‘Feels Like Friends’: Kilby Block Party and the Necessity of Indie Music Festivals
Images of crowds at Kilby Block Party by Elena Saviano.
It poured rain for most of the day, clearing at around three or four in the afternoon, but soaking the soil of the Utah State Fair Park, making a slurry out of the mud and grass and spilt beer and sweat and sawdust used to fill in the holes and make an even ground for trotting.
Moving quickly and hazardously through the crowd alone from one stage to another, ears ringing, trying desperately to locate the photographer I had brought along to do most of the weekend’s work for me, my stylish-if-grippless shoes slipped on the congealed earthy slush and I found myself on the ground.
But not for long. ‘Get him up! Get him up!’ I heard from anonymous passersbys, and suddenly I was lifted by both of my arms out of the mud and upright, and even further hoisted above the heads of a group of shirtless boys then unknown to me all chanting in uncanny unison, ‘Ay! Ay!’ at my successful rescue, my body bouncing above them to the cheers of observers as though I had won a marathon or beaten a bully. And as suddenly as they had struck, they placed me gently back onto the Earth and vanished into the sprawl without a word or a worry. This is the attitude of Kilby Block Party.
The Salt Lake City-based four-day music festival named for and organized by the beloved SLC independent music venue Kilby Court - regarded as one of the Western states’ most ahead of the curve musical centers, known as the starting point for the acts that would become super stars - which takes place over a weekend every May is a case study for the rejuvenation of American festival culture and my personal favorite musical event of the year (the only festival I will board an airplane for).
‘Kilby Block Party started in 2019 as a twentieth anniversary show for our venue Kilby Court.’ explains festival organizer and S&S Presents CEO, Nic Smith. ‘We wanted to do something big, so we rented two big stages and closed the street in front of Kilby Court and we had a little over five thousand people come for that.’
Every year since - disincluding a pause during the pandemic - Kilby Block Party has expanded, whether by days, by stage, or by attendance. In its later iteration, it was headlined by Mac Demarco and Phoebe Bridgers, which sold out quickly, until 2023, when they decided they needed space. ‘Where Block Party is now, the Utah State Fair Park, they usually have the State Fair there - it just felt like an underutilized space. We approached the State and they were really excited to work with us on it. We brought in The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, and Pavement that year, and ended up selling tickets to every state in the U.S. and twenty different countries.’
‘We wanted to celebrate the indie community that supports new music, and prove that Salt Lake City can compete with some of the bigger cities in terms of culture.’ explains festival organizer and S&S Marketing Director Billy Eusterman. ‘Not all of the acts at Kilby Block Party got their start at Kilby Court, but Salt Lake City has a huge counter culture scene and is very into the underground and independent music, so we want to tap into that by bringing in artists who haven’t come through in a while or maybe wouldn’t. We are part of that underground community and so we are booking the bands that we would want to see.’
KBP being a boutique festival with over twenty thousand attendees per day, roughly 56% of whom are from outside of Utah, it is a musical event that caters to the music fan whose needs are not necessarily being met by the major American festivals like Coachella whose stature has shrunk some in recent years as American festival culture shifts from being about music to being about status - an attitude presented most infamously by Fyre Festival, a failed music festival whose public image was dominated by exclusivity and status rather than music.
Where attending other festivals feels like being corralled by a festival whose attitude is that you should feel lucky to be there, attending a boutique festival like KBP feels like we are in it together. There is no ego or aggression, there is free water and clean bathrooms. People move and dance and not just for the internet. People help you and are helped in return, and the only barriers are the ones right in front of the stage. It is a festival with humility that feels like fun; that feels like a few good bands down at your local venue; that feels like friends.
KBP feels less like a corporation doing something huge and more like a group of friends doing something fun, perhaps because in a way, it is. Kilby Block Party is quite an endeavor being put together by a relatively small organization, S&S Presents. ‘We are still a very small company,’ explains Eusterman, ‘at any given time in our office there are maybe ten or fifteen people and we are constantly bouncing ideas off of each other. It’s very community oriented.’
The care and participation of organizers and festival workers - around five hundred people on site throughout the weekend - can be seen in every aspect of the attending experience. From box office workers spending hours ensuring that every attendee experiencing trouble with their reservation makes it in to see their favorite band, to security throwing waters and snacks instead of punches at moshing kids, to a free bike valet, KBP cares about its crowd.
This quality of approach extends in excess to its performing artists and vendors, many of whom are, when asked, eager to profess their love for their stop in SLC. ‘This is the best festival in America to play,’ said a twenty seven year old guitarist of a band having just finished their 1:30PM slot at KBP. ‘I would rather play at this festival than any of the major festivals- they don’t give a shit about you,’ said the thirty seven year old singer of another following their 3:00PM slot. But things like four-day four-stage music festivals don’t come without a bit of risk, and a few lessons.
‘Every year has been kind of a gamble,’ says Eusterman. ‘Every year we learn a little bit more so it becomes a more educated gamble.’
‘Even with club booking, you might have the greatest band of all time, but there might be a sports playoff game that takes people away from your event. Nothing’s guaranteed. That’s the nature of it. But what we were feeling was that Salt Lake has so many people who care about this music and these bands, so we have a built-in audience of people who are really eager and excited.’ says Smith. ‘We’ve also met so many cool stage managers and other production workers who have given us good pointers on how to run things. We are learning as we are going.’
The open door policy for suggestions from workers, attendees, and artists, as well as a bit of luck, has lit a path for KBP to survive in longevity.
‘I think we’ve had a lot of luck in guessing how much a festival would cost to put on, everything always costs more than you think it does.’ says Smith. ‘We’ve tightened up a lot of processes and every year we’ve made improvements. Our first two, we lost money on those Block parties. The third one, we made a little bit. We’re still in the process of trying to make this a sustainable event.’
Ultimately, though, if the vibes are good but the music sucks, who gives a shit? This isn’t an issue for an indie festival like KBP. Where other festivals organize their sets by mass appeal, data, streams, followers, trends, or at worst, impermanent virality, KBP organizers simplify the curation process with an earnest premise and a simple question: we are the community that this festival is for, so who would we like to see?
‘Who is a band you’d fly in for? And who is a band our community would want to see locally? If we take those artists and put them all on top of each other, we make something special. I think that that’s what makes Kilby Block Party kind of unique - it’s a mixture of who we’d see in our neighborhood, but also who we would drive to another state to go and see.’ says Eusterman.
From New York locals like Gift and Been Stellar to legacy acts like New Order and Weezer; from Emo innovators like Death Cab For Cutie to dance favorites like Justice, the question isn’t ‘who is the moment?’ The question is, ‘who’s good?’
I’ve always been a fan of the underdog - the smaller, weirder, thing in a field dominated by massive mainstream things - and while at twenty thousand daily visitors last weekend it may be difficult to call KBP an underdog, I am a fan of Kilby Block Party. It is festivals like KBP that redeem the American festival circuit which for so long had been determined by influencers and defined by outfits. Fuck the looks and the likes. Jumping in unison with a thousand other people who love the same thing you do, losing your friends in a field and finding new ones, crying to a song you never thought you’d see live, being hoisted from the ground by strangers out of the goodness of their hearts - this is what music festivals are about. These are the aesthetics of the music that we love most, and so it is natural that their live manifestation - the indie festival like Kilby Block Party - be so vital, so worthy, and so close to our hearts.
