Liverfest puts pedal to metal
Here’s a music festival that’ll rattle your innards.
Liverfest V brings some of the heaviest bands from the Natural State and around the country for three days and nights of headbanging glory on Cadron Creek near Greenbrier.
Beginning at 7 p.m. Friday, 23 bands are scheduled to play, ending Sunday night with a headlining set by San Diego sludge metal kings -(16)-.
The three-day event’s lineup includes local heroes Seahag, Apothecary, Iron Tongue, Crankbait, I Was Afraid, Sumokem (headlining Friday night) and others.
Saturday’s lineup includes a melding of the bands Full of Hell and The Body, while Madman Morgan, featuring Jeff Morgan of central Arkansas metal legends Rwake, will close the festival that night. And if that weren’t enough music, special after-hours sets are on for Friday and Saturday.
Not a bad procession of extreme heavy metal for a festival that began as a party at musician Jeremy Moore’s house on Memorial Day weekend in 2012.
“We had a band coming through from Mississippi,” says Moore, a guitarist for Seahag (performing Friday and Sunday), about the inspiration behind the first Liverfest. “They were really good friends of mine and they were looking for a show.”
Since most Little Rock venues were booked up for the holiday weekend, Moore invited the band, which would become Criminal Slang but whose original name isn’t exactly newspaper-friendly, to come to his home near Ward and play in his practice space.
Moore, his Seahag mates and a few other local groups rounded out that first Liverfest, taking the name as a winking spoof on Riverfest, which was happening at the same time and with a nod to the participants’ fondness for adult beverages.
There may have been 30 people that first year, Moore, 39, remembers, and it was so much fun he decided to do it again the next year — and the next, and the next, etc. — with crowds growing incrementally.
“It sort of evolved from a backyard party to this thing we have now,” he says.
Enter Moore’s friend Christopher Terry, the well-connected promoter and musician who attended his first Liverfest two years ago and who brought New Jersey band Ruby the Hatchet down for last year’s edition.
Terry, who sings for Rwake as well as Iron Tongue (performing Saturday), and Moore began planning this year’s version of the festival almost as soon as the final note from last year’s stopped ringing in their ears.
Though Moore’s home is, in his words, “about 10 miles from everywhere,” it was time for Liverfest to make a move. Terry heard of the Cadron Creek Outfitters’ property from a friend and went to check it out.
He says, “It’s a really nice place,” offering camping, canoeing, disc golf and other activities
available for the blackT-shirt-clad metal fans this weekend.
Tickets are $15; another $10 will buy concertgoers a goody bag with a T-shirt, poster and other neat stuff.
About 60 percent of the bands are from Arkansas, including members of The Body, who will perform with Full of Hell from Ocean City, Md.
“It’s going to be exciting, with The Body being from here,” Terry says. “The Full of Hell dudes have a hardcore following, and they’re branching out into more experimental noise stuff. Bringing those two together will be so cool.”
And the band that inspired the entire event, Criminal Slang, returns, as it has for every Liverfest.
A set that both organizers are anxiously awaiting is from San Diego sludge metal lifers -(16)- on Sunday.
“This is actually the release
party for our new album,” says -(16)- guitarist and co-founder Bobby Ferry.
The album, Lifespan of a Moth, the group’s seventh, was released July 15 on Relapse Records and carries on the slower-paced, grinding, intense metal -(16)- first began playing in the early ’90s. Along with Ferry and fellow co-founder and singer Cris Jerue, the band includes bassist Barney Firks, drummer Dion Thurman and touring guitarist Alex Shuster.
“It’s midtempo, heavy rock,” says Ferry, who was a professional skateboarder before he traded his board and the skate park for a guitar and stage. “We’ve been doing this sludge metal since 1991. We’re considered one of the first bands in the genre, doing the slower type of metal with [guitars] down-tuned. There were a few others around, but basically we were all just ripping off Black Sabbath.”
As best he can remember, Ferry says, this will be the first time the band has played Arkansas.
Moore, who owns Lonesome Whistle Tattoo Co. in Ward, positively gushes when discussing -(16)-.
“We’re talking about a band I grew up on,” he says. “I found out about them from seeing [Bobby] in skateboarding magazines. They never really got their due and weren’t noticed by American fans.
It’s going to be a great weekend hanging out with those dudes.”
And while Liverfest will traffic mostly in metal and many of its gloriously noisy offshoots — sludge, doom, grindcore, experimental, black metal, etc. — it’s not all crusty walls of scorchedearth savagery.
Little Rock punk band Attagirl and folk singer Jeremiah James Baker will play shows at the campground after-party on Friday, while North Little Rock singer-songwriter Adam Faucett, who records for local Americana label Last Chance Records, plays the campground party Saturday.
After Sunday night’s final set there will be a fireworks show. A barbecue smoker will be set up Sunday and there will be a food truck throughout the weekend.
Talking about Liverfest gets Moore reminiscing about trips he took to the Emissions From the Monolith metal festival in Youngstown, Ohio, which lasted from 2000-2007.
“They had nothing but [great] bands,” he says. “I feel like we are headed in that direction. It’s gone beyond my wildest dreams. We just had a party one time and decided to repeat it and now it’s just gotten crazy. It’s a special thing. I can’t wait to see who we’ll be talking about playing here next year.”