Update, July 5: The first Fort Reno show of 2016 is scheduled for Thursday, July 7, according to an invitation posted on Facebook. Title Tracks, Bad Moves and Strange Avenger will perform. Dot Dash, The Delarcos and Nine to Five are scheduled to play the park Monday, July 11, and The Rememberables, Psychic Subcreatures and The Luau Cinders are booked for Thursday, July 14.

Original post:

After two years of stumbles, Fort Reno summer concerts are set to return in July, according to a message posted on the series’ website.

Shows in the Northwest D.C. park will take place Monday and Thursday evenings as usual, but no schedule has been posted. Submissions from bands interested in playing this year will be accepted through May 31, the website says.

Fort Reno shows have faced uncertainty since 2014, when the National Park Service began requiring U.S. Park Police officers at every gig. Security expenses threatened to drain Fort Reno’s concert budget, said organizer Amanda MacKaye, jeopardizing the nearly 50-year-old concert series. MacKaye began soliciting donations to support concerts at Fort Reno in 2015.

The summer series appeared to be in trouble again this year, after Washingtonian found that MacKaye had not filed a permit application with the National Park Service for 2016. But in an email to Bandwidth, MacKaye said she intended to resume gigs at the park.

“Things are just moving slower on my end,” the organizer wrote.

MacKaye is still accepting donations for the Fort Reno concert series via the Washington Peace Center.

Photo by Flickr user Lewis Francis used under a Creative Commons license. 

As Washingtonian reported last week, Fort Reno organizer Amanda MacKaye still has not filed a permit application to the National Park Service, raising questions about whether she plans to book any shows in the federally controlled park this summer. MacKaye also has not solicited music submissions, which she usually does earlier in the year, Washingtonian points out.

But MacKaye says Fort Reno fans have no reason to worry yet. “There is no story here,” she writes in a brief email to WAMU. “It would appear on the Internet that liberty has been taken to create a controversy where there is none. Things are just moving slower on my end.”

MacKaye still has time to submit a permit application for use of the Tenleytown park this summer, says a National Park Service spokesperson.

“She can submit the application at least 48 hours in advance of the proposed event,” the spokesperson says, though it’s wiser to apply earlier. She adds that MacKaye has been in touch with NPS permit office staff.

For the last two years, the 48-year-old public concert series has faced insecurity after the National Park Service began requiring that a U.S. Park Police officer monitor each concert — a standard requirement that may have been overlooked in the past, a spokesperson said at the time.

MacKaye initially responded by calling off Fort Reno’s 2014 season, saying the $2,640 security fee outstripped Fort Reno’s budget. In 2015, she asked for donations to help defray the cost of a Park Police officer.

Both concert seasons ultimately survived.

Photo by Flickr user Mike Maguire used under a Creative Commons license.

Original post:

This summer’s edition of the Fort Reno concert series is not getting called off. After another round of uncertainty, organizer Amanda MacKaye announced Friday that the popular D.C. series — now in its 47th year — successfully fundraised the money it needs to pay for U.S. Park Police security at the shows. The first concert will take place Monday, July 6, with Sara Curtin, EastWestHwy and The Fuss.

MacKaye hasn’t made the 2015 schedule public yet, but she has posted a list of 20 bands confirmed for the slate. So in what is now a Bandwidth tradition, I made this playlist to help rock ‘n’ roll picnickers decide which Fort Reno shows to hit this year.

One problem, though: Not every band on the list has music on Soundcloud, my preferred playlist tool. Is your band booked for Fort Reno but absent from this playlist? Post a song on Soundcloud and email me a link at bandwidth@wamu.org.

Photo by Flickr user Isaac Wedin used under a Creative Commons license.

“Our formula is Hook –> Chorus –> Bridge (repeat x2) –> End. Keep it under two minutes. Gold,” said guitarist Javier Diaz.

Now that the D.C. band has unleashed two new songs from its forthcoming LP — name and release date still TBD — I can happily confirm that formula hasn’t changed much. Both new tunes, “Burnt Tapes” and “Allison,” rip stuff up and put it back together again in tidy blasts. Neither even grazes the two-minute mark.

Diaz says Spirit Plots dropped the two tracks today to promote its July 13 gig with Teen Liver and Notaries Public at Fort Reno. That summer concert series is officially happening this year, as booker Amanda MacKaye announced today. Its lineup of bands has been announced, with a complete schedule still on the way.

Check out “Burnt Tapes” and “Allison” right here, and get primed for Fort Reno:

Last year, new requirements from the National Park Service almost shelved the annual concert series at Fort Reno park in Northwest D.C. Now the popular series is facing the same trouble — and asking the public for help.

