Daiana Feuer on August 18th, 2015

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By the third day of Echo Park Rising, even the walls were hungover, sweating out a whole weekend of beers and collected body stench from the people parade that spilled drinks in Echo Park since Friday. With the main stage gone, all that remained in the Taix parking lot was extra fencing, as if the zombies had escaped containment and were now far away, eating brains. Those dedicated music fans that returned for day three of the festival — bless them — shuffled between the Echo and Echoplex, Lot 1 Cafe and Little Joy, mostly.

Accidentally venturing out of the house without a phone means I can’t provide the time-stamp method of summarizing Sunday—but timing was off throughout the festival anyway. Here’s the goods, starting with a trickle of people wandering around in a daze until their second or third wind kicked in during the late afternoon and sent them capsizing over the brink of sloppy delirium.

||| Photos by Monique Hernandez

At the Echoplex, Children had the right temperament for an early Sunday afternoon. Seriously everyone in Echo Park seemed hung over. The experience of Children was like stirring celery in your first Bloody Mary — tangy, tasty, and a little bit spicy.

The early “special guest” at Origami Vinyl was the ever so rocking Screaming Females. People packed in the spot like sardines, leaking out into the street. This was a gift for the people who arrived early at the festivities.

The audience gave Frankie And The Witch Fingers a wide berth, standing about 20 feet away from the Echoplex stage. It was kind of like going to the beach but not getting in the water, and the ocean sends wave after wave of forceful bluesy rock crashing to the shore.

Over at Little Joy, Leggy Peggy and her band were in a bright, happy mood, feeding nice people a sweet slice of rockabilly tinged country music.

At the Lost Knight acoustic stage, Donna Bummer served up silly songs about sexing with Jesus and Bill Cosby, dressed in vintage bathing suits and snorkels, while people enjoyed the arts and crafts station in the back of the room.

Back at The Echo, on the patio, pretty country singer Jamie Wyatt sang a song about how far away it was to outer space, while inside the venue, the audience started to come alive for the dreamy surfing safari of So Many Wizards.

The sun was still out but at the Echoplex, Sad Robot kicked up a dark cloud of noisy rock, with brooding expansive guitar and singer Katherine Pawlak thrashing all over the stage like nobody’s business. 

Messy punk band Sloppy Jane let it all hang out, literally, as singer Haley Dahl removed her clothes and performed naked at Lot 1. She does that sometimes, someone said.

At the Echo, the next few bands delivered a pleasant blur of Burger/Lolipop Records lively garage rock. Adult Books cranked up the energy. As this was a battle of the bands, of sorts, perhaps so far they were winning in epitomizing the labels’ tug-of-war over whose garage reigns supreme. Since the band is on both labels, who gets to claim them? They were followed by an energetic set from Latin rockers Pastilla, who are new to us but have 54K fans on Facebook. … And Santoros brought a whole mess of fans onto the stage going crazy for their upbeat psychedelia. At this point, it was so hot in there people lost their minds.

Over at Little Joy, things were much chiller as Pearl Charles serenaded the stoners, dousing them in desert vibes.

Peach Kelli Pop offered a temporary respite from the madness of dudes that preceded them at The Echo, which had the audience bouncing around like adorable popcorn kernels.

Now it was finally time for the night portion of the festival. Jonathan Toubin’s Soul Clap Dance Off is just plain good fun, and if you made it this far, you were ready to let loose. But not before Death Valley Girls got supernaturally enchanting, Thee Commons demonstrated excellent beer chugging in multiple languages, and sent bodies flying across the room, and Sex Stains stirred the audience into a post-punk frenzy. But some crazy stuff did go down.

A free festival attracts fans, but also just people wandering the street. Those wanderers don’t give two shits about the music and prefer to start fights. You can’t yell disgusting things at a band that attracts an audience of feminists and expect to get away with it, more or less. The gist of it is, some guy kept insisting Allison Wolfe “sit” on his “face,” and her loyal fans/friends stuck up for her (and women at large). Wolfe may have swung her mic stand at the bad dude, and guitarist Sharif Dumani basically was two seconds away from crushing a skull. The guy was escorted out of the show and Wolfe called for all the women to come to the front, thus restoring peace and harmony to the chaos.