Every now and then I’ll say something like, “Oh this one time a drunk dude flipped his truck in front of us at Sound and Fury and went running off into the night, and then we (Guns Up!) played our set and everyone got pepper sprayed by security at the end, and directly afterward Trash Talk played out of a UHaul outside because they knew the show was about to get shut down and people were stage-diving off the roof.” And people will kind of look at me like I’m just making this all up, or at the very least I’m probably just exaggerating. Welp, I’m not. -Michael Kinlin (Guns Up!)

Bob (Shedd), Todd (Jones), and I (Riley) booked Sound and Fury from its inception in 2006 through 2009 — so this would be the last iteration we booked together. It was probably also our most difficult endeavor in regards to dealing with venue management. As I started writing this, I felt like I should get some more perspective on this, so I enlisted a few friends. From here on out, anyone not identified will be me. BS is the aforementioned Bob Shedd. JLP is John Liam Policastro — know as PBoy to some — vocalist of New Lows, and as of late journalist for VICE, Bullett, Vocativ, The Daily Dot.

When we started Sound and Fury (2006), we booked the fest in Ventura — at a venue that Todd had been booking at for years, which had recently been rebranded as The Alpine-but you may have known it as Skate Street (it doubled as a skate park). We were familiar with the staff, and they trusted us. There were rarely issues and they understood how to handle an aggressive crowd. Unfortunately, The Alpine closed abruptly in between 2007 and 2008 (in part because they didn’t want to just be doing Punk shows, even though we were the only ones packing their venue. Go figure.), and we were left scrambling for a venue.

BS: The Alpine provided us a venue that was large but felt intimate. It was open, bright and allowed for there to be a lot of people in the building without that unnerving feel of being on top of someone else. We had a strong working relationship with them and they were, during all of our interactions, appreciative of all of the shows we booked there.

Not wanting to exit Ventura County at that time we scoured the area for venues. We had some outlandish ideas, some of which I still may want to use someday so I won’t spill the beans on those, but we ended up finding what we thought was a great location: Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara. Now, if you went to Sound and Fury in 2008, 2010, 2011, or 2012 you know this venue well. But the big, round, acoustically-unfriendly room is not where we wanted to have the fest. We wanted to hold it in the boxy room off to the side of the grounds, but they had a wedding scheduled for our standard Last-Weekend-in-July date. We settled on the big room.

BS: Want to know how we ended up at Earl Warren Showgrounds? The sign. That big digital sign that is visible from the 101. Years before we even started S&F, I was on the return trip from a Knife Fight show in Northern California and we cruised through Santa Barbara very late at night. For some reason, that sign was on and I always remembered it. When it came time for us to hunt for a new venue, I went on several scouting trips, both by myself and with Riley, to Ventura County and Santa Barbara county, and we found a few very good spots that would’ve worked, but Earl Warren seemed like an overall easy choice. We also considered doing the fest at Casa De La Raza (also in Santa Barbara), which would have been a smaller venue than The Alpine. Though the size became a factor we considered and pushed us to Earl Warren, we were very much of the mind, even then, that bigger was not always better and that a smaller venue could have made things very interesting.

We had 3 or 4 walkthroughs with our production team. The sound guy, the stage guy, and the venue people. We realized the room was big, so we concocted the idea to use moveable walls to keep things tight. Despite all of our preparations, we were still unhappy with the result. The room sounded terrible, and no matter how many people piled in, the room didn’t feel intimate. We also had to maneuver around Earl Warren’s employees who simply didn’t give a shit about anything to improve the experience. We knew halfway through Day 1 that we wouldn’t book Sound and Fury at Earl Warren again. Not that there weren’t amazing moments…

BS: 2008 was fun and probably deserves it’s own story, but it was in some ways defined by the room. The sound was not nearly what we would have liked it to be. The room was large, and we were aligning our ideas on what and who to book to grow the fest, so it happened that we added what some may consider bigger bands than had played before. As with many venues, if there is a disconnect, than the process becomes arduous. We were having to deal with the staff much more than actually be involved with the festival, which was disconcerting. At one point the festival was absolutely being shut down half way through Saturday night, but we managed to talk them off the ledge… but that’s another story for another day.

2009: Finding a Home

There was an issue: we had begun to seriously burn out. Bob had moved to the East Coast, and Todd or I needed to find a new venue. Earl Warren wasn’t an option. The Alpine was dead. Todd knew of a former skate rink in his hometown of Oxnard called El Rodeo that was now primarily a Mexican nightclub. But the room was BIG.