Best In Texas Festival – The Review

This past weekend the fam and I packed up and headed out to Columbus for a little getaway and to hang out with some friends at the Best In Texas Festival. Through Galleywinter, I had been part of some talks to help sponsor the event and from everything I had heard I was really excited to go and be a part of it.

Unfortunately I was completely under-whelmed. It seemed more like a fair than a full blown festival set up to celebrate some of the best bands in Texas. Gate tickets were a bit steep at $50 for a two day pass and to add insult to injury we were prompted for an extra $5 to park. I realize that sometimes different companies are involved and all that.. but good grief.. just roll it into the price of the ticket.

We arrived at around 5ish on Saturday afternoon to be greeted by some guy at a booth trying to sell us a vacation package. No idea who impulse buys a vacation in 100 degree Texas heat but i guess there is a market for it. After being hounded by that guy we diverted around to look through the other gammit of assorted booths such as the US Border Patrol. Again.. No idea what this has to do with a festival promoting music… but I guess you need sponsors to make it all happen. There were some cool food vendors and, of course, the regular hippie shop selling Tie-dye shirts. Couldn’t talk the wife into one of those to save my life, though. Bummer.

The location was really nice out at the Colorado County Fairgrounds and Columbus is one of the best little towns on I-10. It has a nice large pavilion and the sound team they hired did a great job of setting things up and also projecting the sound out past the pavilion into the rest of the festival area. They ran two stages to help speed music up and it worked great. The Musicians really brought it and every single one of them that we watched put on a great show. It’s not often you get guys like Stoney, RRB and REK all on one stage.

The bottom line is that for this lineup I expected a lot bigger turnout and the setup to be a little more conducive to getting people in front of the music. Not sure if that was becuase of a Father’s Day weekend, marketing or if the planets weren’t aligned. I hope it was a successful event because despite my dis-satisfaction I saw plenty of people having fun and loving the $3.00 beer. Not sure if I’d go again next year.. but as everyone knows.. I’m a sucker for good music no matter where it is :)