What is Barnfest

So you’ve looked at a bunch of old black & white pictures on this site that are tagged ‘Barnfest’ and wondered what the hell is that?  The pics I have labeled Barnfest were all taken at the Old Barn Punk Fest.  This was a wild weekend of crust punk music and culture in the middle of the woods in Jim Falls, WI in August of 1999.

The Old Barn Punk Fest was in some ways the high water mark for the punk scene in the 90’s. After this festival the scene started to fragment and fracture.  The more active anarchist kids made their way west and appeared in the black block armies during the Seattle WTO meetings.  The kids more into the music seemed to soften their sound and distance themselves from the anarchist’s and the self-proclaimed working class punks just grew older and kept working.

The Old Barn Punk Fest was everything that the Warped Tour isn’t.  The venue was the unpaved parking lot of a figure 8 racing track in the middle of the woods in Northern Wisconsin.  There was an old one-room bar on the premises that served drinks and some food and had facilities for the thousands of camping crust punks.  The stage was two flatbed trucks backed up against each other.  The second day of the festival there was a torrential downpour and the dirt parking lot was filled with foot deep mud.  This is the backdrop for many of these photo’s.

The festival took place just over 10 years ago and only those that attended seem to know it even happened.  When I started going though a box of photo’s recently I found all of these 10 year old pics of the event and thought that I should archive them here.

For the record here was the line-up for the weekend:

Friday

• Scorned
• From Ashes Rise
• Deadstate
• Nine Shocks Terror
• Talk is Poison
• Dreadnaught

Saturday

• Inflicted
• Code 13
• Brother Inferior
• Ruin Acre
• Spider Cunts
• React
• Disagree
• Detestation

Sunday

• Antisocial Behavior
• Calloused
• Despite
• Word Salad
• Distraught
• Aus Rotten
• Oi Polloi
• the Varukers