washingtonpost.com
At the HFStival, an Enduring Alternative
In Baltimore, Moshing Like It's 1999
By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 15, 2005; D01
BALTIMORE, May 14 -- Driving from Virginia Beach to Baltimore in their 1990 Oldsmobile, the dark blue station wagon with half-dozen HFS bumper stickers slathered across the back window, the Jacobs prepared themselves for the eventuality that this, their 11th HFStival, could be their last -- even though the host announced, "I guarantee you, we'll be back."
For the past decade, the family has come to this legendary day-long outdoor concert. It was, for many, the unofficial start of summer. Like many of the 40,000 concertgoers who, organizers say, bought advance tickets to Sunday's 16th annual extravaganza, the Jacobs still worried that the festival was about to disappear, much like the legendary radio station that created it.
As if in mourning, the Jacobs started to reminisce. They talked about the time Dan Jacob, now 19, got his first ear piercing in sixth grade. And the year his mom, Lisa Jacob, broke her leg and came in a wheelchair -- joining Dan, who always uses one.
And the year Dan was 12 or 13 and brought a friend, and "someone poured beer on top of us," Lisa remembers, still cringing, "and I was gonna have to bring the kid back, smelling like beer."
And the bands -- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lisa says. "Oh, yeah!" Dan answers. "Godsmack," she continues, and Dan's friend Rob Werntz says, enviously, "Ohhh. I heard they were good." Lisa continues, her long tenure with the concert only partially proved by the 1998 and 1999 HFStival T-shirts she and her other son are wearing. "Offspring, Limp Bizkit . . . Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Lint . . ." "Rage Against the Machine," Dan interrupts. "Rage," Lisa repeats, fondly. "And Third Eye Blind, the first time, when they were on the [smaller] stage," Dan says.
The concert didn't seem as crowded as in past years at the District's RFK Stadium, the Jacobs said. Even the number of vendors seemed to have shrunk -- instead of six or seven booths devoted to selling jewelry, they counted only a couple, and instead of two or three booths devoted to piercing bodies, they counted only one, and the rock-climbing wall had disappeared.
Even the Marine Corps recruiting booth wasn't the nifty obstacle course featured at last year's festival, but was, instead, a mere chin-up bar, noted a disappointed 18-year-old Clarisse Bernardes of Bethesda, who's been coming for four years and thought the festival lacked a booming crowd.
Her friend Katherine Bohannon, a 29-year-old from Alexandria who teaches guitar, said she asked her students this year if they were coming to the HFStival, thinking the answer would be, "Definitely." But the students answered, "Oh, they're still having it?"
Still, Bob Philips, a vice presidential honcho in the Infinity Broadcasting radio chain, which owns the WHFS name and the HFStival, was cheerleading Sunday's event as a great success.
In his basso, radio-announcer voice, he not only emphasized the great lineup -- including such legends as Billy Idol and the New York Dolls, but also Coldplay (a group made even more famous by its lead singer's marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow), the Bravery, Interpol, Garbage, Sum 41 and the Foo Fighters. But he also promised that the concert would return next year even though the radio station WHFS now exists only online. He raved about how "jampacked" the concert was, and how the warm, sunny weather -- still holding at midday -- appeared to bring out lines of people buying the still-available tickets.
Of course, in the HFStival's heyday, the concert sold out 60,000 seats.
Hardcore HFS fans can tune into programming called "HFS on Live 105.7," a Baltimore FM radio station, after 7 on weeknights and throughout the weekends to hear the rock music that started playing on Washington's 99.1 FM in about 1968. The station itself switched in January to Spanish-language salsa and meringue and changed its name to "El Zol." The unannounced transformation shocked the station's most devoted listeners, and Lisa Jacob, who lived in Annapolis and recently moved to Virginia Beach, where she works at a warehouse store, remembers hearing the switch while driving to the pet store. She turned the radio off, then on again, then off, then on again, thinking that if she kept it up long enough, the situation would fix itself.
Sitting inside M&T Bank Stadium, surrounded by its gigantic bowl of empty purple seats, Emmet Gallagher of Sterling, Va., watched the Bravery on the main stage below and talked about how he doesn't listen to radio because he prefers an online station out of Santa Monica. Does he log onto whfs.com, too? No. He doesn't care about the radio station, he said. The concert's appeal, he said, was "just that all the bands are here," a fact he discovered when TicketMaster sent him a "ticketAlert" e-mail.
In years past, coming to an HFStival was like seeing all those other fans who also tuned into the radio's mid-dial voices, each listening -- in the car, driving to pick up a date; in the kitchen, making ramen in the microwave; in an upstairs bathroom, while getting ready for the first day of eighth grade; at work, tarring a rooftop or changing a customer's oil.
"It was just a time for all the fans to get together -- old people, young people . . ." Lisa Jacob notes, then falls momentarily quiet, still mourning "the day the music died."
