When the lineup for the inaugural Kaaboo Texas festival, to be held at Arlington's AT&T Stadium May 10-12, was announced earlier this year, more than a few music lovers curiously scratched their heads, trying to connect the dots of a rather nonsensical lineup.
Topping a three-day, multistage festival with the likes of Sting, Lionel Richie, the Killers, Kid Rock, Little Big Town and Lynyrd Skynyrd is certainly out of step with the trendier, millennial-courting Coachellas of the world. Scanning further down the lineup brought more head-scratching. How in the world do Alanis Morissette, Lauryn Hill, the Avett Brothers, Rick Springfield, Pitbull, Garbage and the B-52s go together?
Granted, there's not much to be found in any sort of stylistic symmetry, but check the most recent lineups of major festivals like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza or Austin City Limits, and you'll fail to find strict cohesion there, either. And if you look behind the Kaaboo names, there's actually an easy theme to discover.
If you're in your late 30s or older, you're in for a weekend full of bands you've likely listened to for a couple of decades or more. If you told us "Kaaboo" is Latin for "Music from Generation X," we'd believe you.
In fact, a great amount of credit is owed to Kaaboo for not booking yet another major festival that looks and sounds exactly like every other major festival. Rare is the year now when the lineups aren't depressingly similar. If you want to see Major Lazer, the 1975 or Travis Scott - all fine, currently relevant acts with new music - you have seemingly dozens of chances to catch them at another festival this summer.
Just not in Arlington during the second weekend of May, and that's refreshing.
Blockbuster memories
The presence of '90s alt-rock chart-toppers the Counting Crows, Collective Soul and Bush on this lineup is significant, especially for those of us who remember falling (even more) in love with Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke after seeing Reality Bites in the theater. And if you're a concert-loving Gen Xer from the Dallas area, it's impossible to not connect some pretty magical dots between Kaaboo and another giant, star-studded festival from over two decades ago.
On June 21, 1997, those three bands - along with No Doubt, the Wallflowers, Matchbox Twenty, Jewel, Sugar Ray and Third Eye Blind - performed at the Blockbuster Rockfest held at the then-new Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth. Estimates for attendance that day range from 150,000 to 500,000.
This was two years before the first Coachella, and five years before Bonnaroo debuted. Although the Counting Crows had been platinum-selling headliners for a couple of years then, the overall scene that day for lead singer Adam Duritz and crew was a surreal, nerve-racking series of events.
"I remember that show very vividly, for both good and bad reasons," Duritz says. "There was no way for bands to actually get to the show that day. It was just heavy traffic for 30 miles in every direction, and the festival hadn't thought of how to get us all there. They wanted to fly us into the speedway by helicopter, which was something I hadn't done before at that point. I remember feeling like it was a real sketchy way to get to a gig, and I didn't want to end up as a news story about the guy who was killed on his way to a gig."
Duritz, his band and some of the others made it to the show with the help of a police escort caravan. But it wasn't all fear and anxiety for the Rockfest bands. In 2017, Bush leader Gavin Rossdale told GuideLive that Rockfest was "one of the best days of my life," due to his spending it with now-ex-wife Gwen Stefani. "It was just a special day all around, really," he added.
Collective Soul bassist Will Turpin understandably remembers the sea of humanity, but as with Rossdale, his fondness for the other bands on that bill stole the show. Again, this type of all-day, all-headliner lineup wasn't even close to being the norm it has become in recent years.
"When you think about the bands on the lineup that day," Turpin says, "and how we were all doing really well, to have [all those bands] and us on the same stage was just the coolest thing for all of us to be a part of."
With the American festival scene now in full bloom, there's every reason in the world to feel the memories of Rossdale and Turpin are closer to what they'll again experience during Kaaboo, rather than what Duritz experienced during Rockfest. Kaaboo is promising nothing short of a luxurious, well-rounded event. Something for just about everyone seems to be on the menu, thanks to a lineup of A-list comedians, culinary events and plenty of art installations to provide all sorts of glamorous Instagram-ready backdrops.
Although D-FW is rich in music festivals, none of them compete with the sheer scope of what Kaaboo aims to accomplish in its first year in Texas. The popular Austin City Limits Festival is the closest Texas Kaaboo counterpart. But ACL doesn't have a Vegas-style pool lounge, nor does it have chefs such as Michelle Bernstein and Sean Brock slinging gourmet bites.
And hopefully, Duritz won't encounter the vibe-killing episodes or health scares he witnessed 22 years ago.
"We were having a great set, and it was so cool having so many bands I liked playing there, too," he says. "From the stage there were people as far as you could see, except right in front of me, there was some sort of triage set up with stretchers lined up forever, just carrying people away for any number of reasons. In the middle of this great set, all I kept thinking about was whether or not these people in front of the stage were OK. But I'm pretty sure it's not going to be like that this time, though."
Kaaboo Texas at AT&T Stadium, Arlington, May 10-12. Tickets start at $99 and can be purchased at kaabootexas.com.
