Head downtown to Hotel Congress where for three days beginning Friday, Sept. 4, you can catch nightly concerts featuring nearly 50 acts — from hometown favorites Chicha Dust and Tom Walbank to Tempe darling Roger Clyne and a handful of national acts.
That’s a whole lot of bands.
Add in the daily taco and barbecue parties, Roger Clyne’s Mexican Moonshine Tequila Cantina happy hour with Tempe brewer Four Peaks on Friday, Sept. 4, the first-ever Tucson Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum in the Copper Hall on Sept. 5 and a concert Sept. 6 with the buzz-worthy Mexican Morrissey tribute band Mexrrissey and you’ve got yourself HoCo Fest 2015.
This year’s festival celebrates Club Congress’s 30th anniversary so Hotel Congress entertainment booker David Slutes pulled out all the stops. He assembled a cast of acts that includes the who’s-who of Tucson talent performing with a handful of national acts including California indie rockers Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven.
Arguably the most exciting performance will come Sept. 6 when Mexrrissey performs. The Morrissey tribute band, co-founded by Tucson’s own Sergio Mendoza and Mexico City electronica DJ and producer Camilo Lara in late 2014, capitalizes on Mexico’s obsession and infatuation with the former Smiths frontman and English singer Morrissey. The super group, which includes Mexican folk musician Alejandro Flores and rocker Chetes, performs Latinized versions of Morrissey’s songs that employ brass, accordion and other Mexican elements.
Since its founding, Mexrrissey has performed in just four cities: Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City and London.
“We are very, very fortunate to have good connections with these people,” Slutes said. “Tucson is the only town outside of these major centers to have this so it’s really, really cool.”
Slutes said another not-to-be-missed attraction at HoCo Fest is the pop-up Tucson Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum exhibit set up in the Hotel Congress lobby and Copper Hall.
Slutes, who played in one of Tucson’s biggest and longest-running bands, the Sidewinders, has solicited memorabilia from Tucson musicians including worn and weathered handwritten setlists, scrapbooks, photos, instruments and “all sorts of crazy stuff” mostly from the 1980s on. The exhibit will be up Saturday and Sunday.
“David and I hope that it turns into something larger, longer and more permanent, but it has to start somewhere,” said Timothy Gassen, a Tucson filmmaker who has been involved in the Tucson music scene since 1980 and is working with Slutes on collecting artifacts for the exhibit.
Gassen said he hopes some of these 1980s bands can attend and talk about their experiences. This weekend’s exhibit focuses primarily on bands that helped define Club Congress in the mid-1980s onward.
“Many of them are still active in the scene and that material is on the top layer of the archaeological dig of people’s garages,” said Gassen, the husband of Star columnist and editorial writer Sarah Garrecht Gassen.
“It was an exciting era,” said Timothy Gassen, who was the lead singer of the Tucson band Marshmallow Overcoat, which played one of its first shows at Club Congress in 1987. “I have been involved in Tucson music since 1980 as a producer, as a filmmaker and as a member of bands. I’ve seen it all in the last 30 years.”
Gassen and his filmmaking partner Ray Frieders will premiere their film “That Desert Sound,” which features rare and significant 1980s music videos that they shot for Tucson bands. Gassen said many bands relied on music videos in the 1980s as a way to get themselves known in Tucson and beyond.
“That Desert Sound” includes videos never seen before outside of bootlegged copies, including a video by popular Tucson new wave punk band Jonny Sevin. Back in the 1980s, Jonny Sevin was arguably one of Tucson’s most popular bands, at one point opening a local show for New Wave giants The Romantics.
“This will be the first time they will be seen from the master tape from the person who made them, and that was me,” Gassen said.
Gassen said he and Frieders hope to develop “That Desert Sound” into a full-length documentary, complete with band interviews.
