Did a dysfunctional T kill In Between Days?

As the summer festival season winds down, we can reflect on the great moments that put exclamation points on the music calendar throughout the hot months. Did you make it to Boston Calling? How about Wilco’s Solid Sound in North Adams? Nice, A Fest in Davis Square? And there’s still time to buy a ticket to the folky Campfire Festival at Club Passim in Harvard Square through the weekend …

So many musical memories in the summer of 2024, but none included moments from In Between Days, the plucky newcomer out of Quincy, which organized impressive indie rock lineups in August of 2022 and 2023.

The festival flashed big ambition, mixing local talent and national touring acts such as Modest Mouse and Lord Huron, drawing interest from all over New England. The trick is, of course, getting there to enjoy it.

Sure, you can drive, and there was plenty of parking next to Veteran Memorial Field. But if you want to draw a younger generation of music fans with lower rates of car ownership (plus folks who want to tie a few on), the public transit option better be available and, hopefully, attractive. Who can afford a big Uber or Lyft bill on top of the festival ticket?

Alex Magleby, the business face of the fest, is also the owner of the local professional rugby team New England Free Jacks that calls the stadium home. The guy understands the logistics required to put on major events. So he understood quite well what a kick in the pants it was, to put it politely, when last year the MBTA decided to shut down the red line from JFK/UMass to Braintree on the weekend of the festival. Both days! Fans taking the subway had to transfer to shuttle service, which crawled along Interstate 93 in bumper-to-bumper traffic as the music started without them.

Hey, shit happens. But shit like that can kill business ventures such as In Between Days, which, instead of building up slowly, was coming out of the womb fully formed. Big headliners! Free beer in the press tent! Giant branding and marketing campaign! All the trimmings with vendors, sponsors, corporate tie-ins and more! In other words, a lot of money invested on the front end, let’s cross our fingers this works.

The first year of a new fest at this scale almost always operates at a loss. You plan for that, setting certain growth and performance benchmarks that need to be hit to keep building toward future revenue projections. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But whatever those benchmarks were, In Between Days didn’t hit them in 2023. The organizers announced that there would be no followup in 2024.

We all know a dysfunctional T is poison for local business, which has very real and depressing impacts on the local music scene. It can be hard to connect the dots between lapses in public transportation and the health of the economy. With In Between Days, though, it’s easy. There was a massive, big, ginormous festival in Quincy, which a lot of people wanted to get to by public transportation, and they couldn’t do it in a reasonable amount of time.

Everyone with a ticket made it there eventually and had a great day of music. But the experience was colored by the false impression that “it’s just too difficult” to get to Veteran Memorial Stadium for folks in Greater Boston and beyond. Good or bad for 2024 sales projections, you think?

Every time that thought flickers through the mind of a music fan – that “it’s just too difficult” to get to shows – the local music scene dies a little death.

Hit this

Friday: Cakeswagg & Friends with DJ WhySham (Sonia, Cambridge)

Cakeswagg just dropped her latest album “Michelin Star,” and she’s pulling together some friends to celebrate at Sonia. You knew DJ WhySham would be part of the party, linking up again with the rapper after holding down the turntables at Cakeswagg’s Boston Calling set. Who else? Maybe the two featured cameos on the new album? Marquise! and Gio Dee contribute on “Bad Bitch Link Up” and “Flutes,” respectively. Maybe a solo performance by one of the producers on the album, like Rilla Force? Most definitely the Cakeswagg hip-hop dancers, with routines that would put Australian breakdancer Raygun to shame. Wait, am I too late on the Raygun slander? 

Saturday: Cyber Crypt (Cantab Underground, Cambridge) 

A night for the “hard dance” subgenre lovers, with DJs cranking out contributions to “gabber, hardcore, breakcore, hard techno, drum n’ bass, hard trance and hardstyle.” The lineup includes Akafaë, Feardotcom, DJ Hello, Pand0ravirus and DJ Eight. And the event is subtitled “Episode I,” so the organizers are probably big “Phantom Menace” fans. Expect the room to be dark, the speakers loud and the drinks affordable in the basement of the Cantab Lounge. No worries if you lack a sense of timing and can’t dance. What’s most important is heart, much like the heart displayed by Australian breakdancer Raygun, who is a shining example of ignoring the haters and following your star. Wait, am I too early on the Raygun PR redemption narrative?

Sept. 5: Raavi, Sister., The Croaks (Lilypad, Cambridge) 

It’s an indie-rock triple stack at The Lilypad with strong BOS-NYC vibrations. Raavi can go solo acoustic or rock out with the full band. The Croaks, just off a dynamite performance at Nice, A Fest, put out a video for their single “Lochness Lady,” which comes with an epilepsy warning. And Brooklyn’s Sisters. is spelled with a period at the end of it, which really messes with my autocorrect. How about that Raygun?

Live: Somergloom 2024

Darkness descended upon the old Armory at 191 Highland Ave. this past weekend. The two-day music festival Somergloom took over, filling the former barracks with grinning gargoyles, pentagram-themed bondage harnesses at the vendor mart and waves of melancholia onstage. Sadly, no black bile-inspired signature cocktails at the bar. Melancoholic, anyone?

Somergloom 2024 boasted a savvily scheduled lineup that opened a window into the world of “heavy” music for the unaffiliated. I mean, it’s one thing to satisfy the true believers and confirmed fans at genre fests, but if you can make the lightbulb turn on in the hearts and minds of newcomers to the sound, you’re really onto something. Somergloom had that kind of vibe – how’d they do it?

Start with the alternating stages, the main stage plus the more intimate setup in the Rooted Armory Cafe. Alternating stages have become de rigueur festival fixtures, even for smaller fests, if the venue or location has the space to accommodate them.

But just because you have the space doesn’t mean you use it to your benefit. Somergloom did it right, by featuring quieter and more introspective acts such as Kira McSpice and Luci Dead Limb, who demonstrated that the heaviness of “heavy” music is as much about spiritual weight than the volume coming out of the speakers.

If you were hungry for decibels, though, there were plenty on the main stage. The festival didn’t skimp on the headliners, booking Montreal’s Big|Brave for Friday and Atlanta’s Royal Thunder for Saturday. The former delve into the postrock, experimental noise approach, while the latter, featuring otherworldly lead vocals occasionally hampered by sound issues, synthesizes elements from every decade of every genre whose acolytes feel compelled to flash the sign of the horns.

One last word on the Satanic Panic beat. Were there any genuine, card-carrying Satanists in the building? Hard to say. Do Satanists carry cards? There was one guy who was wearing a “Satan is Great, Whiskey is Super” T-shirt. He was there with his wife, engaging in friendly conversation with others at the lip of the stage before the Big|Brave set.

He mentioned that he had worked the third shift at a local factory for decades, which was a tough grind, but it freed him up during the day (if never sleeping counts as being “freed up”) so he could be there for his kids: Drop them off at school, drive them to sports, attend their games, school plays and graduations, and birthday parties.

Is that what counts as being a Satanist (and Whiskeyist) these days? Being a Super Dad or Super Mom? Strange days have found us.

Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.

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