Balloonfest is kicking it up a notch this year. With a solid music lineup featuring headliners Benny Mardones on Friday, June 10, moe. on Saturday, June 11, and .38 Special on Sunday, June 12, all three prefaced by performances throughout the day from some of the best local bands, this annual event is celebrating extra hard in 2011. Grazzi Zazzara, owner of Paradise Companies and the promoter of the event, has been working with Balloonfest for three years as promoter and more than 20 as a vendor. Zazzara says the improvements were intentional:
“We decided to up ourselves from last year We wanted to raise the bar. Balloonfest wasn’t going to exist a few years ago because they weren’t stepping it up with entertainment. It’s in my back yard and I hated to see it go. It’s a great family event.”
Although last year’s event struggled with uncooperative weather on Saturday, Zazzara is hoping for better conditions this year and a corresponding crowd to match. “You can go anywhere and see some bands,” he says. “And other balloon festivals charge just as much for just balloons. Here, for the fraction of the cost of a normal ticket for moe., you get both.”
Not only both, but throw in the Kim Monroe and Chris Eves Band, Turnip Stampede, Dark Hollow, Los Blancos, Elephant Mountain and more in a family-friendly environment and festival patrons have a full schedule of tunes and balloons.
Chuck Garvey, guitarist and vocalist of moe., is also happy to visit the shores of Jamesville Beach Park for the event. He’s also excited to come back to New York state where his band began in a Buffalo basement 20 years ago. Garvey called in for an interview with the Syracuse New Times while the band was stuck at an airport in Portland, Maine, after rehearsing for their upcoming summer tour.
“My family is really psyched about it,” he says. “My parents and a couple of my sisters still live in the Utica area. We grew up spending a lot of time in Syracuse because that’s where we always went to go see concerts, either at the New York State Fairgrounds or the Carrier Dome. It’s great. I love being there.”
When moe. gathered in October 1989 for a Halloween party show, they didn’t expect much beyond that. They took a more solidified form in the winter of 1990 and named themselves Five Guys Named Moe, after a Louis Jordan song.
“He was a jazz musician who was really kind of a rock star in his time,” Garvey says about Jordan. “He had a very raucous, upbeat, exciting band. It was just something that we thought we identified with at the time. We tried to come up with different names for the band, so we just shortened it up to moe.”
The group went through a few name variations—with the period, without the period, capitalized, lowercase— but ultimately settled on moe., lowercase and with the period. In 1992 they released their first studio album, Fatboy (Fatboy Records), on cassette and only 1,000 copies were made. (It was reissued in 1999 on CD). In 1994, the band released Headseed (Fatboy) and officially quit their day jobs. Musicians came and went, but core members Garvey, bassist and vocalist Rob Derhak and guitarist, keyboard player and vocalist Al Schnier are joined today by drummer Vinnie Amico and percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Jim Loughlin.
“When Rob and I did our first show with the first drummer, Ray {Schwartz} 20 years ago we never would have thought that it would have lasted this long,” Garvey says. “We basically got together for a party and just played a bunch of cover tunes and it was strictly for fun. It was a hobby. And over the next couple years the hobby became something that was a lot more fun than our day jobs, so. . . ” So 20 years later, after more than a dozen albums, shows around the world and numerous festival appearances including at their own moe.down, snoe.down and Summer Camp, moe. hasn’t just surpassed their expectations, they’ve built a brand and a faithful following.
“When we started out touring around the Northeast, usually from the stage at some point in the evening one of us would say, ‘So, does anybody have some floor space where we could sleep tonight?’” Garvey remembers. “That’s just the way it went for a while. We were trying to live on next to nothing, but it was definitely fun and we progressed to this point where people would actually follow us. It was this kind of traveling thing where we would see familiar faces a couple nights in a row. And now it’s gotten to the point where some people have seen us like 200 or 300 times.”
Throughout the many festivals they’ve played, the band has also had the chance to collaborate with artists including Robert Randolph, members of the String Cheese Incident, Bela Fleck, Perry Farrell and tour with Robert Plant. These collaborations as well as their offshoot side projects, including Ha Ha the Moose and Al and the Transamericans, continue to give them more ideas to bring to the band’s round table.
Given moe.’s experimental, shape-shifting sound that switches among genres, this open invitation for differing influences and tastes makes for an exciting songwriting process. “We just try everything out, basically,” Garvey says. “Say I’ve got this idea and let’s try this here or that there and every once in a while something, even if it doesn’t seem like it works right away, we try and refine it. It’s usually a process of trial and error. We all have slightly different tastes in music and we all have things in common and we basically try to mix it all as much as possible. Make something that might sound like The Clash or reggae and rock or bluegrass. There are these little things and we want to put them together as much as we can.”
The band is currently writing songs, with plans to lay down tracks this summer for a new release due next year. In the meantime, their touring schedule, which spans Virginia to Connecticut, will keep them busy, although it noticeably lacks Bonnaroo this year, a festival they’ve played several times, including the very first in 2002. “There are times when you have conflicts where two bands you want to see are both playing at the same time at Bonnaroo,” Garvey says. “It’s almost a bummer to run around and try and catch everything. It’s pretty amazing. It’s a total freak magnet.”
Balloonfest may not be a freak magnet, but it should be a music-lover-magnet. But who knows: Maybe they’re the same thing.
