Can Fun Fun Fun Fest Stay Texas' Coolest Festival?

Mike Brooks

Kowabunga, dudes! Fun Fun Fun Fest featured beautiful weather and lots of crowd surfing in 2014

Music festivals are a tough business. It's hard to make them stick. Organizers don't usually expect to break even for the first five years, often longer. Even if a festival survives, it's not the end of the story. Maintaining what you have often means expanding your model and your audience. But for many festivals, that goes against what makes them great in the first place.

Exhibit A: Fun Fun Fun Fest, which took place last weekend at Auditorium Shores in Austin. Now in its ninth year, its voluminous credibility is built on its status as a small, well-curated event. But while this year's installment was an overall success, there were hints of a festival that's hit a crossroads.

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The weekend got off to a bad start, though that wasn't entirely the festival's fault. Software issues caused the computers to repeatedly crash on Friday, leaving fans caught in long and slow-moving lines. By late afternoon, the wait for will call had stretched to over three hours, a situation especially painful for people who shelled out $85 plus fees for a one-day pass. (Not that the $195 weekend-pass holders were thrilled either.)

To their credit, Transmission, the organizers of FFF, responded to the situation by eventually letting everyone in the door essentially on good faith, and for the rest of the weekend there were no further issues. In their statement-slash-apology, they alluded to the difficulties caused by their change of location -- Auditorium Shores is undergoing remodeling, meaning the layout was different from 2013 -- but that was only part of the problem. Even without the technical issues, the box office seemed way under-staffed.

Exact numbers on attendance haven't been released yet, but it's almost certain they were higher than they've ever been. It was only three years ago, after all, that the festival moved to Auditorium Shores from the much smaller confines of Waterloo Park, expanding not only from two to three days but also incorporating the FFF Nites in the downtown clubs. Saturday in particular was very full. Not surprisingly, then, it was on Sunday, when the crowds had thinned out a bit, that the weekend seemed to hit its proper balance of a relaxed, end-of-season festival with plenty of space to move around.

Mike Brooks

King Diamond was one of the major draws for metal fans

Mike Brooks

Courtney Barnett impressed Saturday on the Orange Stage

That, after all, is what's supposed to make FFF so great. It's a small-to-midsize fest with a little bit of everything: Music, comedy and side attractions (wrestling, skateboarding, table tennis, bean bags and the like), plus good beer (from Shiner) and liquor. Its strengths lie in the details, the most important of which remains the music, which draws heavily on tastemaker-friendly indie bands and, more unusually, metal. It's a blend few festivals serve up, including Austin City Limits and SXSW.

Yet for all that, the core of this year's lineup felt disjointed. Part of that, again, wasn't exactly the festival's fault: Death Grips, Guided By Voices and Death Cab for Cutie, all supposed to feature prominently, canceled. Then again, those first two bands are notorious for being unreliable, and while the last wasn't exactly exciting (they failed to even sell out KXT's Summer Cut over the summer), they were still intended to be co-headliners. Foreseeable or not, these remained miscalculations.

The remaining lineup fell a little flat, too. Much like ACL this year, the headliners at FFF -- Judas Priest? Modest Mouse? Neutral Milk Hotel? -- were heavy on nostalgia, light on currency. Sure, many of those selections were bands you'd never find at ACL, and the stages were broken down conveniently along rough genre lines, but the package didn't veer that noticeably from the model of the big festivals from which FFF supposedly separates itself.

But that's what happens when a festival grows the way FFF has in recent years: It can no longer rely on young, up-and-coming bands to build its lineup because it needs to sell more tickets, so it falls back on "name" artists to help broaden the appeal. Much like criticisms that have been leveled against SXSW in recent years, there was little to actually buzz about. Those efforts to split the difference made FFF feel like a festival that's a little unsure of its identity, or at least in a state of transition.