Photograph by Whitney Curtis, Illustration by Sam Wiley
Austin has Austin City Limits. Chicago has Lollapalooza. Even Manchester, Tenn., has Bonnaroo. But beyond Twangfest and a string of blues festivals, something was missing in Missouri.
“I moved to St. Louis about eight years ago,” explains Brian Cohen, a native of Austin, Texas, “and when I decided that I was going to live here long-term, I tried to see things that weren’t here that I wanted.” So two years ago, with the help of other music lovers, he launched LouFest, a multiday indie music festival in Forest Park.
This was no typical festival: The first year boasted Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and She & Him’s Zooey Deschanel—long before New Girl debuted on FOX. This year’s lineup included TV on the Radio, Cat Power, and (until that East Coast hurricane) The Roots.
Everything about the festhas remained quintessential St. Louis: It’s unpretentious, inexpensive, and laid-back.
Before moving here, Cohen produced documentaries about Jewish history in the U.S. for public television and helped create the award-winning film A Joyful Noise: The Lost Jewish Music of Philadelphia. He approached creating LouFest the same way that he’d produce a documentary: “I’d come up with what I hoped was a good idea, develop it, fund it, and then execute it... With the festival, I relied on a much larger group of people to help me get through the steps.”
Beyond the summer concerts in Forest Park, the fest also presents concerts at local venues like Off Broadway, where LouFest hosted a high-school battle of the bands, whose winners played the fest’s Area K. “One of the goals of LouFest is to become a strong community partner,” explains Cohen.
So just how did he find the confidence to spearhead such an ambitious undertaking? “It’s hard for me to think in those terms,” he says. “St. Louis is big enough to make this successful, but it’s small enough so you’re able to reach the people you need to reach in City Hall. In that sense, St. Louis was really the perfect city for this.”
