Freakout Festival Featured in Rolling Stone France
Ooo la la! A feature like this one doesn’t come around every day, and we couldn’t be more thankful to our friends at Rolling Stone France for pointing the spotlight on our very own Freakout Festival in their latest print issue. Naturally, this was published in french, but we had it translated so our english-speaking followers could enjoy the story as well.
THE FREAKOUT SHOCK!
A festival, a label, a band... What drives the one who’s at the top of this three-headed beast, over there, in Seattle? Report.
Written by Xavier Bonnet
Photos by Jake Hanson, Travis Trautt, Rachel Bennett, Christine Mitchell, Stephanie Severance, Eric Tra, Etsy Ketsy, Rudy Willingham
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It’s a smile you can’t escape from. It’s been going on for a solid half hour on the stage of Salmon Bay Eagles Club. You find your way to this most peculiar venue through what you could easily mistake for a service door, up a staircase, to a ballroom whose wooden floor has obviously seen many other nights. On the walls, some portraits of former club members are carefully hung. Well, that is if you don’t get lost and end up in the adjacent bar, where dust is sitting at the counter amongst the regulars.
Anyway, our guy is having a blast. On this cold Saturday night, while Seattle is proudly honoring its “America’s chamber pot” reputation, his band is closing the penultimate party of his own festival. The feeling of a job well done for the seventh year in a row must have something to do with that smile. But if the guy is absolutely euphoric right now, it’s for a whole other reason: since the beginning of the set, about ten musicians have been succeeding one another, backing him and his drummer, Ian Cunningham, co-founder of the band (and who also happens to manage his visual identity). Ten musicians, from all over the place (Seattle, Mexico, Germany, France) who all collaborated with him at some point or another during his peregrinations around the world. Since 2014, they have all played some part in one of his live adventures, but have never been together on the same stage. It’s a happy mess. It spins out of control and always lands back on its feet. It’s everything their “leader” loves.
Guy Keltner is his name. 32 years old, even though you would easily give him 10 less. All right, let’s say maybe 8 and be done with it. “Acid Tongue is essentially Ian and I,” he explains the next morning. He still seems to be on cloud nine, but this could just be the lingering effects of the bender he was on last night, he confesses.
“I write every song, I bring it to him, we go in the studio, he fixes a thing or two, and then the rest of the time consists in fighting with the producer to make sure he doesn’t polish the sound too much”.
Long story short, Acid Tongue likes to push the walls, its own walls, and is always eager to mix with the style and creativity of others. Musicians he stumbles upon will end up touring with him abroad, just like last year in Mexico when his Mexican friends backed him for a tour. Today, he repays the favor by inviting them to play his festival.
This strong sense of community and mutual help is the DNA of the Freakout Festival. Its founders, Guy Keltner and Skyler Locatelli, value it above all. This rendezvous is a perfect example of that. Over the course of four days, no less than seventy artists and bands will perform in 8 venues, only a few blocks away from each other. Some of them are even on the same street, Ballard Avenue. You may think that it was designed to be the perfect hang. And you wouldn’t be too far from the truth. That’s even how it started. It seems so far away now, but when you ask him, the memories of that first edition start rushing back. It was in Capitol Hill, a neighborhood since then massively gentrified. He remembers this punk club he rented from a heroin addict owner, who ran away with the money to dodge some unhappy, err… Suppliers.
“We had to reorganize the whole night at the last minute, and relocate it to a dance studio” Keltner laughs. “You met Nathan, right? He had to build a stage from scratch that day”. We met Nathan indeed. He was our assigned driver from the airport to downtown. Strapping lad who, indeed, mustn’t be afraid of a few wood planks, Nathan Louis is now less involved with Freakout, too busy with his job at Microsoft. He explained what he does but we didn’t quite get that.
Still a strong supporter of Freakout, Nathan was there at every show, one night alone, the next at the arm of his tiny girlfriend, surpassing her by at least 10 inches. Always happy to chat, Nathan portrays his fast changing city. It is now unrecognizable since our last visit… A quarter century ago! Amazon is to blame, spreading its tentacles over the city like a giant octopus. It apparently created between 70.000 and 80.000 jobs, quite an addition to what was already Microsoft City. The town seems to have doubled in volume, and no area is left behind this transfiguration. “Ballard, for example, used to be a blue-collar neighborhood” Louis carries on. “It was where the fishermen lived, but now they have all been replaced by 25 year old bros who all work at Amazon”.
The contrast is in fact striking when you walk along Ballard Avenue. Trendy restaurants stand alongside stylish shops. Old school bar-clubs are generously pouring indie-rock and craft beers: here, an Irish bar (Conor Byrne Club), there, a pub whose back room quickly turns into a sauna when a show is playing (Sunset Tavern). Over there, this western-style venue with boots hanging from the ceiling (Tractor Tavern). In all these places, everybody knows Keltner: he was hanging out there way too much when he moved in Ballard after he graduated. “Some of these bar owners have known me since I was a kid” He adds, cracking up. “It reinforces the family spirit of the festival. We walk hand in hand. They offer me facilities and we bring a crowd where most of the time, they don’t see anybody after 9.”
It’s really this urge to shake up his world that motivates Keltner. After all, the dude could totally have enough on his hands between Acid Tongue and running Freakout Records. His label was created after the Festival was born and now counts nine references to its catalogue (only three active bands were on the bill for this seventh edition: Smokey Brights, The Grizzled Mighty and… Acid Tongue). As if that wasn’t enough, he started doing reissues, starting with a 50 years old anniversary, collector edition of a 7’ single by The Bumps, a local band from the late 1960’s. For this, he collaborated with HockeyTalker, another label founded this time by Mike McCready, the guitarist of Pearl Jam.
It’s an anger ready to explode that drives Keltner, stirred up by these new generations who “move in these neighborhoods, stuff themselves with food they ordered online, binge Netflix from their couch, and in a way, steal a place where people used to interact with each other”. Even if it means appearing a little presumptuous, Keltner doesn’t hide behind false modesty when he announces that he wants to leave his mark on the city's culture. A city whose main radios still stick to blasting Nirvana, Soundgarden or Alice in Chains… Thirty years later. “We started having a certain impact with what we do, and we intend to amplify it,” he adds. “This festival is a matter of passion, of desire. I can’t even call it my main job. For that, it would have to make money!” (Laughs)
Money, the sinews of war, both here and elsewhere. He willingly acknowledges it, not everyone is in the same boat when it comes to fees. Most of the budget goes to the headliners (Soft Kill, Death Valley Girls, The Shivas, Elephant Stone). Local bands mostly get exposure. Keltner has at least the merit of being fair and transparent with everybody.
But none of this will curve the boy’s ambitions… Like, for example, dreaming of welcoming Austra (“too expensive for now”), imagining a heated tent in the middle of Ballard (for the Brian Jonestown Massacre) or even exporting his concept in France. Gentrified Paris needs it just as much; he saw it with his own eyes, after marrying a French publicist (he’s a busy man). “I want to give a chance to all these bands that I have been able to discover over there, create bridges with the bands I know” He punctuates “Paris is falling asleep, let’s wake it up! Let’s not surrender it to all these people who buy apartments on top of a club who’s been here forever, and then complain about the noise at midnight on a Saturday night. Get out!”
Of course, since then, covid happened, postponing everything. Across the Atlantic, Seattle was even one of the first clusters of the epidemic. As many others, it is now eager to get back on its feet. At least, we know who will volunteer to lead the front line when the time comes…