Fun Times at Fort Wayne - Oakaloosa 2013

 

The first ever Oakaloosa Festival took place this past Saturday at the Historic Fort Wayne in Detroit. The festival featured 2 stages with acts ranging from Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. The weather wasn't exactly ideal for an outdoor festival, with storms and downpours happening throughout the day. It kept the crowds away for a big chunk of the day and put quite a delay on the main stage. We opted to go to other indoor shows until about 11 p.m. when we caught wind that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony was about to hit the stage and the rain seemed to be done for the night.

First off, Becca and I had never been to Fort Wayne before and most of the stories we had heard were from local ghost hunters MPI. So, I was pretty spooked out walking up to the festival. Way more buildings than I expected and there were obviously ghosts lurking everywhere... well at least in my mind.

Regardless, we walked up and could hear Bone Thugs on the stage and
we both immediately turned "gangsta". I'm not huge on rap, but who doesn't love these guys??? Even if you only like "1st of tha Month", you have to admit that song is pretty much awesome and you sing it to yourself on the first of every month. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony haven't aged a bit and put on a pretty awesome show. Definitely worth going to just to be able to say we've seen a Bone Thugs concert.

Up next was the headliner of the festival, Girl Talk. Only, there was a problem. Due to the delays through out the day, it was almost midnight at this point. There's a curfew in Detroit. So some poor guy got the horrible job of coming over the speakers and announcing that Girl Talk would not be performing for that reason. The crowd of a few hundred were not fans of that idea, but after chanting for long enough apparently the festival decided they didn't care about fines. So Girl Talk hit the stage with a storm of confetti and toilet paper. It was loud. It was fun. It was definitely a bigger party than Fort Wayne had ever seen before. Pretty fuckin' awesome.



Despite the rain and the less than desired numbers in the crowd, from what we saw, this festival was awesome. We really hope that the organizers of this event try to make it happen again in the future. It was a great open space for a show, with a really cool atmosphere of history around you and the Ambassador Bridge and Ren Cen in the distance as a backdrop. For the big acts on the bill, the price of about $50 really wasn't that bad and we loved that they mixed a lot of local acts like Kaleido, Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas and The Infatuations in there too. Our only complaints would be that the weather sucked and that we didn't get there sooner. But neither of those are the festivals fault! There were plenty of places to park, even free ones. Beer was pretty cheap. It was clean. It was fun. What more could you ask for in a festival? We hope next year Oakaloosa gives it a try again and can make it even bigger and better than this time around.

~C