“At Fest, you can be whoever you want to be,” says Tony Weinbender over the phone. “You don’t really have to try to fit in. I think Fest is just full of a bunch of nerds. It’s just a bunch of music nerds.” Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, Gainesville, Florida’s Fest is the undisputed fan favorite in an ever-expanding universe of punk rock festivals. On the last weekend of October, the city otherwise known as home to the University of Florida will once again transform into a living, breathing Valhalla for all things punk, fueled by the support and enthusiasm of scores of volunteers, thousands of fans and its mastermind a decade and a half running, Tony Weinbender. And while it’s far from the biggest, or the first, or whichever superlative a competing festival might boast, it’s a common consensus among punks that Fest is the best. According to Weinbender, that has everything to do with the fact that he’s as much of a geeked-out fanboy for this shit as the rest of us.

“I try to curate a festival that I personally want to attend,” he says. “I’m not curating a festival that’s gonna make me the most money or get me the most attention. I don’t put bands on that I’m not into. I just happen to be somewhat lucky that my tastes kind of mirror the tastes of several thousand other people.”
Unlike bigger, corporate-sponsored music festivals that start small and grow into unmanageable, claustrophobic monsters in a matter of years, Fest has remained a beacon of quality and integrity in the scene, never selling out or pandering to trends in the name of the almighty dollar.

“I don’t give a fuck about a lot of the shit out there,” says Weinbender. “I played in bands when I was sixteen and the only way we got shows out of our town was to help out other bands. And when I stopped playing in bands, I still did that. I still booked shows for bands but not because I was a promoter, like, ‘Oh, let’s look at how many ticket sales they did in Florida last time.’”
It’s hard to pin down exactly what the secret is to Fest’s success, but Weinbender chalks it up to simple care and concern for the fan. Talking to him about his festival, he genuinely sounds more like a frustrated, invested music fan than an erstwhile enthusiast-turned-proprietor à la Perry Farrell. And thank god for that.

“I think we curate a festival that is curated around the attendee’s experience more so than the band’s experience,” he says. “I can’t believe it when a band’s like, ‘Oh man, where’s our green room? Where’s our catering backstage? Where’s our VIP lounge?’ You shouldn’t give a shit about that! You should be out there watching bands and hanging out with your fans instead of all sitting around backstage in a catering area or sitting on the side of the stage watching each other play.

Maybe it’s the fact that we have smaller venues. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s not all outside in one giant field. I like to choose my own adventure and that’s what I liked about going to certain music festivals but also, I didn’t like a lot of things about them. But instead of complaining about it, I just got together with friends and started what we thought was a good idea as a festival. And fifteen years later, it might not be the best blueprint but it seems like a pretty fuckin’ solid one.”

That blueprint stemmed from what Weinbender perceived as a dearth, both locally in Gainesville and in the scene at large, of a healthy and positive celebration of punk’s more positive elements. As a teenager, Weinbender bore witness to the genre’s commercial boom, which, together with the rise of macho, agro hardcore bands, put punk in a position ripe for criticism and in dire need of reclamation. And since its inception in 2002, Fest has risen to a position of sanctuary for folks who seem to simply get it.

“I graduated high school in ’94 and that’s when we really started seeing the jocks going to punk shows ‘cause of Green Day and stuff. It was cool. It was accepted. They were like, “Yo, dude. I’m gonna get my aggression out. This stuff’s fuckin’ heavy. And you know what? There might be some hot chicks there!” And that shit still goes on, very much so. And it might happen at Fest, too, somewhat, but I think as far as the community of people that come to Fest, that shit’s really looked down upon and if anything like that ever happens at Fest, usually the crowd shuts it down before we have to have anybody from our crew deal with it. You can’t control everybody, but I think as far as music festivals go, we have the best music fans. I’ve never had a report or seen a fight at Fest either. I’ll knock on all the wood for that.”
Fifteen years strong, Fest serves as a strong case for punk rock as an instrument of positivity. Still seen by outsiders as a breeding ground for aggression and debauchery (and not incorrectly, in some instances), punk rock has a well-intended, wholesome side that often goes unnoticed. Fest does a remarkable job of showcasing that side, both to festival attendees and, perhaps surprisingly, to the city of Gainesville.

