Since 2008, famous alt-rockers, The Toadies, have been moving their festival, Dia de Los Toadies, from Texas town to Texas town. Now, five years after its inception, these local heroes are coming home, and they are bringing their show with them.
Dia de Los Toadies is a two-day festival that features a wide variety of Texas bands and good old classic blues-rockers. Each band is handpicked by the members of The Toadies, giving them ultimate control over the sound and direction of the event. This ensures a consistent tonal theme with no lulls or jarring juxtapositions, as well as giving the show an extremely personal feel.
Dia is a unique festival in that each of the two days offers something entirely different. The first day is a smaller, much more intimate show that is described as an "almost acoustic" set – think fireside on a camping trip. It will include performances by James Hall, Will Johnson, and, of course, The Toadies. Day one offers the band the opportunity to strip down their beloved post-grunge rock tunes and reinvent them with new structures and aural textures. They will be playing familiar songs in unfamiliar ways.
The second day will feature more than a dozen bands across two stages. The lineup includes Austin blues man Gary Clark Jr., The Cush, Baboon, Oil Boom and several others. Day two is all high-voltage rock-and-roll – the amps will be plugged in and almost certainly turned to 11. There will also be a performance by the School of Rock's "Dean's List."
School of Rock is a local music school that generally caters to children under the age of 18. They will be picking their most talented students who will then go on to perform in front of the thousands of concertgoers. Toadies" front man and lead guitarist, Vaden Todd-Lewis works hand-in-hand with the School of Rock and even has his daughter enrolled there. Todd-Lewis is excited to showcase the kids, describing the concert as "a family thing, not a big dirty rock concert."
The Toadies began playing together in 1989. They released their first full-length album in 1994 and quickly gained national acclaim for their songs Tyler, Away, I Come From the Water, and, most famously, Possum Kingdom. After a lengthy hiatus between 2001 and 2007, The Toadies reemerged and have since released three albums. It was during this time that they decided to create their own festival. As Todd-Lewis describes it, "We were spit balling and thought, "what if we did something modeled after Willie's Picnic? You know, where we could do our own thing and pick all the bands." We didn't yet have a name for it, and I did a conference call with my manager right there and said, "Maybe somewhere by water where we can move it around, have a couple of stages, all Texas music, etc…" and within 10 days or less, I had him call me back with possible locations. And it has just been a blast ever since."
This year's festival will be at Panther Island Pavilion, Sept. 13 and 14.
