Sink With California Festival IV

When I was a sophomore in college, I applied for and received a grant from Princeton to start a music festival. I convinced them it was to bring kids/young adults together in a productive, progressive scene to share ideas through music. While this is generally true, the idea was also to get kids to come to southern California. To enjoy the beach. To rock out and eat burritos and get away from whatever boring suburb they were living in for a few days. I named it after one of my favorite songs (“Sink With Kalifornija”) by one of my favorite bands (Youth Brigade).

Four years later, the festival has become a yearly mecca for some awesome punk bands and some crazy punk kids and some not so awesome punk bands and some pretty run-of-the-mill kids. A good time nonetheless. An endeavor I run with the help of bandmates and friends, mostly Tim, who is also the general manager of my life, generally speaking. This year was exceptionally difficult. A few other menfolk who are not-so-supportive of any/all things Al Brown decided to get a different festival going. In doing so, they snaked a lot of the headlining bands that would’ve drawn a lot of kids to our festival. So then, with the air snatched from our sails, Tim and I delved deeper into our sack of bands and pulled out a roster that we were most proud of: Acts of Sedition, Burial Year, Sabertooth Zombie, Another Breath, Broken Needle, 108, Greg MacPherson, Parallax, and all the Bremerton, WA bands (Sunset Riders, The Flexxx, Valley of the Dinosaurs, H.I.V.). There were more, too, and we hoped that kids would come out and rock out and be crazy.

The kids did not come.

I lost a great deal of money and was really frustrated and, by Sunday, when DANGERS (our band) was scheduled to play, I had a lot of emotion running through me. We set up to play and just sort of let loose. We hadn’t played a show in three months, hadn’t played half of the songs on our set live, ever, and just sort of rammed them out like a battering ram:



Cathartic and exciting. The reason that losing money is no real loss at all. Not affecting a lot of kids, but affecting a few kids a great deal. Feeling alive. Forever moments. That sort of thing.

Al