Belmont-Sheffield Music Fest ran Memorial Day weekend, May 22 to 24, on the streets around the Belmont CTA station. The programming was tribute-band driven, which is the polite way of saying that almost nobody on the bill played their own songs.
This is the point in a review where a music writer is expected to be witty at the festival’s expense, and I am going to decline, because the tribute band is a legitimate Chicago summer institution and the contempt aimed at it is mostly snobbery with a press pass.
What the Form Actually Does
Start with the function. A street festival needs a crowd that stays and spends, made up largely of people who did not come for the music. Original material asks that crowd to pay attention to something unfamiliar while holding a beer in a street full of distractions. A tribute act asks nothing, and delivers a room where several hundred strangers sing the same song.
That collective recognition is a real musical experience, not a degraded substitute for one. It is also, incidentally, exactly what happened at the most-discussed moment of Lollapalooza this year, when a string trio played Lily Allen arrangements and the crowd did the singing. The mechanism is identical; only the prestige differs.
Second, the musicianship is frequently excellent and always underrated. Playing another band’s catalogue accurately, for two hours, outdoors, on a flatbed stage, is difficult work. The players doing it are working musicians earning a living in a city where that is close to impossible, and a tribute circuit is one of the few reliable sources of paid live work left.
The Honest Criticism
None of which means the model is costless. Every tribute slot on a street festival is a slot an original act did not get, and a city whose neighbourhood festivals default to the form is quietly deciding not to invest in its own scene.
That is why Edgewater Music Fest booking 35 original acts in August is genuinely notable, and why West Fest handing its booking to the Empty Bottle produces a better festival. Those are chambers of commerce choosing to take a risk on unfamiliar music, and the risk is real.
Belmont-Sheffield does not take it. It opens the season on Memorial Day weekend with songs everybody knows, fills Lakeview, and sends everyone home happy. Produced by Special Events Management, per the published calendars.
The version of this piece that mocks a covers festival writes itself and is worth nothing. A few hundred people in Lakeview singing a chorus together on the first warm weekend of the year is a decent thing that happened, and the musicians got paid.
Cover image: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)