The PopCulteer
MAY 9, 2025
So, yesterday the 2025 Live on the Levee line up was announced, and a lot of folks aren’t happy.
This isn’t exactly a new thing. There are always people who feel left out, that their favorite type of music, or favorite local band isn’t included. Or they hate the styles of music that is included. But this year it’s different.
This year Live on the Levee has been dramatically scaled back. There will only be six of the free concerts at Haddad Riverfront Park, and three of those are incorporated into other events, which means that there will already be a ton of people crammed onto Kanawha Boulevard, so it’ll be doubly hard to find a place to park.
I’m not going to complain about the selection of musical acts. Some are pretty hip and ambitious. I do question the idea of having The Reverand Horton Heat, an amazing Rockabilly act and easily the biggest name they have on the schedule, starting at 5 PM, which doesn’t give people the chance to get off work, go home, get ready and head back out. But since that show is tied to some kind of bicycle event, parking is likely to already be a nightmare from hell, so despite it being a great act, it’s an easy pass for me.
I was also impressed that they brought in the No BS Brass Band, because they’re practically avante-garde for an outdoor show in Charleston. They sound sort of like John Phillips Sousa playing Prog-rock with elements of Funk and Rap. It’s tied to the sadly-waning FestivALL, so crowds might not be so bad.
Fans of Heavy Metal are not at all happy, and they make a good point about classism affecting the decision-making process for choosing bands, but it’s harder to argue for inclusion when theres so much less in which to be included.
The major beef with Live on the Levee this year is that it’s not being done weekly. And I understand the reasons for that. It’s very unfortunate that cutting back so dramatically on the number of shows means that local bands are getting so many fewer opportunities to play in front of a decent crowd.
It All Comes Down To Money
The problem is that Charleston brought back The Sternwheel Regatta, and that has pretty much sucked up the vast majority of available sponsor money. Combined with the cessation of any federal arts grants, and the state taking money away from every cutural program so that they can funnel it to private religious schools, and you can see that something had to give.
Live on the Levee has five major sponsors with logos on the graphics they’ve released. There are dozens more sponsors listed, but those are probably people doing in-kind contributions or just being media partners for individual shows.
It comes down to the city having to decide where to best allocate their resources. With sponsors offering less money, Charleston had to weigh the costs–which includes pay for the musical acts, ASCAP licensing, prep time, closing streets, overtime for city workers, overtime for police, any added security, clean up after the shows, the actual production of the shows (sound systems and lighting) and any riders that need to be added to their liability insurance–against the benefits of bringing people into Charleston to support the local businesses.
Most of us have probably seen the big numbers that Charleston rolls out to tout the “Economic Impact” of citywide events. And let me be clear, I am not singling out Charleston. Every city that holds some type of event, whether it’s shutting down Chicago’s East Loop to hold a NASCAR race, or Las Vegas paying over eight million dollars in cash and tax credits to woo WWE to hold Wrestlemania there, releases an economic impact report that totally justifies the expense and shows how successful the event was.
It’s good for folks to know that this is all pure public relations hokum. All these reports amount to is a tally of exaggerated gross revenues of every possible business that was operational during the event, without deducting any of the expenses of putting on the event, or any of the revenue that would have normally been generated anyway.
If you really want to know if an event was successful, wait to see if they do it again.
It’s clear that Charleston, when looking at the real numbers, had to make the tough decision to scale back Live on the Levee. It looks like they struggled to find a way to at least keep some of it, but barring the influx of a few new deep-pocketed sponsors, Live on the Levee is on life support.
Some Of This Is On Us
It’s a shame that Charleston has such a nice venue as Haddad Riverfront Park, and another now at Slack Plaza, but can’t justify the expense of putting on a full weekly concert series. It’s not the fault of the city. People living in and around Charleston are notoriously fickle when it comes to free or cheap entertainment. Some of the fault lay with the people programming the shows, but we have an audience that is too easily dissuaded from attending cool live events.
And before anybody calls me on it, I am as guilty of this as anybody. I have Myasthenia Gravis, and being outside in the heat for long periods can knock me off my game for a week afterward. I’m not as young and strong as I used to be, and it’s really easy for me to decide to stay home on a Friday night to watch Smackdown instead of fighting a crowd, finding a place to park, and then getting home late.
When I’m not being overly-lazy, I like to travel. I’m going to be out of town for at least three of the Live on the Levee shows. The early start time for the good Rev knocks me out of that show as well. If the weather is absoutely perfect and my MG is not flaring up, I’ll consider the other two shows, but those are big “If’s.”
Charleston, sadly has an aging population, and we have more great art and music than we have audience to consume it now. It’s getting harder and harder to get people to come out to hear live music.
It’s something I’ve been writing about for more than a decade.
The Sad Decline Of FestivALL
The same issues that have caused Live on the Levee to contract in size are affecting FestivALL. I am currently running a series of episodes of Radio Free Charleston that I filmed during the 2011 FestivALL in PopCult‘s RFC Flashback posts every Saturday. Back then, FestivALL had just expanded to two weekends, and was new and exciting with a fresh approach to the arts and loads of enthusiastic supporters.
That can’t really be said now. FestivALL has been in a bit of a rut for almost a decade. Nothing new has really been added and some of the most fun events associated with it have fallen by the wayside, or become tarnished. The Streetworks art auction never recovered from the “Let’s burn some art” debacle, which pretty much convinced me to end my association with Streetworks, and the re-introduction of the Regatta, which was moved to just a week after FestivALL wrapped, grabbed almost all of the spotlight away from what was hoped to become West Virginia’s version of the Spoleto Festival in that other Charleston.
This year FestivALL finds itself shrunk back down to a single weekend and bumped from the spot on the calendar that it held for its entire existence, adjacent to West Virginia Day, and is instead happening at the end of May/beginning of June.
Which is when I’ll be in Louisville, Kentucky, for WonderFest USA.
I think maybe the current leadership of FestivALL, rathering than ushering it into a brave new era, are instead shuffling it off to hospice care. I hope I’m wrong on that, but the fact is that, after an exciting first decade, FestivALL has failed to evolve, and has lost it’s “must-attend” status.
So Now What?
As usual, local artists and musicians wind up getting the short end of the stick. I could talk a mean game about how we need people to organize and promote a new series of free concerts devoted entirely to local bands of all different genre. But it’d be intellectually dishonest for me to be the one to do that.
The fact is, it takes a lot of dedicated people to work for cheap or free to put on and promote free concerts, and those of us who were happy to do that fifteen years ago are fifteen years older now…at least those of us who are still alive.
I miss the all-day metal shows at the bandshell at Coonskin Park, but I am in no position to help organize one. I’ll cover it as much as possible in PopCult and on The AIR, but I’m just one person. I can’t do the heavy lifting anymore. I did that for three hundred video episodes of Radio Free Charleston and The RFC MINI SHOW, and over 500 radio episodes (and counting), but it’s going to take younger, stronger people with more time and money than I can spare.
And sadly, that is the only solution I can offer for this. You guys need to go do more stuff. Tell me when it’s ready. I’ll help spead the word.
And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for a fresh post every day, and several exciting regular features.
Hey, this week I’ve got too many things going to even come up with a clever opening paragraph. Evidently it’s Mother’s Day weekend, so if you are so inclined, you might want to incorporate that into your plans. There are also yard sale events taking place in Charleston’s East End and also in the Teeming Metropolis of Dunbar. Anyway…here’s our weekly guide to STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston and beyond for the next several days.
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