“For a college town, you’d think they’d be kind of used to it. You take homecoming or any of the other football games… it’s gross. There are no fucks given at all. Like, “Fuck the planet, fuck everybody else, go Gators.” A friend of mine started Ubering and he stopped after doing an Orange and Blue game, which is just a scrimmage or something. There were so many people in town that they took over University Ave. so bad that cars couldn’t drive up and down it. Cars were dead stopped because people were just walking through the streets. If that happened at Fest, the city would be so pissed at us. We take the time to think ahead and be like, “Hey, we’re gonna have a lot of people on this street at this time. It’s probably gonna be a good idea to just close these streets down so pedestrians can walk through. And I understand it’s really hard to manage a city. But when you see the level of chaos and craziness and grossness that happens around any major college or university around sports time and then you take it to a normal person and go “Hey, we’re thinkin’ about doing this big football game OR we’re thinkin’ about letting 8,000 kids in black that are punk rock in your town, which would you like? Most city commissioners would be like “I’ll take the football game.” But then you talk to local businesses. After Fest 10, local business kind of stepped up. The mayor did a survey and went around downtown and it was in the paper that local businesses support this punk rock music festival. The business owners were like, “This is way better than game days. People are more polite. There are no fights. People are actively enjoying themselves. They’re spending money. We make more money this weekend than we do any homecoming game.” And homecoming is supposed to be the biggest sports income event to the city. Fest does an amazing job supporting the Gainesville economy.”

Weinbender is proud and effervescent as he describes his festival, as he should be. As long as I’ve known about Fest personally, I haven’t heard a single negative word about it, from bands and fans alike. The only ill will he had toward a facet of the festival pertained to those rare birds hatched from bad eggs that travel to Gainesville for the wrong reasons altogether and manage to sully an otherwise perfectly good time. Unfortunately, such ne’er-do-wells still manage to slip through the cracks.

“When people come to Fest and they’re kind of bad people, they’ll show their ass fast and we’ll get a bad report and they won’t get asked back. I really feel like there’s not a band that keeps getting asked back and people are like, ‘Man, who let those assholes play?’
I recently had to tell a band that’s played Fest for a long time, “Hey, I don’t think we’re gonna have you back because one of your members is just a really bad person when he drinks.” I witnessed him just being a total dick to one of my people. I was standing right there and he was so fucked up that he didn’t even realize that I was there. It was gross and he needs to grow the fuck up. And that sucks, because now I’ve got to be that guy. And of course there’s that argument of “I guarantee you somebody else was worse.” Yeah, but I saw this. I have to take action. We’ve had some stuff like that. (Fest co-organizer) Sarah Goodwin, who deals with all the bands, has told me on occasion, “These people are kind of shitty. I don’t like dealing with them.” And if you piss off Sarah Goodwin, I don’t want you coming to our festival.

Every stage manager fills out a band report card. And it’s like, two out of 360 will be like, “Fuck this band.” And every time it’s a band who’s been sent to me by a third party, an agent or something who’s never been to Fest and they just don’t get it. They took too long to set up, whined about this, whined about that, they overplayed, weren’t considerate to the fact that there was a band playing after them and then another band after them. You learn. You learn every year and you tweak it so the next year’s a little better. And after fifteen years of experience with this, we’ve taken lots of notes about what works and what doesn’t. But since you don’t have that connection, you do have to trust people. When bands come, they get a letter that says very clearly, this is the stuff you do not do. It helps if bands read. I think the key is you sign and say you read something before you get your first free beer. Maybe that’s what we should start doing. “I need you to recite the third line…”
While Fest has annually been host to a handful of veterans from its formative years, the fifteenth anniversary will bear an emphasis on reunions from the early days of Fest and the years leading up to it, particularly emo favorites from the genre’s mid-90s golden era. However, unlike the reunions you might see at giant competitors like Riot Fest, these don’t reek of the cash grab that palpably spur so many musical comebacks.

