever ago. Their old stuff before they sold out was much better.” you can pack away in your American Apparel skinny jeans.

The festival is being put on by the “St. Louis Secret Sound Society” who describes themselves as:

[A] unique collaboration of musicians, music journalists, concert promoters, show bookers, graphic designers and visual artists who combine our broad ranging music experience to support and celebrate independent art in St. Louis. We’re looking to create a broad range of new content to broadcast St. Louis’ nascent creative communities both to the city and beyond.

Details about this weekend’s festival on Cherokee Street, including a schedule, bios on all the bands playing the show, and of course, the all important ticket link (only $10), are on their site: stlss.org

If you head down there, make sure you hook us up with some photos of the festivities: facebook.com/punchingkitty or punchingkitty.com/tips.

Saturday we went to go checkout PlaybackSTL‘s music festival that took place in the Loop this weekend.  This was the most interesting thing I saw:

One might think its weird that you would go down to one of the more fun areas of St. Louis to see a music festival and you hear no music, see any signs of a festival, but instead just see a scary, chain smoking clown, but that’s apparently the way PlaybackSTL wanted it…a secret music festival.

The idea of the festival is a good one.  Get a bunch of bands, both local and outside, and get them to come play and in the process highlight both good new music, and some of the great University City venues.  However, they missed the part about letting people know about it.

Seriously.  I came to the Loop Saturday afternoon to see how it was going and check out some of their panels on different topics that could help young bands.  I knew it wasn’t a good sign when I got a parking spot with no problem.  It got worse from there.  The streets weren’t any more filled than a usual Saturday, and to my shock…no stage, no bands playing outside, no music at all.  None.  So I head in to Cicero’s, where the panels are to take place.  Once again I have to check my phone to see if this is the right day/time. There were maybe 10 people in the place and the panels were tucked away on that back stage with the door closed no less.

As you can see, the panels weren’t even close to full, despite the streets being full people that had no idea any of this was going on!

I don’t understand this at all.  Why bother having a music festival in the Loop if you aren’t going to bother using that great street atmosphere?  I asked around and I heard the same thing from a few people: The organizers thought a free, outdoor stage would take away from wristband sales.

Yes, thats a moronic way to look at it, and if thats how you feel, go do the damn thing in St. Charles, but whatever at least there was some sort of thought put in to that decision.  What about the decision to not promote the damn thing at all?  No one had an answer for that, but I did talk to several people that had no idea whatsoever that the festival was going on!  Well done.  To make matters worse, the best show of the night at the Pageant, featuring several great local acts, wasn’t even a part of the PlaybackSTL line up!

I’m not taking away anything from the bands, which I hear many of them felt guilted in to playing, rather than actually wanting to, and I’m not taking anything away from the panelists.  They all did great work, its just too bad PlaybackSTL didn’t give them the support and audience they deserved.

Last year’s attempt was much better.  There were people in the streets, a stage next to Vintage Vinyl, and a feeling of an actual festival.  This year it felt like a secret club meeting.

I do hope they do this again, and I hope they do it right the third time around.

We braved the blistering heat of Sunday and headed south to check out the Tomato Festival at St. Louis favorite Iron Barley.  We missed the actual creation of the World’s Largest BLT, but that didn’t dampen our spirits as we took plenty of great photos and even put together a little video our the event which you can see right below.

We have some of the photos in a gallery via Flickr for now but we will have all of them up soon when we launch the much needed update to our photo system.  See the gallery here.