Treasure Island fest: not this year
Treasure Island Music Festival will not take place this fall, but the event will return with the same name at a new location in 2018, organizers announced on Wednesday, June 28.
Jordan Kurland, cofounder of the festival, said that after a decade of producing the two-day concert at its namesake island, it felt like the right time to pause and reevaluate. The biggest obstacle in moving forward, he said, is finding a new site as construction under way on Treasure Island’s long-awaited redevelopment project has forced the festival to relocate.
“A lot of factors went into our decision to take a year off, the main one being that finding a venue was taking a little longer than we wanted,” Kurland said. “But there was never a question of whether or not we would do another one.”
Treasure Island’s copromoters, Noise Pop Industries and Another Planet Entertainment, spent much of the last year searching for alternate spaces in Alameda, Oakland and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which already hosts the annual Outside Lands and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass multiday music festivals.
“We’ve now narrowed it down to two locations,” Kurland said. “We’re just not ready to announce it yet.”
Despite the change in scenery, the promoters are determined to keep the Treasure Island experience largely the same, with more than two dozen indie acts playing music on a pair of adjacent stages, with no overlapping sets and the laid-back atmosphere of a backyard barbecue. They also plan to bring back its iconic 60-foot Century Ferris wheel, interactive art installations, midway attractions, food trucks and silent disco.
“It will still be the music festival for people who don’t like going to music festivals,” Kurland said.
The outdoor event launched in 2007, marking the first time live music was played for the public on Treasure Island since the Golden Gate International Exposition closed nearly 70 years earlier. Then, for the Treasure Island Music Festival’s 10th anniversary last October, it hit a rough patch.
Just days before the festival, promoters had to improvise a new footprint on the southeastern point of the island adjacent to the Bay Bridge, because construction booted it from its usual site on the Great Lawn, a 125,000square-foot rectangle on the island’s west shore with views of the San Francisco skyline. Then the storms came. Heavy winds and rain delayed or completely washed out sets by several acts over the weekend, prompting many angry ticket-holders to threaten a class-action lawsuit against Another Planet and Noise Pop for claiming a “rain or shine” event when not all the artists advertised performed. A festival attendee was also injured after a vending machine toppled over on her due to strong gusts (she has since filed a complaint against the city and county in San Francisco County Superior Court).
“Last year was a real bummer,” Kurland said. “It was a bunch of things we had no real control over.”
But rather than starting fresh next year with a new name, the promoters have decided to stick with the Treasure Island brand they built with memorable performances by the likes of the National, Massive Attack, Beck, LCD Soundsystem, Death Cab for Cutie and countless others.
“It was a big source of internal debate,” Kurland said. “But after 10 years of building up this festival, people really love it.”