I Fell Down a Rabbit Hole Of Old HFStival Videos Last Night And Wanted To Share

(I can write this blog 2 ways- I can write it for the Baltimore/DC audience who already knows about HFS and the HFStival, or I can write it for the mass audience who doesn’t. I’ll kinda do both I guess.)

HFStival. I don’t even know how to describe it. A radio station music festival that actually cared about the fans and the music, while being as close to a modern-day Woodstock as possible, all inside of a football stadium. There’s a different one of these type of festivals every weekend now with the same 10 bands that go city to city and do the festival tour, but HFStival was different. It was the festival put on by 99.1 HFS, one of the most famous and influential radio stations there ever was. It was when radio airplay really mattered, back before the Internet and downloading songs and finding new bands on YouTube. If you got on HFS, you made it as a band, similar to KROQ. Then out of nowhere in January of 2005, it flipped to Spanish music. It was national news. A radio station flipping formats was national news. It was abrupt. It made no sense. But it was really the changing of times. No longer could stations get by playing songs the DJs and the listeners wanted to hear. Breaking new bands wasn’t getting ratings. DC 101 was playing the same 5 songs every hour (and they still do!) and beating them in the ratings. So HFS died.

Side fucking note about DC 101. It might be the worst radio station in the country. If you want to hear the same Mumford and Sons song 4 times an hour, that’s the station for you. The other day I was driving and the god damn Shut Up And Dance With Me song was on DC’S ROCK STATION. That’s what they call it. And the most pop song of the last 10 years was on it. That’s the state of radio right now. No more hot talk, no more rock stations, just top 40 every single place on the dial.

But back to HFS and the HFStival. I was looking for a wake up song this morning and randomly stumbled upon this Kurt Loder piece about HFStival. When MTV had music news updates, awesome.

So I then spent the next 2 hours watching as much old footage of HFStivals as possible. Takes you back to a time where everyone in the crowd would go nuts, not stand there with their cell phones in the air. And as it turns out, there’s a lot of old HFStival footage on YouTube. I mean this must have been filmed with the heaviest camcorder of all time.

Blink 182 from the 1999 HFStival anyone? They were the 3rd band to come on that year, right after Lit and Jimmie’s Chicken Shack.

In 2004 the street stage- the bands not big enough to make it on the main stage, had Modest Mouse, Fall Out Boy, and Taking Back Sunday. That’s insane. The Cure, The Offspring, and Jay-Z headlined the main stage that year, in reverse order. Imagine Jay-Z not closing a show now.

There’s a lot of other cool HFStival videos up on YouTube, like this one from 1996. Just really cool stuff. Viva La HFS.