What are you going to do over Memorial Day weekend? If your go-to event has always been RiverFest, you'll need to come up with another plan.
Options: Africa Day Street Festival will be going on along South Main Street. The Sound of Music will be onstage at Robinson Center. Butler Center is opening an exhibit of vintage Arkansas-related and other movie posters. There's stuff to see at the Old State House and Arkansas Arts Center. Plus picnics, cookouts, trips to the lake.
So why no RiverFest? The downtown Little Rock music festival is, according to its representatives, taking a year off to restructure, reorganize and re-invent itself.
It started out a casual free gathering at Murray Park known as the Summer Arts Festival in July 1978 that was founded by the Junior League of Little Rock. I remember arriving there on a hot, sunny afternoon with the boyfriend of the moment in his ancient yellow soft-top Jeep CJ-5 toting a cooler of beer and a jug of sweet pink Catawba wine (a product of Lake Erie wineries which, though headache-inducing, was familiar to me from growing up near there).
We parked on gravel (Murray Park was much more primitive then), poured ourselves a cold beverage, and wandered around checking out homemade booths populated by area crafters and listening to local musicians.
Details (and memory) are elusive, but I recall having a fine time.
After moving to Memorial Day weekend in 1979, and to Julius Breckling Riverfront Park in 1983, the festival that was renamed RiverFest gradually became rigidly fenced off from its surroundings and evolved into an expensive, bloated, highly regulated and conventional venue that, for the free-wheeling set, soon lost its appeal.
Admission was free for its first 12 years. Then the level of entertainment rose--and with the arrival of performers like the Turtles, Willie Nelson, Al Green, ZZ Top, LL Cool J, Flaming Lips, Steve Earle, James Brown, Richard Thompson, George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Chris Stapleton, and the traditional closing night performance by Arkansas Symphony Orchestra followed by an ever more spectacular fireworks display--and so did the cost to attend.
As a music reviewer for the Arkansas Gazette, I spent a lot of time at RiverFest, writing about some of these impressive performers. Friends often expressed a degree of jealousy that I got to see concerts for free. But, while trying not to sound like a whiner, watching a show in order to review it on deadline is not the same as watching a show for fun.
Reviewers can't leave early. Most of us avoid substances with the ability to inebriate or impair judgment. Coming up with a coherent story that conveys the atmosphere, sound, crowd reaction, and quality of the music in a brief period of time (usually 30 minutes) is stressful. And reading one's review in a newspaper's print edition the next day often leads to remorse over an error or omission of details that might have made it better.
This sounds like the journalistic version of a First World problem. It's not like I'm spending my evenings at sewer commission meetings or writing stories about babies who look like Hitler (an assignment carried out by the journalist character played by Ricky Gervais in an episode of After Life). Still ...
Yeah, I got into RiverFest for free. But years of working the event can turn what's fun for most festival goers into work for those of us writing about it. After a night or two of reviewing, about the last thing I wanted to do was go back and enjoy it the way others do. Besides, as costs continued to rise, there's no way I was going to fork over my hard-earned review pay for the price of admission.
In 2018, a three-day pass with no re-entry was $50 (plus sales tax and a $2 "venue fee" totaling $6.50), $65 with unlimited entry (plus $7.85 in fees). A single-day pass on Friday (no exit or re-entry) was $25 plus $4.25; a single-day pass on Saturday or Sunday was $30 plus $4.90.
This would run up a pretty big tab for a family, seeing as it covers the cost of entertainment but not food, beverages, gimcrack purchases, souvenirs, and in some cases parking for those who aren't familiar with where to stash a car downtown on a weekend without handing cash over for the privilege.
In an attempt to address this discouraging situation, in 2016 the children's programming was separated from the main festival to become a free event on April 2 called Springfest. It was fun, but the date shift didn't do much for attendance. And the temperatures were brisk, in the high 50s on that date.
In 2017, RiverFest moved to the first weekend in June. By 2018, it returned to Memorial Day weekend. But people stayed away in droves. So no festival this year.
Organizers hope to return in 2020. And there are those of us who hope that if it does return, it goes back to being a casual, diverse and lively festival that's free, open and fun.
Karen Martin is senior editor of Perspective.
Editorial on 05/19/2019