A message posted on fortreno.com says that, like last year, the National Park Service and U.S. Park Police are asking that Fort Reno pay for park police to staff each concert in Tenleytown, and they need donations to help cover the fee.

“I shudder at having to write that because it makes the concert series appear like an unsafe environment — something it definitely is not,” says the series’ website. “I had hoped that our peaceful series in 2014 would have changed minds, or that I could — but alas, here we are.”

That hope may have been misguided. According a spokesperson for the National Park Service, last year’s Fort Reno concerts led to “12 incidents requiring law enforcement, ranging from illegal vending to drug and alcohol issues.”

Plus, it doesn’t sound like Fort Reno was in a position to avoid the police fee in the first place. The NPS spokesperson says Fort Reno organizers knew about the fee at least since February, when they met with NPS and U.S. Park Police to discuss this year’s concerts.

Last year, Fort Reno booker Amanda MacKaye announced she was canceling the concert series in light of the newly required fee, which totaled $2,640, outstripping Fort Reno’s annual budget. (That expense has risen slightly since: It used to cost $66 per hour to hire Park Police to staff events like Fort Reno concerts. Now it costs $70 per hour, according to NPS.)

MacKaye eventually met with representatives from the Park Service and U.S. Park Police — later appearing on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show — and last year’s concerts were un-canceled. But the feds didn’t relieve Fort Reno of the police fee.

“One of the primary goals in permitting any event is to ensure public safety,” writes the NPS spokesperson in an email. “These fees are standard practice for many permitted special events.”

Concerts on federal parkland in D.C. are generally required to pay for U.S. Park Police security.

According to Fort Reno’s website, 21 local bands have been scheduled to play the park this summer.

MacKaye has not returned multiple requests for comment.

Photo: Hardcore band Give plays the 2014 Fort Reno concert series

Ten minutes later, Scharbach swapped the frisbee for a microphone. He bounded onstage, pumped up to play D.C.’s Fort Reno summer concert series for the third time with his group, GIVE, D.C.’s most boundary-pushing hardcore band. It would be another three months before the band released its debut LP, Electric Flower Circus.

After ample time in the studio, a wait at the pressing plant and many dollars spent, that record finally arrived today. (Stream it below.)

In a scene that tends to adhere to a dress code of jorts and black T-shirts, GIVE is all sportswear and trainers, sometimes even Oxfords and selvedge denim. Its sound lives outside of the confines of D.C. hardcore, too: The five-piece skirts the classic faster-louder formula, referencing ’90s alt-rock just as often as it borrows from early Dischord.

Scharbach says he would be proud to say GIVE springs from D.C.’s rich punk heritage. But part of the band’s aesthetic seems inherited from Haight-Ashbury instead of the District. Its art and song titles emit a whiff of patchouli: A white flower logo adorns its 7-inch singles, which come with names like “I Am Love,” “Flowerhead” and “Petal Pushing.” Electric Flower Circus looks utterly psychedelic. No stern faces and black X’s here.

“In the hardcore punk scene we came up in, the imagery was a lot darker,” Scharbach says. But he felt drawn to more positive symbols, like the flowers of the paisley 1960s and Britpop 1990s. That imagery became “a floral foundation we just built off of,” he says. “Flowers became our thing.”

“In the hardcore punk scene we came up in, the imagery was a lot darker,” says GIVE vocalist John Scharbach. “Flowers became our thing.”

In a city both enriched and constrained by its legendary hardcore scene, GIVE seems respectful of the past, but not handcuffed to it. The 13-song Electric Flower Circus aims to further stretch its oeuvre—and the limits of hardcore.

The record won’t sound unrecognizable to fans; it still weds the pounding pace of Fugazi-bred hardcore with a little Lungfish and the band’s other myriad influences. But this time, the guitars sounds cleaner, and Scharbach does, too, in a way: he sings more and growls less. Some moments on the album even enter dancey territory. The frontman says that from his close vantage point, it’s tough to identify what’s different on this record. But eventually he describes Electric Flower Circus as “more rock-and-rollish” compared to the band’s previous stuff.

GIVE’s sound isn’t the only thing getting a rethink on Electric Flower Circus: The LP also marks the band’s return to self-publishing after a string of rendezvouses with other labels. GIVE dropped the full-length on its own imprint—the appropriately crunchy-sounding Moonflower Records, which only has one prior release: the band’s 2009 12-inch of demo recordings. After that EP, GIVE dropped five 7-inch singles on five labels, all run by the band’s friends in the scene.

