The annual River Roots Live music and rib festival is coming up next Friday and Saturday at LeClaire Park in Davenport. I've worked as the stage manager/announcer for bands at the rib fest every year with the exception of its first year in 1998. And when River Roots Live began eight years ago, I've worked every event with the exception of the second year. When the two combined six years ago, it was marriage of two popular and successful summertime events in the Quad Cities. And this year - with The Wallflowers and Shooter Jennings headlining the event (with a special appearance by The BoDeans) - promises to be another great festival.
With that said, I was interested to hear that the Fargo Rib Fest - also known as Happy Harry's Rib Fest (named after chief sponsor Happy Harry's Bottle Shops with two locations in Fargo and one in Grand Forks) - would be going on when I was up in Fargo earlier this summer. After driving from western North Dakota thru Fargo on my way to Minneapolis, I decided to stop back in Fargo to check out their rib fest.
The first Fargo Rib Fest was held in 1996, two years before the first rib festival was held in Davenport. Just like the one in Davenport, it features a number of national and regional traveling rib vendors and live music that includes slowly dying rock bands, and up and coming country acts. Whereas River Roots Live is probably a music festival first and a rib festival second, it fully appears that the emphasis is on the food at Fargo and the music is a nighttime afterthought. We start the music at 5 p.m. on Friday evening and at noon at Saturday. In Fargo, they have an opening act and then the headliner comes on sometime after 9 p.m. This year's headliners including Sugar Ray, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Blue Oyster Cult (a band that has played at River Roots Live in the past) and some country band that I wasn't familiar with, Gloriana. But, then again, I don't keep up with country music all that much.
The rib festival in Fargo is four days - Wednesday thru Saturday - compared to only two days for the River Roots Live rib fest in Davenport. (Back when the Davenport Rib Fest was a stand-alone event, we did four days on a couple of occasions, but it was mainly three days.) Happy Harry's has been the title sponsor in Fargo for three years now. But the Fargo Rib Fest has over 20 national, regional and local sponsors for the event including big names like Miller Lite, Ford, and Bud Light. As my Fargo audio dealer told me when he was describing the rib festival to me, "The community really gets behind the rib fest up here."
On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. the Fargo Rib Fest waives their admission fee (I believe it's normally 5 bucks to get in) and they work with the rib vendors to provide lunch time specials. I pulled into Fargo just after noon and made my way up toward the Fargodome where the event is held in the northeast side parking lot of the enclosed stadium. (see map) When I pulled onto University Dr. N. from 19th Ave. N., I encountered a minor traffic jam of dozens of cars trying to get into the parking lot. Now, when we do lunch on the Friday of River Roots Live, we get a pretty good crowd of downtown workers. But with the expansive parking lots on the east and south sides of the Fargodome, they get HUGE crowds for lunch. (My dealer told me later on, that on the day I attended the rib fest it was the first nice day they'd had in the Fargo area in weeks. "People here have cabin fever," he explained. "They've just been waiting for a nice day to come and it's obvious they came out in droves.")
After parking the car toward the south side of the Fargodome, I made my way onto the grounds of the rib fest. Given the amount of cars in the lot, I knew that the lines would be long. But I didn't anticipate them being THIS long! There were seven rib vendors there including perennial Davenport rib fest vendor Desperado's BBQ, and a couple other rib vendors who have participated in the Davenport fest in the past - Aussom Aussie and Rasta Joe's BBQ. I had hoped to look for Donna Rice, the owner of Desperado's (her husband, Lee, died of complications of a stroke last year), but they were so busy that I wasn't going to interrupt their lunch time rush.
Fully knowing that I wasn't going to be able to get any ribs for lunch (they did have other non-rib vendors on the grounds), I sauntered over to the Summit Brewery tent that was manned - well, that's not the right term because it was being run by members of the Minnesota State University-Moorhead women's basketball team. I saw that they had a Summit Summer Ale on tap and I ordered up a 16-ounce glass for $6.00 bucks (ouch!). After grabbing my beer, I took off for a look around the grounds to see what they did differently from our festival in Davenport.
As I said, the rib vendors all had long lines of people waiting to get ribs and two free sides as part of the lunch special that goes on during the week at the rib fest. After getting my beer, I just happened upon a young guy who had just picked up a some ribs at Just North of Memphis, a rib vendor from north central Minnesota. I asked him how long he waited to get ribs and he said, "About 30 minutes. That's not as bad as last year. I waited over 45 minutes in line to get ribs one day last year." I began to wonder if there's any good rib joints in the Fargo-Moorhead area given the throng of people lined up in front of all seven vendors.
The stage was somewhat similar to what we do for River Roots Live. Our is a combination of the ornate Le Claire Park bandshell (which is only used as a backdrop) and a constructed covered stage. Interestingly, they have rib vendors close to the stage area, something that could cause some pretty bad congestion for those trying to get barbecue when a band it playing and there's a load of people in front of the stage. We keep the rib vendors back toward the east side of LeClaire Park, well away from the people near the stage area for River Roots Live.
It was also interesting to see how and where people were eating their food. The rib festival in Fargo used a number of large wooden cable spools as table tops interspersed around the parking lot at the Fargodome. I thought, "Geez, what a great idea!" However, procuring the large wooden spools and getting them to the event would be two separate issues. There's also a handful of metal picnic tables scattered throughout the grounds of the rib festival. And people were even sitting on some of the small metal bleachers toward the back of the stage area to try and eat their lunch.
And like we have at River Roots Live, there's an dining tent. Only the one they use in Fargo is about three times the size we use and they really do "sardine" the people in there. The one thing I noticed is that they use heavy duty metal folding chairs in Fargo compared to the flimsy plastic seat and back folding chairs we have in Davenport. They aren't too stable, especially when you're sitting on grass instead of asphalt.
For the families, there were a number of areas for the kids. Ford Motor Company had a traveling exhibit that showed new cars and offered interactive video games for kids. There was a huge bounce area for kids as well as a small stage for family-centric entertainment. Having that large of a parking lot allowed a lot of spreading out of the festival as a whole.
Even though I couldn't get any barbecue - no, wait - I didn't want to WAIT to get any barbecue at the Fargo/Happy Harry's Rib Fest, I still came away impressed with the whole operation. I guess-timated there were easily over 3,000 people who were either eating, waiting in line, or still coming in when I left just before 1 p.m. I can easily see why people in Fargo get behind the rib festival. I learned some things that I took back to Davenport with me to try and make our event even better in the years to come.
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