Mourning City Stages

In the morass of municipal and other music festivals, Birmingham’s City Stages has been solidly in the Not So Good category for many years. But last year there was a miraculous turn-around. After some years flirting with total bankruptcy (and perpetrating the fraud discussed here), the festival emerged from asking “Anyone want to sponsor this [...]

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Welcome New Readers!

Writing up reviews of City Stages was a good idea. We here at Toxic Culture have gotten quite a bit of traffic from said entries. If you haven’t seen our reports yet, check ‘em out. And if you’re new here, whether lured by the City Stages reviews or by your relentless Google searching for “big [...]

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City Stages 2008 Review, Day 3

The grand finale of the 20th City Stages was tremendous. We missed a chunk of the daytime events: the milling around on the scorching asphalt, the scurrying for shade, the ritual gorging from all of the food trailers. As a sidebar, I’d love to know why there were so few local food vendors represented.

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City Stages 2008 Review, Day 2

Yes, it was Saturday the 14th. It was City Stages, Day 2: Electric Boogaloo.
There was some concern at first. We woke up pretty late since we got home from The Roots set at about 2 a.m. So we ended up sleeping late and a big rain storm caused us to wonder if the less-than-thrilling Saturday [...]

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City Stages 2008 Review, Day 1

It was a dark and stormy Friday the 13th…. Well, it wasn’t all that dark (nor stormy) when we arrived to the first day of Birmingham’s semi-famous 20th Annual downtown cultural heritage festival corporate music festival. You see, City Stages is telling folks that they are all about culture and heritage (whatever that means), but [...]

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