McMullen: It's high time Sedalia staged a music festival

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column in which I rapidly fired some ideas at the wall with the hope that some of them might stick.

Among them was an idea that I’ll admit probably isn’t extremely original — I’m sure that the people of Sedalia have been stumbling upon it independently for decades now: that we should consider having another music festival like the one that eventually came to define an entire decade in Sedalia’s history.

That thought even inspired a poll on the Sedalia Democrat website and responders overwhelmingly indicated that it was something they would like to see.

So let’s just do it, right? Bing, bang, boom — one music festival, coming right up.

It’s not quite so easy. We tried to have one as recently as 2006 called “Delicious Rox.” It ended early when a member of the audience was hit in the head with a beer bottle when Chad Hanks, of American Head Change, chucked the object that had been thrown at him back into the audience.

The two headliner acts, Fear Factory and Drowning Pool, didn’t go on that night, and many metalheads went home unsatisfied.

So our track record with these sort of things isn’t great, but it certainly could be worse. It would probably be a great idea to avoid hucking bottles at the talent in the future if we’d like to have another try, though.

So, let’s start with something easy: What should we call the Sedalia music festival of the future?

Out of tradition I guess we could just call it the Ozark Music Festival again, but I think such a unique piece of Sedalia lore should get that name to itself.

A thing like that only happens once and that name carries certain connotations that we’re trying to avoid this time. Merely re-invoking the name might drive visitors to try and match the spectacle of the past.
And “Delicious Rox” just sounds silly — we need something new.

I was thinking “Missouri State Music Festival,” in honor of the grounds that have and will continue to host these sorts of events and the event that defines Sedalia.

I don’t even know if we would technically be allowed to use a name like that, though.

Maybe “Maple Leaf Music Festival” would work. I don’t know, maybe that sounds a little too rustic.

Hip, modern music festivals end in suffixes like fest and palooza, right? “Sedfest” rolls off the tongue quite nicely. Maybe we should go with something simple like “Rawhide Rock.”

All right, figuring out the name isn’t quite so easy, but there’s one thing that will be absolutely instrumental if we’re really hoping to start up a serious music festival that could become an annual event: money.

We’re going to need sponsors, a whole lot of them. The Ozark Music Festival had an insane ’70s lineup. Many of its bands are still touring more than three decades later, and it would be appropriate to invite them back. (The Eagles would be the most important band to invite back.)

We need a lineup of the best and most well-known bands from the last three decades and today. We would need the biggest country stars, the heaviest metal bands and the dopest hip-hop acts. And some dubstep! The kids love dubstep!

Of course, this would all be wildly expensive and could even put the event in danger of not making a sufficient profit, but if we’re going to do it, we need to do it big.

If we’re going to have another music festival, it’s going to be one of the biggest in rock festival history, just like the one we’re known for.

And we would also need to invest heavily in getting the word out. We would need commercials, billboards and print ads — the whole nine yards to get the crowds we need to have a successful festival.

We would also need nonmusical acts: fire spitters, alligator wrestlers, bearded ladies and we should definitely call upon the services of the local spin gypsy tribe.

We’ve got to foster the idea that there’s something decidedly unique and interesting happening here. We’ve got to create an engaging environment.

And we’ll have to rethink the standard policy when it comes to hassles. We absolutely can’t let it turn into another crazy drug stupor that ends up causing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the fairgrounds.

But we could do it and it would be grand — fun and good for the local economy, just like the poll said.