The line-up for Summerfest 2011 features a number of contemporary heavy hitters: Kanye West, Britney Spears, the Flaming Lips, and Florence + the Machine, to name a few. And while Milwaukee's annual music festival will never be as hip as other gatherings such as Chicago's Pitchfork Festival and the...

Along with the 12 billed stages at Summerfest there's a much smaller stage that you won't find listed on any official festival programming. Nestled on the festival's lake walk behind the Venice Club, The Refugee Stage has been quietly booking independent musicians for years, working with no official sponsorship...

For much of Summerfest's history, local bands were an afterthought. With so many touring acts dominating the schedule, local bands were left to compete for unglamorous day slots, with preference often given to reliable draws like cover bands over groups with edgier or more esoteric sounds...

Since it settled into its permanent home at the Summerfest grounds at Henry W. Maier Festival Park in 1996, Milwaukee's PrideFest has grown into one of the country's biggest lesbian, gay, bisexual and...

In the aftermath of the tragedy at O’Donnell Park in June, questions are being raised about the county’s stewardship of its properties. Funds were cut out of two recent budgets for routine building inspections. And despite lawsuits over the construction of the O’Donnell structure, its last “full assessment” was in 2005, when $600,000 in repairs...

We’re assuming that anybody reading this blurb doesn’t need to read yet another Bruce Springsteen comparison, so instead here’s a bit of trivia about the Milwaukee ties of Brooklyn’s The Hold Steady. The band’s bassist Galen Polivka is a Whitefish Bay High School alum who for years played in the...

In preparing its comeback album, Something for Everybody, Devo took the unusual step of inviting fans to pick the 12 songs from a pool of 16 that would make the album. “We did it on purpose as an experiment,” Gerald Casale explains in a recent phone interview. “It’s something we had never done. We were always hermetically sealed, like little aliens...

Local bands have sometimes been lost in the shuffle at Summerfest, but for the last three years a stage dedicated exclusively to local and regional performers has showcased the kind of independent Milwaukee bands that the music festival had historically overlooked. Since quietly debuting in 2007, the Cascio Interstate Music Groove Stage has...

By the end, RiverSplash was on life support. For two decades, the event had marked the unofficial start of Milwaukee’s festival season the first weekend of each June, but following years of bad weather and even worse press after a 2008 shooting, organizers announced in December that RiverSplash wouldn’t return this year. That cancellation freed up a prime weekend for Summerfest officials...

They don’t call Milwaukee the “City of Festivals” for nothing. Throughout the year, Milwaukeeans and visitors alike come together to celebrate the city’s diverse cultural herit