Students show enthusiastic local music support at Logan City Limits
Music filled the Taggart Student Center as band after band rotated between the ballroom and the international lounge during the 7th annual Logan City Limits, a free, all-day music festival at Utah State University.
Seventeen bands came up to Logan to perform 30-minute sets, each from 11:30 am. to 10:30 pm. on Saturday. Each set saw an increasing number of students and community members gathering to see the shows. By the final set, performed by Smallpools, the TSC Ballroom was full and the audience spilled out into the foyer.
“This festival is a great one to go to because you’ve got a lot of talent in one place and it’s free,” said Terran Maynard, a sophmore in marketing. “You don’t have to pay a lot to go into a venue and this is somewhere you can come and hang out all day and listen to a lot of great music without really any money.”
The audience was able to listen to music, buy band merchandise, and even mingle with the bands who joined the audience to listen and enjoy the other shows.
“These people, they’re just ordinary people that are just hanging out with us and then they’re doing crazy huge things,” said Malone Hansen, a freshman in psychology, “I think that’s very humbling to see them do that.”
Logan City Limits was a good bonding experience for the student body, she said, because it brought all different types of people together in a nonalcoholic, fun, musical environment.
“I think it’s very cool, like no drinking, and how it kind of shows that you can have fun without the drugs and the alcohol and how it’s just based purely on music,” she said, “and in the city, I don’t know, most venues are open alcohol and it kind of detracts from the music, I believe.”
Great crowds supporting the local music scene is what gives Logan its reputation as a city with an energetic and supportive audience, said Nate Dukatz, a senior in management information systems and the director of arts and lectures.
“It wasn’t always that way,” he said, “people would come to Logan and they’d have no one at their shows.”
In fact, when Dukatz first started coming to school at Utah State University, the local music scene wasn’t doing well at all, he said. The few shows that Aggie Radio hosted were attended in the low hundreds and there weren’t a lot of bands coming up to perform on campus.
“A lot of people just really weren’t into local music,” he said.
Then the local music scene started to become more relevant in Utah, he said. Many bands started to gain popularity and make it to the big times.
Still, few bands were coming up to Cache Valley, so Dukatz started bringing them up for events and shows, including Logan City Limits.
“I think people started seeing, ‘Hey, I think we have really good local bands,’” he said. “Like, we have really good talent. All students need to see is that these bands are actually really good.”
As support for local bands grew, Logan and USU students started getting a reputation for being enthusiastic and fun to play for.
“It’s our absolute favorite place to play,” said Megan Larsen, a member of Westward the Tides. “Favorite fans, favorite school we’ve played. The energy’s through the roof. Crowd interaction is fantastic. The entire show, we just feel like it’s a huge group of friends coming to see us play. It’s so fun.”
Tessa Barton, who premiered her first show as part of Doe this weekend, agreed. Despite feeling nervous at their debut, the crowd’s energy fueled their performance and made the group feel welcome.
“The crowd was so responsive,” she said. “That’s always helpful, and obviously Utah State is so great because everyone loves music here. So that was really fun.”
Having such a supportive fan base and a good reputation for Logan City Limits is what helped bring a lot of bands to USU this year, Dukatz said.
“People want to come play here,” he said. “It kind of has that reputation. Like, if you come to Utah State, you’re going to have a good show and you’re going to be treated well and you’re going to have a good crowd … and then you know the students are knowing and learning to love these bands and realizing that they’re local talent.”
In the future, Dukatz hopes to see the festival grow as more bands sign up to perform and more people come out to see the local talent and enjoy the free music.
“I think some people think, ‘Oh you have to be hipster. You have to know the bands,'” Hansen said. “You don’t at all. You could be a geek, you can be a jock. You can be anyone and come and find a place and you can relate to the music in some way.”
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