“A lot of people are like, ‘I don’t know who Twelve Hour Turn is,’” says Weinbender. “And I’m like, ‘Well, maybe you should.’ I still get a kick, at forty, at the ‘Hey, you should listen to this band.’ I don’t wanna go to a festival where I’m like, ‘I know every single band on this list. They’re all awesome!’ I want people to go ‘Who the fuck is this?’ and then actually check them out. That’s why our website is so strong, every band has a profile page and there’s radio playlists so you can check out new stuff. I still geek out. I feel like a proud papa in a lot of ways, like I’m really excited that people go see this band ‘cause I was stoked when they emailed me and they’re really rad. And that’s another thing that’s helped us over the years. There are certain bands that have played year after year because we were there for them when they were small bands and we gave them that shot and they kind of grew with Fest. And we still see that with a lot of the bands. I wish some of the bands respected that a little bit more but I think a lot of times they have other people poking them in other directions. Like, we had you for the first couple of years when nobody cared and now I’ve got a manager telling me, ‘Oh, your festival is just not that big anymore. They’re getting offers for these other big festivals.’ Okay, you get to play with the GZA. I’m stoked. I understand this is what you do for a living and this is what you have to do and you can’t always come back home.”

On top of the reunions, this year’s Fest will play host to some new surprises, many of which Weinbender plans to hold out on announcing until late summer, but was willing to tease at a few:

“The lineup in general is just stacked. We spent a lot of time curating it. We invested more money into it this year. We’re really excited about the way the schedule’s shaping up, the pairings we’ve done with bands, the showcases we’ve built. There will be a bunch of mystery band shows this year already in the schedule that people are gonna lose their shit over—bands that are already playing Fest that we’ve talked into playing some secret shows in smaller venues. So those will be really intimate and really fun. Already, we’ve had a great response from bands that wanna do some really unique cover sets. Those will be announced when the rest of the schedule’s announced, which we’re hoping to have up in August. But the mystery band stuff we won’t announce until the day of.

I’m gonna go a little bit bigger with our wrestling show that we’ve done. This will be our third year doing that. We’re getting more hands-on with wrestlers that we appreciate in the indie world and seeing about getting ‘em here and showcasing a lot of Florida talent. We’re working with the city on a possible new space to host the wrestling. They’ve got a really old, abandoned warehouse that they don’t do anything with so we’ve been talking about maybe having four walls and some electricity and getting weird in there.”

When you boil down Fest to what sets it apart, its own name is in many ways a misnomer, an ironic gesture toward the fact that it’s quite unlike any other days-long celebrations of music and its surrounding community. According to Weinbender, that’s the product of mere enthusiasm, both from himself and his staff and from the fans who keep coming back, year after year:

“People are there not to attend a music festival but because they’re like, ‘Holy shit, I’m gonna try to see all of these fuckin’ bands. And it’s gonna be impossible but I’m gonna try the best I can.’ people love the fact that they can stand in line and talk about this rare band that they love. Fans interact and expose each other to stuff, which is really cool, and that’s kind of what punk was when I first got to go to shows. I’d been walking around high school with my three buddies, watchin’ skate videos, buyin’ MRR and Thrasher and trying to, like, find music, you know? But when we went into the city and saw our first punk shows, we were like, ‘Holy shit, there’s like a hundred people in here and we can talk to anyone about music.’ And they wouldn’t be like, ‘What the fuck are you talkin’ about, faggot? Who the fuck is NOFX? What the fuck’s a Rancid?’ That’s kind of just how it was at the time and that’s something we take pride in, too at Fest. I grew up liking punk rock a lot and movies but I also really like pro wrestling, which is kinda weird. I went to Wrestlemania in Dallas recently and I came back to Gainesville and people were like, ‘How was Mania?’ And I was like, ‘It was awesome! I was surrounded by people and we could talk about wrestling and we were all geekin’ out and I didn’t feel like an outcast.’ And they go, ‘So now you know what people feel like when they come to Fest.’”