You can’t please everyone, but two things most everyone likes are pizza and rock and roll. So last year the members of three like-minded bands—Coconut Coolouts, Slippery Slopes, and Johnny and the Limelites—thought people might like to hear rock-and-roll songs about pizza while eating pizza, at an event named Pizza Fest.
“There were these bands that had songs about pizza, and it was time that we turned it into a money-making machine,” says the Coolouts’ Ruben Mendez. “The bands that play have songs about pizza, food, or have songs that are good to eat pizza to.”
The first Pizza Fest took place in Chicago last year over six days, and when Johnny and the Limelites decided to come west this year, they and the Coolouts felt that a second, Seattle-based Pizza Fest was in order. Unfortunately, Johnny and the Limelites’ West Coast tour fell through, but the ball was already rolling. There would be no canceling Pizza Fest. So Mendez and friends hand-picked three days’ worth of bands to take over the Funhouse for an orgiastic display of lo-fi rock and punk bands with roots in the garage and hearts in the gutter.
Some bands come from Seattle—the Coolouts; lady-part palindrome band TacocaT, who write fun, funny songs about vaporizers and the suckiness of having a UTI; Idle Times, a grimy ex-Catheters project. Thursday night’s lineup is all local bands. Most Friday and Saturday bands, though, are from all over North America, like the pie-centric Jersey punks Personal and the Pizzas, or White Mystery, a brother/sister duo from Chicago who back up an adorable visual aesthetic of identically curly red locks with catchy, pared-down garage rock and roll.
The idea for Pizza Fest germinated during the Coolouts’ tour with Personal and the Pizzas last summer, and “every place where we played, there was free pizza,” Mendez says. It’s not free this year, but Post Alley Pizza will be selling pies at the shows, and if you sign up for the pizza-eating contest, as much pizza as you can cram down your gullet can be yours for a $5 entry fee. Just try not to puke on the rest of us when you’re thrashing around the room.
