Just days before last Saturday’s annual Mifflin Street Block Party, local city officials decided to uphold a noise crack down, despite petitions and protests by local residents to ease the restrictions. Now, to be clear, I have never even attended the block party in it’s 40 years, however, I’m pretty familiar with the scene, i.e. huge crowds of college students packing into a crowded location to have fun and drink lots (and lots) of beer.
The debate of the merit of such events aside, it’s a shame to deny the opportunity for live bands to play in a downtown Madison block party in the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon.
If you DON’T have live music, what DO you have? Really, just an overcrowded drunk tank full of students with not much to do except drink…and drink…and drink. Allowing a few bands (or good DJ’s) to entertain in some organized fashion would give the block party a sense of a celebration and not just another excuse to get wasted.
Fortunately, Alderman Mike Verveer seems to be thinking along similar lines. Of course, I’m sure his proposal to “regulate” the annual block party into an event like the newly city-sponsored Halloween “FreakFest” will be met with predictable resistance by students who want the no-holds-barred block party tradition to continue the same as it ever was. But with 438 arrests made, a new high for the event, it looks like the trend is only moving toward regulation, or crackdown.
I, for one, would dig seeing a few live band stages added at each end of the closed off blocks. The police have a job to do, local resident have rights to enforce regulation in their neighborhood, and god knows, college students sometimes need safety restrictions put in place for their own good, whether they like it or not.
So I guess we’ll just wait and see what the future holds for the 40 year old annual party fest.
In the meantime, big ups to the unknown band in the photo for their renegade, impromptu performance on the upstairs balcony of this home. I wonder if they were ticketed or arrested?
The photo reminds me of a Jah Kings gig we did from the 2nd story deck of Dominic’s in Ann Arbor at the 1994 Hash Bash. Oh, the days of college youth. May we preserve them, but with the least impact to the rest of us who (thankfully?) are a few moons past those days.
My ten-minute later follow up:
So here’s what the Mifflin Street Block Party is competing with, another perspective on Madison parties, none other than your any-given-Saturday home Badger football game. What a hilarious write-up, because you know it’s true for almost everyone in the student section.
Is this what the Mifflin St. B-Party should become (or already is)?!? Maybe live music could save folks from themselves…or maybe not. It’s Madison, in all it’s greatness, or not.
