Tag Archives: Festival

Ludacris says he’s not playing Heritage Fest

UPDATE: 8.11.2009 – The organizers of the Birmingham Heritage Festival  have announced that this year’s event has been canceled. The Birmingham News has the details.

Apparently the reduction in ticket prices last weekend for this weekend’s Birmingham Heritage Festival has encouraged its organizers to move forward with it (at least according to the front page of their official website. Those who bought tickets to see Ludacris at the festival on Friday night though may be a little disappointed; the hip-hop star sent out the following tweet last night:

Bogus promoter alert!!! Birmingham, AL Heritage festival, completely false. Luda will not be there so don’t buy tickets!!!

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A range of emotions for City Stages

We’re still finding more conversations and blog posts to add to our list involving the demise of Birmingham’s 21-year old music festival, City Stages:

Dennis Pillion followed up his initial post on his blog about what the festival meant to him with what can best be described as an investigative piece about how the festival ended up where it did.

Secret History Productions shared this post on MySpace that seemed to bring out opinions as well both for and against the idea of music festivals in general.

Mary Jean Baker LaMay was a long time volunteer for the festival (and continues to be a friend to this website) who decided to share her thoughts about what the festival meant to her via yesterday’s editorial pages of The Birmingham News.

For some more nostalgia, why not check out BhamWiki’s gallery of City Stages posters (and submit photos of the others to them if you can).

City Stages is no more…

newcslogoIf you haven’t already heard, the Birmingham Cultural and Heritage Foundation announced earlier today that City Stages is no more. The Birmingham News reported the story first earlier this afternoon. Wade on Birmingham and bham.fm have also posted about the news and already have comment threads of their own. Wade’s includes a link to Dennis Pillion’s post about his last visit to the three-day music festival.

Tonight’s episode of WBHM’s Tapestry program (one of the last weekly editions) plans to include a look at “the death of City Stages” while bham.fm’s Twitter feed gives us a look at how this announcement may have ripple effects throughout the community. There’s also all of the other thoughts being shared on Twitter.

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UPDATE: City Stages 2009 | Acts announced, website unveiled

This morning we’ve started seeing the first acts for City Stages 2009 be announced and dissected (courtesy of The Birmingham News and Wade on Birmingham respectively). So, what else can we add?

cs2009screenWell, for starters the festival ‘s new website is scheduled for launched today – this morning actually. Whether that happens or not, it’s our understanding that It has been built using WordPress, the same CMS program used to operate The Terminal. The site will feature the festival’s new logo and allow you to share your favorite City Stages memory. We also know that we’re planning our own special City Stages section again this year, though it is still not ready for its own unveiling as of yet.

So for the time being, we want to know what you think – as Birmingham’s world class music festival is the basis of today’s Magic City Question.

Image: Screenshot of new City Stages website.

We’ve got two more passes…

In case you’re wondering, we’ve already posted the names of the winners of the eight weekend passes we’ve been giving away for  City Stages on the contest page. We’d like to take a moment and thank everyone who entered (and there were a lot of you) – and now we’d like to say that we still have two passes left to give away

We were thinking of the most fair way to give these two passes away while seeing folks show their love for the music festival (as well as for us)… and we’ve settled on giving them away separately. Here’s the catch, we’ve got to see you tomorrow (Friday) at lunchtime over at Java and Jams (321 20th Street North).

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Follow City Stages on Twitter

Screenshot of City Stages' Twiter profile

Screenshot of City Stages’ Twitter profile page.

Birmingham’s annual downtown music festival has recently introduced a Twitter profile to the mix of ways to keep track of what’s going on. The popular (and recently erratic) microblogging program allows people to follow people, places and in this case events either on the web, or using your cell phone’s SMS feature. If used effectively, it could let people know about delays in acts taking the stage and other events associated with the festival among other things.

We’ve been quiet with our Twitter profile recently, but hopefully that will change this week…

Looks like we got two right…

City Stages formally announced part of their 2008 lineup via The Birmingham News as a front page article in Sunday’s (today’s) paper. This list includes a couple of big names – like Diana Ross and The Flaming Lips.

Looks like we were correct in identifying two of this year’s acts , The Roots (March 18) and Old Crow Medicine Show (yesterday). The News was able to figure out a couple of them as well (and a lot earlier than we were – see the Old Crow post to find links to those posts).

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