Cropped Out Music Festival creator Ryan Davis sits at a cement table at Turner Park on River Road. Friends/festival volunteers Cutter Williams and Jim Marlowe are with him. They talk about some guy in a hockey mask on a dirt bike.
The park is like a summer camp. Piles of dead wood lie around charred fire pits, dead light bulbs hang from a tin canopy next to a kickball field, paint peels away from cinder-block walls. A breeze picks up. Boats mosey by on the Ohio River. Davis’ arms are splotched with paint from the house he’s working on. Williams’ hair hangs past his shoulders. One of the lenses in Marlowe’s glasses is broken. They all wear slim black jeans.
It’s mid-August, and the temperature is dropping toward September. The guys say the fall is the perfect time to watch your friends wear masks and ride motor bikes through crowds of people. And up elevators and onto improvised stages. OK, what they really say is it’s the perfect time for Cropped Out, a weekend music and arts festival that takes over the home of the Louisville Turners once a year. “There’s a lot of weird stuff that goes on here. But it’s not like people are setting themselves on fire,” says 29-year-old Davis, who started Cropped Out with a friend in 2010. “We were doing a lot of travelling with my band (State Champion), and we thought it’d be really cool to put something together in Louisville, just kind of like a big showcase for all these bands we knew,” Davis says. “The mission statement is showcasing bands that are underappreciated, that are ‘cropped out’ of the big picture.”
There will be music inside and outside, and the place will fill with camping tents, food trucks, artists and maybe a few surprises. There was a magician and a tarot card reader last year. Thirty-seven bands — including Apache Dropout and local groups like Belgian Waffles and White Reaper — will play on three stages. In the past, Davis says about 300 people have come each day. But he hopes for more. “We’ve already outsold pretty much every other year,” says 31-year-old Marlowe, who owns Astro Black Records on Oak Street in Germantown and sells tickets there.
Davis funds most of Cropped Out, which costs between $30,000 and $40,000. Volunteers help organize it. Davis says he wants to keep the festival diverse. It’s not a rock festival, or a noise festival, or an experimental festival; it’s a music festival. Internet-famous rapper Lil B performed in 2012. “The Cardinals’ basketball team came out in 2012. Russ Smith was there. Kevin Ware, too. I was geeking out about that. Everybody was getting pictures,” Davis says.
But this year is different. Headliner: the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by saxophonist and Louisville native Marshall Allen, who is 90. Jazz pianist Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount, started the 15-person Arkestra in the 1950s. He had a flashy, cosmic look. The Arkestra often performs in bright, flowing fabrics. They look like aliens with an Ancient Egypt obsession (Ra claimed to be from Saturn). Ra died in 1993, and Allen, a longtime Arkestra member, became the director. Davis simply emailed the band’s publicist, and the two went back and forth without anything concrete for weeks. Davis delayed the lineup release as long as he could, but he had to know something. “Just tell me,” he said. “Tell me, ‘No.’”
The answer: “Yes.”
“It was a personal victory, getting them to sign on,” Davis says. The three guys smile so wide it forces me to smile, too. They stack Arkestra compliments like Jenga blocks.
“It’s so great to have a jazz presence.”
“They’re such an amazing band.”
“And Marshall Allen is from Louisville!”
“I saw him on his 84th birthday,” Marlowe says. The tower falls down; Marlowe has won. We go quiet.
“I saw them in Philadelphia. It was the best concert I’ve seen in my life. He got right off the plane and drove to the venue. They played for, like, four hours. They blew the place apart. They are kind of like a party band, in a weird way.”
And the game starts again, one block, one sentence at a time.
“They are a perfect fit.”
“Really go with the vibe.”
“Awesome.”
The Arkestra will play beneath the tin canopy, which will be covered in art. So will the advertisements. Last year, all the ads were on an eight-foot-tall tombstone. The bar will be open late, maybe until 4 a.m., like last year. Davis, who lives about five minutes away, will probably hang around until later than that, like last year. And weird stuff will happen, stuff that may involve dirt bikes.
“And if you have some time and you don’t want to watch anything,” Marlowe says, “you can just drink beer and, like, stare at the river.”
Written by Dylan Jones. Images courtesy of Mickie Winters
This article appears in the September issue of Louisville Magazine. To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, click here.
