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Mission Creek Festival returns with inspired lineup

By Loren Keller

It’s no idle boast when organizers of the Mission Creek Music Festival say the bands they’ve brought to Iowa City in recent years have been on the cutting edge.

Among the two dozen groups that played the multi-venue festival last April were Bon Iver, profiled in the Jan. 12 issue of The New Yorker, and Fleet Foxes, a Seattle band introduced to national audiences on “Saturday Night Live” Jan. 17. Both released their debut full-length records last year (For Emma, Forever Ago and the eponymous Fleet Foxes) that earned a spot on the top ten lists of many critics.

Andre Perry, who along with Tanner Illingworth founded a Midwestern version of the festival four years ago following a decade’s worth of successful Mission Creek Music and Art festivals in San Francisco, had caught both bands at the South By Southwest festival in Austin and knew a good thing when he heard it.

With the help of the University of Iowa’s Student Commission on Programming and Entertainment, Perry brought Bon Iver to the Iowa Memorial Union. Festival organizers worked with Daytrotter.com’s Sean Moeller to make Fleet Foxes part of the April 2-5 festival; the band played at the Huckelberry’s Pizza Parlor in Rock Island after recording a live session for the web site.

“Sean does the same thing we do – he keeps his ear close to the street and tries to figure what’s cool and new that we haven’t heard before,” Perry says.

It’s a pretty simple formula but one that works.

“It’s not surprising – someone has to blow up and every year it’s just the way that critical heat works,” Perry says. “They find a sound they like and more people get behind it, and once you can get a crossover into the NPR crowd — which is less just music nerds and people who are just interested in the arts at large — then you really tap into a base of fans that extends beyond the usual music fan.”

Perry lists three bands playing at this year’s festival, set for April 1-4 at various venues around Iowa City, that have the potential to break out big: Fruit Bats, a side project of Shins multi-instrumentalist Eric D. Johnson; Swedish indie folk songwriter The Tallest Man on Earth; and the one-man El Paso Hot Button, a.k.a. Mickey Reese, who plays guitar and percussion and mixes his own sound onstage.

Those are among the dozen bands booked for this year’s festivals so far. Headlining the festival will be GZA, also known as The Genius and a founding member of the seminal hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan.

GZA will perform Liquid Swords, his 1995 solo record selected as one of The Source magazine’s 100 Best Rap Albums of all time, at the Englert Theatre Wednesday, April 1, at 8 p.m. Yea Big and Kid Static open the show; tickets, available online, are $22 in advance or $25 the day of the show.

“We’re all big fans of Wu-Tang-Clan and all the old hip hop material, and the chance to have someone of that stature kick off the festival was something that was really hard for us to pass up,” says festival promoter Todd Olmstead, who saw GZA perform at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

“Once we saw the success of Atmosphere playing at the Englert last fall, we knew this could also be a really successful show that a lot of people would be excited about.”

Another big catch for Mission Creek this year are the Mountain Goats, a band led by singer-songwriter John Darnielle who will share the bill with John Vanderslice. Each will perform a separate solo, acoustic set. Simon Joyner opens the 8 p.m. show at the Mill on Friday, April 3. Advance tickets, $15, are available online.

Pieta Brown, Escape the Floodwater Jug Band, Lipstick Homicide, Mannix!, Dave Zollo and the Body Electric, Matthew Grimm and the Red Smear, The Gglitch, Dead Larry, Dennis McMurrin, Public Property and Caleb Engstrom are among the local acts scheduled to play the festival. A complete festival schedule is posted here.

“What we’ve always tried to do is create an event that is community friendly and accessible to everybody, and also something that might bring nationally touring, cutting edge and exciting performers to Iowa City,” Olmstead says. “An event of this caliber, where things are happening all at once and there are multiple events on one night makes it a different and unique event. I don’t think we have anything else like that in Iowa.”

Besides music, the Mission Creek festival will include several literary readings and a screening of the documentary “Copyright Criminals” by UI communications professor Kembrew McLeod and Benjamin Franzen.

Perry, who earned his MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the Writers’ Workshop and now teaches there on a fellowship, has teamed up with McSweeney’s editor Ted Thompson and the co-creators of the local Anthology Reading Series, Writers’ Workshop students Cutter Wood and Geoff Hilsabeck, to organize the festival readings.

Authors on the docket include Edmund White, faculty member of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing whose best-known novel is A Boy’s Own Story, the first volume of an autobiographical fiction series detailing the stages in the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. White, along with Charles D'Ambrosio and Andrew Milward, will give a free reading at The Mill on Saturday, April 4, at 3 p.m.

Other authors reading will include Steven Kuusisto, who wrote the memoirs Planet of the Blind and holds a dual appointment at the UI, where he teaches courses in creative nonfiction and serves as a public humanities scholar in the College of Medicine. Contributors to the poetry journal Forklift, Ohio will read at Public Space One.

Olmstead says the readings are a natural fit for the festival.

“I think that’s just another facet of Iowa City that we don’t want to go unnoticed,” he says. “As people who are promoting these events, I know that we’re interested in seeing the readings and hearing the authors speak just as much as we’re interested in the bands. People who enjoy the arts tend not to be so limited in their scope.”

Limited edition, all-access passes to the festival are available for $50. Check the Mission Creek web site for details on how to get one.