The HFStival, a festival launched by the alternative rock station WHFS in 1990, was Washington’s biggest concert of the year in the 1990s and early 2000s — a chance to see all the bands you heard on the radio or saw on MTV in one glorious, humid, deafening day.
For Gen Xers and elder millennials who grew up in the D.C. area, that social media post, which appeared on the 9:30 Club’s X account just after lunch on Wednesday, served up a potent nostalgia bomb, like getting a message out of the blue from your long-lost high school sweetheart. You can’t stop the memories from flooding back.
For local teens, HFStival meant an epic day out with your friends, surrounded by tens of thousands of people and their friends. It came with the shock of getting off the Metro at Stadium-Armory on a sweltering summer morning, joining a sea of strangers wearing Pearl Jam and Cure and Lollapalooza T-shirts, streaming past bootleg merch vendors on the trek to the promised land, er, RFK Stadium. It was the smell of sweat and sunscreen and Teen Spirit deodorant, and too many human beings packed tightly together. The giddy excitement of helping pass crowd-surfers overhead, and watching swarms of concertgoers circle and crash in front of the stage. For a moment it felt as if the entire world was springing up and down to the Stereo MCs’ “Connected.”
Who could forget seeing the Violent Femmes for the first time and singing every word of “Blister in the Sun” and “Kiss Off,” which everyone knew every single word of? Thanks to WHFS DJs playing one or the other or both every single day on your way to or from school. Or seeing Jewel get clocked by a Frisbee mid-song? Hearing No Doubt and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and the Ramones and the roar of the Rollins Band and the crowd going quiet for a cameo by Tony Bennett?
For weeks before HFS happened there would be incessant speculation — at lunch, at the mall, in the park where you hung out after school — and listening to the radio hoping for clues about who was playing. (This reporter vividly remembers being on the phone with a high school girlfriend when HFS made the announcement about the 1993 concert, the first at RFK and hearing the chiming guitar riff of Velocity Girl’s “Audrey’s Eyes,” revealing that one of my favorite local bands was the first on the bill.)
The date that tickets would go on sale was circled on the calendars of countless local bedrooms, above the beds of teenagers who were plotting with friends (via cordless home phones) to meet in the pre-dawn hours outside designated sales points, like the Tower Records in Rockville or the JCPenney’s in Ballston. By the mid-’90s, attendance was over 50,000 but tickets were selling out in less than two hours.
For all the memories that have poured forth on social media in the past 24 hours, we still have no idea what a reconstituted HFStival might look like — who’d play, how many stages, how many winking callbacks to the 1990s. (“Stay tuned!” was the response from organizers when emailed by a Washington Post editor.)
But no one traffics in rock nostalgia like I.M.P., the parent company of the 9:30 Club. They spent 2023 celebrating the opening of the Atlantis, a new venue “inspired by” the original 9:30, with feverish demand for intimate shows featuring a number of HFStival veterans, including the Foo Fighters, Violent Femmes, X, Barenaked Ladies, Third Eye Blind and Bush. And when I.M.P staged revived HFStivals at Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2010 and 2011 they leaned heavily on ’90s-era lineups.
In the thick of this fresh round of HFS speculation, what we know for sure is that happy memories almost always come from a very specific time and place. In this case, a sunburned, sweaty one.
The HFStival’s high-water mark occurred when music was much more of a communal listening experience — when audiences found new bands on the radio, on MTV (especially the alternative rock “120 Minutes”), in the pages of music magazines or on mixtapes lovingly compiled by friends. The HFStival left RFK for good after the 2004 concert — a four-stage spectacle involving the Offspring, Jay-Z, Modest Mouse and Fall Out Boy — which was a year before YouTube was founded, and half a decade before Spotify appeared. There was an element of trust: The HFStival drew massive crowds for a mix of mainstream acts and local bands, but had enough underground cred that music lovers would head to the smaller “Street Stage” for a glimpse of up-and-comers such as Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Girls Against Boys before those groups were hugely popular.
And the crowds that came? Well, we were young and thin and had our whole futures in front of us, which probably makes one think more fondly of certain Goldfinger or Soul Asylum songs than necessary.
Too bad we can never go back. Or can we?
