The story of the 2018 Homegrown Festival really begins with the 2017 Homegrown Festival.
In January 2017, iconic '90s alternative rock band Tripping Daisy announced it would make that year's Homegrown Fest its first-ever reunion date. And since fans had been waiting for nearly two decades to receive such news, tickets for the fest sold more rapidly than for any of the previous seven Homegrown events. After months of buildup, the energy in Main Street Garden Park, the fest's home for its entire run, was palpable among the tightly packed bodies in the park.
The triumph of hosting Tripping Daisy's first official reunion concert was a sonic boom heard around the state and was easily the biggest Dallas music story of 2017. Walking away from the fest that night, it was impossible to think the next edition of Homegrown would come perilously close to being cancelled.
But such a scenario probably should've been easier to fathom. How many festivals in north Texas stay successful for all that long anymore?
We continue to see big names drop off the annual calendar amidst an uncertain landscape consisting of many potentially ruinous X factors, including inclement weather and fickle audiences. In an interview with the Dallas Morning News in late April, about three weeks before this year's fest, Homegrown Festival owner and organizer Joshua Florence admitted his fest could be canceled due to low ticket sales.
A week or so later, however, local music fans were treated with the news that not only would Homegrown happen this year, but that Homegrown's tenth edition in 2019 was already being planned. With the cold calculations of financial projections and market trends out of the way, there's the music to take into consideration.
In just one year, the headlining slot at homegrown became more of an Event than a simple closing concert gig.
Truly, aside from booking native legends such as Willie Nelson, a reunited Pantera with a miraculously resurrected Dimebag Darrell, or maybe a Tupac at Coachella-style Stevie Ray Vaughan hologram, what transcendent artist could Homegrown have booked that would've topped last year's headline-grabbing headliner while still keeping with the "home grown" theme?
Dominated by Austin-based guitar heroes, this year's Homegrown bill had a muscular, bombastic, psychedelic edge to it thanks to headliners Explosions in the Sky, Black Angels and Roky Erickson. Add in Canadian dream-pop outfit Alvvays -- filling the non-local slots held last year by Lower Dens and Mutemath -- and fans of reverb-filled guitar virtuosity were gliding around the grounds fat and happy.
And to that end, the music was all fire and 100 emojis. Even from a state that's produced the aforementioned axe-slinging icons Dimebag and Vaughan (not to mention ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Vaughan's brother Jimmie, and new-school giants Gary Clark Jr. and St. Vincent's Annie Clark), the two biggest guitar stars of Homegrown made their own cases for residency among Texas rock's heavenly bodies. Christian Bland of the Black Angels and Explosions in the Sky's Munaf Rayani authored the night's signature sounds with energetic majesty and imaginative prowess.
Though both groups provide music that would make for the ideal soundtrack to a desolate West Texas road trip, the Austin bands are vastly different.
With Bland handling much of the sonic ship-steering from the back of the stage with his arsenal of tools including a twangy Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar, lead singer Alex Maas lent each drone-rocking number a hypnotic, almost alien vocal delivery perfectly suited for the group's otherworldly jams. "Bad Vibrations" and "Entrance Song" were among the trance-inducing highlights from a group every bit as Texan as the Alamo and the Fort Worth Stockyards.
Look inside Homegrown Festival in downtown Dallas
With the sun setting during the Black Angels performance, the visual canvas of a clear, dark sky was perfectly set for the waves of color and light that come with an Explosion in the Sky concert. With sturdy, rhythmic beats from drummer Chris Hraski, Rayani lunged, bounced and writhed near the front lip of the stage, sending harmonic riffs and chimes soaring from his Fender Stratocaster.
Without the aid of lyrics and vocals, the rest of the group, which included Michael James and Mark Smith, folded in their personal layers of the oft-described "symphonic rock" through tunes old (2001's "Yasmin the Light") and new (2016's "Disintegrations Anxiety"). Although the group became famous following its contributions to the Friday Night Lights movie soundtrack in 2004, they've long since graduated from trendy novelty to a more permanent sort of Lone Star State attraction.
Attendance was clearly down when compared to last year's nostalgic bonanza, and the news of Homegrown possibly being cancelled was indeed jarring. But through it all, Homegrown delivered what it has for almost a decade now -- an absolutely perfect night of Texas tunes under a pristine downtown sky.
