Brofest (attempt 3)

A shitty video that I made as part of a job application. I had assumed if I didn't list any hot key words, no one would see it that wasn't supposed to. In 12 hours, 14 people have seen it. Who are these people?

I figured I may as well post it here for any lurkers that may or may not exist.



I didn't know Nicholas Hurlbut really well, just in that sort of running-in-the-same-circle kind of way. He and I were always at the same shows, and probably shared a few words. Many of my closest friends were close friends with him, so I felt like I knew him by extension. I was always in awe of how friendly and positive he was, even when I knew he'd been in the hospital earlier that week. I remember seeing him play a show with his band one summer evening in July 2006, and commenting on how good he looked. A couple weeks later he was back in the hospital, and a couple weeks after that, a week before I left for university, he passed away.

I knew his friends in Silverstein had been in the early stages of planning a benefit concert to help out his family, and when the "For friends of Nicholas Hurlbut" announcement came, I really thought it would be about the concert that would become Brofest 85. It wasn't, and later that day Marie and I quietly drove to the Burlington mall to buy clothes for the funeral. We ran into several of our friends somberly doing the same thing. We were 18 and 19 and it was August. We were used to wearing shorts and brightly coloured band t shirts. I didn't own dress shoes. I was too young to buy funeral shoes. The funeral was packed with kids awkwardly pulling at collars and ties, not used to wearing church clothes.

A couple months later I came back to Burlington to help out with Brofest. I donned my "Fuck Cancer" t-shirt and sang along with my best friends, and a year later, I did the same thing. It was a way to embrace the tragedy and turn it into something good, instead of letting it own us. For me, Brofest represented the strength and support that could come out of a music scene. The kind of community that often gets a bad rap for producing selfish, self-important, cookie-cutter musicians had produced something great, and I was grateful to be a part of it.

This year, I had planned on covering Brofest for my project. I'd arranged to come down and speak to the organizers and musicians before the show. I spoke with Ryan Henderson (one organizer, and guitarist for I Am Committing A Sin) at 2:00 and by the time I got there at 2:30, the City of Burlington was threatening to shut down the show due to ambiguous fire code regulations at the venue (24/7, a church that, in it's prior lifetime, was nightclub NRG that was notorious for producing problems for the police).

Assured that it would be resolved within the hour, I left and came back around 4:00. It still wasn't resolved then, but my friend Paul told me that Ryan was in talking to the mayor, and "the mayor likes Ryan, so it should be okay." It never occurred to me that the show might not go off, so I left to run some errands and spoke to Paul again at 5:45 (doors were to be at 6:00) when he told me that everything was fine, everything had been resolved and they were just running a little behind.

The City put the kibosh on Brofest 87 five minutes before they were about to open doors. That was that.

When I got there, not having heard the news, I flashed back to Nick's funeral more than two years earlier. It was the same crowd, the same disappointment, the same solemn faces just trying to accept what was and move forward. There was no room for feeling angry or bitter at the result, no time to think about the money that could have been raised for charity, the room was just filled with an unquantifiable sadness masked by Nick's endless optimism.

It was unfair. Life is unfair. We didn't rail against it, because we already knew.

From the first Brofest: