Dan Coleman, owner of Spirit of ‘68 Promotions, said he noticed many of the musicians try to find somewhere to play on the road between their hometowns and the festival.
His inbox floods with emails from bands looking for gigs on the way to South by Southwest every year, he said.
In 2010, Coleman came up with the idea to combine all of these show requests in Bloomington, he said, and the Pit Stop Music Festival was born.
“The idea of Pit Stop was always that it is a run-up to South by Southwest,” Coleman said.
After the 2010 festival didn’t work out in quite the way he imagined in regards to aspects such as the venues used, Coleman said he decided not to put the event together for next year and didn’t think he would ever put it together again. Stephen Westrich, owner of the Bishop Bar, changed Coleman’s mind, and the festival is back on for March 12-14.
“In the fall of this past year Steve got in his head that we should do the festival again and, after months of trying to convince him otherwise, we decided to go ahead,” Coleman said.
This year’s festival was heavily reworked. Coleman said they tried to pick apart what did or didn’t work at 2010’s festival and apply that to this one.
One of the biggest changes to the festival was the reduction from eight days to three. While the event is shorter, Coleman said the lineup of artists this year is much more ambitious to make up for the loss. He said he started with the lofty goal of getting Madlib to perform and, after that fell into place, worked backwards from there.
The lineup represents an eclectic mix of national and local artists playing a wide range of genres. Bloomington listeners have a diverse taste in music, so the lineup needed to have something in it for everyone, Coleman said.
“Unless you’re doing a bluegrass festival out in Brown County, you’ve got to throw as wide a net as possible,” he said. “There’s a lot of good music out there.”
With the shows staggered at different times and different venues around downtown Bloomington, he said anyone who wants to should be able to go from a rock show to a rap show without missing much more than an opening act.
Coleman said he wants to see the festival grow in future years, and having the event for only a few days this year is just a starting place. He said he hopes the festival will become an event for the town, like a Lotus World Music and Arts Festival for “the rest of us.”
“We could have a sustained musical happening that appeals more to the college kid than it does to their professors,” he said.
