MUSIC
LEAH SOTTILE
GET DOWN IN PEACEFUL VALLEY
There’s an old snapshot on the KYRS MUSIC FEST’S website from a punk show back in the early 1990s, held outside the Peaceful Valley Community Center on the spacious, green Glover Field. It’s a photo of a band crammed onto a tiny stage. A small crowd stands in front — arms crossed, hats backward, hands jammed in pockets — listening. The guitar player, with bleached blond hair, yells into a microphone and plays a baby-blue guitar covered in stickers. The bass player — he’s got bleached hair, too — is shirtless and lanky. Behind them, the drummer is moving his sticks too fast for the camera to catch them clearly. They called themselves Greenday then, later Green Day. And much later, they’d become one of the biggest bands in punk-rock history. The expanse of green grass sits mostly unused today — a spot on the bank of the Spokane River in the shadow of the hulking Monroe Street Bridge. So when Lupito Flores and the other organizers of the first KYRS Music Fest — to be held there on July 13 — were brainstorming spots for their first big music festival, they instantly thought of that long-ago Green Day show. “We were just trying to think of a cool place to do a festival and really liked the idea of having it near the river and near the falls, and the Peaceful Valley community is a cool place to live and fits our mission,” says Flores, station director at KYRS. As an independent, volunteer-powered community radio station, he says KYRS depends on donations from listeners and revenue from events to stay on the air. While the station hosts a number of benefit concerts, speakers and films each year, Flores says the station realized one big event could support the station in a big way that lots of tiny events can’t. “Mainly, we do depend on members to keep [the station] going,” he says. “We do two or three on-air fund drives per year, and we get very small grants. But this could be pretty significant for our budget.” So they pulled out all the stops and planned a huge music festival. The bill is reflective of the radio station’s varied programming: from reggae to blues, folk to surf rock. Portland’s Menomena — which has opened for the National and received a Grammy nomination — will close out the night. The family-friendly festival — which is completely solar-powered — also will feature a Ninkasi beer garden, a bike corral, a food court, yoga, drumming and Hula Hoop sessions between bands. Flores says KYRS wanted to create an event that becomes a summer institution — one that people look forward to all year long. And like that Green Day show, maybe they’ll keep talking about it for years to come.
76 SUMMER GUIDE JUNE 13, 2013
In a way, Green Day (below) lent inspiration to KYRS’ music festival, which is headlined by Portland’s Menomena (above).
Check off the boxes as you complete your bucket list this summer.