Not that GIVE is done with other shops. In fact, it’s now collaborating with two of the heftiest labels it’s worked with yet. Big-deal hardcore label Revelation Records plans to release Sonic Bloom, a five-song GIVE EP, which the band recorded and mastered at legendary Arlington studio Inner Ear over the summer. Then there’s its single due out on top Boston hardcore imprint Lockin’ Out. Both releases, expected to come out this year, will include material from GIVE’s full-length as well as some exclusive songs.

Working with big hardcore indies hasn’t always interested GIVE. The band says it was approached by some in the past, but they never felt like a good fit. For one of the most eclectic bands in hardcore, hopping on a label with a bunch of other hardcore acts didn’t seem ideal. “We never wanted to be boxed in like that,” Scharbach says.

“We don’t want our band to be on iPhone cases,” says GIVE drummer Gene Melkisethian. “We don’t want our band to be a product.”

Plus, some of those bigger labels could have pushed GIVE in a more commercial direction, which the five-piece has never felt comfortable with, according to drummer Gene Melkisethian. “We don’t want our band to be on iPhone cases,” he says. “We don’t want our band to be a product.”

Revelation and Lockin’ Out seemed different. Melkisethian says he’s known the folks who run Lockin’ Out for years, and Revelation’s distribution network and name recognition made it hard to pass up. But GIVE didn’t want to put its LP in anyone else’s hands. For that, they wanted creative and financial control. “We knew that if we financed it, we could put more money into it than a label would,” Melkisethian says.

Besides, the band sold about 1,200 copies of its self-released 2009 EP, and they felt confident they could do it again. Electric Flower Circus hasn’t been cheap—when we talked over the summer, GIVE had spent about $5,000 on the record, most of it earned from touring—but the creative and economic freedom that comes with going DIY seems worth the money, Melkisethian says.

“That’s kind of the tradition in D.C.,” says the drummer. “We think it’s a good thing.”

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Protect-U:

GIVE:

So unless you’re the kind of Fort Reno fan who goes to every show just to hang out and buy ice cream from the truck, this playlist—of every single band playing Fort Reno this summer—should help you decide when to pack your picnic and head for that Tenleytown green.

Our playlist includes show dates, but here’s the series’ entire 2014 schedule in case you need to brush up. Tonight brings performances from local ska group Captivators and Harrisonburg punk band Malatese.

Having trouble loading the playlist on your iPhone? Try the Whyd app.

Photo by Flickr user Rudi Riet used under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s what we can expect from the (unusually short) eight-concert series:

Monday, July 7
Captivators
Malatese

Thursday, July 10
Peanut Butter & Dave
Golden Looks
Calavera Skull

Monday, July 14
Baby Bry Bry
Aloners
Tiger Horse

Thursday, July 17
Priests
Sotano
Puff Pieces

Monday, July 21
Alarms & Controls
Talk It
Dissonance

Thursday, July 24
Title Tracks
The Effects
Myrrh Myrrh

Monday, July 28
Black Sparks
Stereosleep
The Raised by Wolves

Thursday, July 31
Give
Protect-U

Photo by Flickr user ann gav used under a Creative Commons license.

That news came today after a meeting between organizer Amanda MacKaye, the National Park Service, and U.S. Park Police. Afterward, MacKaye, Park Police Lt. Allan Griffith and Rock Creek Superintendent Tara Morrison stopped by WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show to announce the latest.

“Sitting around the table face to face, we were able to work through the issues and resolve it,” Morrison said on the show this afternoon.

In comments both off- and on-air, Griffith and Morrison said both the National Park Service and U.S. Park Police need to implement changes to make sure that Fort Reno and other D.C. concert series on federal parkland go through a more navigable process in the future.

Fort Reno still has to pay for officers to staff its concerts, which is the last-minute requirement that prompted MacKaye to call off the series Thursday. But that money—$66 an hour, at a minimum of five hours per event—no longer has to be paid in a lump sum upfront. (Previously the Park Police had sent MacKaye an invoice for the total amount of $2,640.)

On Kojo Nnamdi’s show this morning, MacKaye said she wouldn’t even consider seeking sponsorships for the proudly independent shows. “Growing up in the D.C. punk scene… it’s in my blood,” she said. “I cannot sell out the music.”

The eight-concert series is scheduled to begin on July 7, weather permitting, as usual. Bandwidth will post the schedule when it’s available. Update, July 1: The schedule has been posted.

Photo by Flickr user Valerie Hinojosa used under a Creative Commons license.

Due to a reporting error, the original version of this post inaccurately said Fort Reno is an eight-week series. It should have said eight-concert series; there are only eight shows over four weeks.