It’s my birthday today. I don’t have any plans, but that’s OK. I’ve already been to the mountaintop when it comes to celebrating my birthday, the Davefest reunion can wait another year.
When I turned 28 I decided I wanted to have a big birthday party. After reporting on a story about high school graduates training for boot camp, I met some of the same Marines later that night at the local bar. Over tequila shots, we hatched a plan to create a “Christmas in July” event for my birthday.
We decided to call it Davefest. Catchy, isn’t it?
I decided I’d rent out a bar, hire a couple of bands and invite everyone I knew. I wanted to support the Marine’s best-known charity, so I asked everyone to bring a toy for Toys for Tots or pay $10 at the door. One of my favorite hangouts in Des Moines, the Underground, agreed to host the event. They even provided a couple of discounted kegs and opened up their full bar.
Looking back nearly a decade later, it’s amazing how easy everything came together. I’d never been a concert promoter, but it turns out renting out a bar and hiring a couple of bands to play your birthday party doesn’t take much more than making a few phone calls. Having a wide circle of friends to draw from didn’t hurt either. I think I invited more than 200 people via Facebook and at least half of them showed up.
Nine years later, my circle of friends has gotten smaller but even closer.
My friends Lars and Toby opened for Brother Trucker, who burned the house down with two blistering sets. I saw friends I hadn’t seen in years. I even managed to do a good deed in the process by raising some money for charity.
Friends volunteered to work at the event, checking IDs at the door, hanging up posters and helping me run the show. Like any volunteer event, we needed a small army of volunteers. We survived a million tiny catastrophes to reach the finish line. I’ll admit, even I wasn’t sure we could pull it off. The week before Davefest, I turned to my friend and consigliere, John Flowers, and I told him we should just forget the whole thing. No one was going to show up anyways.
John wouldn’t let me quit on my big birthday party, after all, he’d already hung 500 flyers for the event all across downtown.
In the end, we ended up raising almost $1,000 and John’s car was stuffed full of donated toys. Celebrating over pizza after we closed down the bar, I confided to John I was already planning to hold a second Davefest — bigger and better than ever — next year. That was still the plan, even if I woke up the next morning with a two-day hangover. It just didn’t quite work out that way.
By the time my birthday came around again, I was in California living next to the Pacific Ocean in a tiny studio apartment on Ocean Avenue. The status of Davefest moved from “pending” to “permanent hold.”
Other than a lone handbill John pulled off a streetlight a week after Davefest, that I framed and hung on my office wall, there’s little left to remember my big birthday bash. Most of my friends have left town by now, with John moving to Seattle. Lars and Toby broke up, too. The Underground closed. It’s an arcade bar now, the stage is gone and there’s a row of Pac-Man machines sitting where we jammed out that night. Brother Trucker is still rocking, but then, they might outlive us all.
They’re playing at the Gas Lamp tonight. Maybe I’ll call up a few friends and we’ll head down there for a couple beers. Who knows, maybe we can start planning the Davefest 10-year reunion show.
Contact David Dolmage at
ddolmage@newtondailynews.com