Is this a dream?
“Ace of Cakes” star Duff Goldman is playing bass in an indie-rock band in a field next to a bowling alley. Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty is flirting with the Derby City Roller Girls and a writer from USA Today is interviewing people in the crowd. And they're surrounded by costumed freaks — beavers, marmots, mustachioed valkyries with bowling-ball breastplates, popes, Saddam Hussein and bikini bunnies. A massive white rapper called The Kentucky Prophet mingles with the various freaks and weirdos.
And then they start bowling.
Weird, right? Regulars at Lebowski Fest are accustomed to such strange scenes, but this trippy sequence from 2008 might've taken the cake. The toe cake.
Last year's Lebowski Fest had the makings of an end-all, be-all affair — maxing out both on oddity and acclaim. After all, 2008 was the 10th anniversary of the quirky 1998 Coen brothers film, “The Big Lebowski,” about a lazy stoner stumbling through a mystery with the strangest cast of characters ever devised.
The Louisville Lebowski Fest — always the biggest for the Louisville-based festival — had its own odd cast of characters populating the greens of Executive Strike and Spare on Phillips Lane.
The Founding Dudes — Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt, along with co-conspirators Bill Green and Ben Peskoe — even became published authors upon the release of “I'm A Lebowski, You're A Lebowski,” a comprehensive guide to the film. Russell and Shuffitt jokingly described the 237-page book as an ideal bathroom reader, which it is, but this made the book's presence in the top-10 of the Los Angeles Times' non-fiction bestseller list all the more remarkable. But that always has been the Lebowski Fest way.
Humble beginnings
Russell and Shuffitt aren't fools and, contrary to public's understand, they're not loafers, but they are always legitimately surprised when their Lebowski-related endeavors exceed expectations. And most have.
“The first year we did it, we had 125 people show up,” Shuffitt said of the 2002 fest, organized as a whimsy based on mutual love of “The Big Lebowski” and the belief that others shared it, too. “The next year, I remember telling Will that 350 would show up and we sold the thing out. It's like every year we bring the bar up a little and at the end we're like, ‘Well, this is it — we're at the top of the mountain.' And yet it continues to grow.”
How does something grow when it's already exceeded expectations, not to mention its life expectancy? You take it on the road; you go national. Russell and Shuffitt have done that, too. Lebowski Fest's first non-Louisville itineration was a festival in Las Vegas in February 2004, followed six months later by a festival in New York City. Since then, Russell and Shuffitt have organized three, sometimes four, festivals per year beyond the big Louisville bash, each spaced out by a couple of months to offer time for resting up, preparation and dealing with their respective homes and business endeavors.
But new fests have come to light. This year, out-of-town dates will expand to 14, with 13 of them part of an entirely new and ambitious plan to reach fans who've asked and asked via e-mail, often without satisfaction, that Lebowski Fest come to their cities. They'll depart for a 10-day, four event West Coast leg after this weekend's festival at Executive Strike and Spare; they'll do eight dates over 30 days in September, mostly in the East Coast, plus an October fest in Austin, Texas.
Called the Speed of Sound Tour (it's a Metallica reference, dude), the first leg kicks off July 20 in Seattle, nine days after this weekend's Eighth-Annual Lebowski Fest — which makes Russell giddy because he can finally use the Lebowski line “Mark it 8, Dude” on posters. Each city gets a screening on the first night and a bowling party on the second. It's a real tour, with a bus (probably) and back-to-back dates, just like a rock band. It's an unlikely and ambitious expansion from guys who usually exude a Dude-like air of tranquility and leisure.
And with expansion comes risks; as with any ambitious tour, this expedition might suffer the snags, trip-ups and logistical snafus that legendarily dog touring bands. “There's always room for error,” Shuffitt said, laughing.
Russell and Shuffitt have help. For the first time, a management company is handling much of the logistics for the out-of-town shows. So maybe it's a great plan. Ingenious. A Swiss watch. The only way to know is to hit the road — after all, how boring would it have been had the Dude not obsessed over his stolen rug, which tied the room together? No Big Lebowski. No Valkyrie Maude. No Jackie Treehorn. No Nihilists.
“We've kind of been learning as we've been going. We never set out to be promoters,” said Russell, seated next to a mannequin that may (or may not) become a valkyrie ring toss game this weekend. “It all fell in our lap and it just all worked out. These guys had some more expertise in this. It's funny, because when I was a younger man I wanted to be in a band and go on tour. And Scott and I actually were in a band, but we never made it on tour because we just kind of sucked.”
Russell and Shuffitt had long wanted to reach more Achievers, as “Big Lebowski” obsessives are collectively called.
Lebowski Fest has always been a small operation — Russell and Shuffitt, working at their Butchertown office cluttered with props, T-shirts and trinkets, aided by a couple employees and Green, who has since decamped for L.A. And it's never been overly thought out, they say. A non-Louisville show typically began with a phone call to a bowling alley in the chosen city. Russell and Shuffitt would enlist two or three friends/helpers and fly to the location after months of long-distance planning and promotion. Then it was back home to Louisville.
“It's cool, because being on a bus as opposed to flying from one city and back we can do things like bring our giant bowling pin costumes,” Russell said. “Those things are a huge hit. Who doesn't like a human-sized bowling pin with Hamburger Helper hands?”
Outside assistance
Since Lebowski Fest became an out-of-town affair, Russell and Shuffitt have received e-mails from fans asking them to bring Louisville to their town. Late last year, Russell and Shuffitt were contacted by +1, a Brooklyn-based music management and publicity firm, with a proposal for a Lebowski Fest road trip.
It turns out that +1's chief, Nat Hays, is an Achiever who'd attended the Lebowski Fests in New York City. Hays' company offered logistical support to Lebowski Fest — help booking bowling alleys, publicity and the logistics of having a small, mobile festival in a bus.
“It's one of my favorite movies and I really enjoyed Lebowski Fest, but I also wondered how far could this go and how many people could enjoy it,” said Hays, who also acknowledged the risks of such a huge expansion. “This is an ambitious plan this year. There's always going to be some learning curves and growing pains. We're prepared for that. There might be some issues, but hopefully a lot of hits.”
There have been stumbles. A Las Vegas date was scrapped, as have been plans to bring the Dudemobile, a jalopy similar to the Dude's battered Ford Torino, on the tour; it's too heavy to tow and isn't exactly dependable for road trips.
Hiring outside help is useful, but there's also peril in having outsiders help with such an insidery thing.
Lebowski Fest has a very specific audience, and Russell and Shuffitt are ringleaders of this circus. LebowskiFest.com is the epicenter for the movie's obsessive fans, who keep in touch on the forums, buy quirky Lebowski T-shirts and bumperstickers and keep up with the fests on Leblogski, a new feature rolled out with a recent redesign. Hays' company has its own kitschy experience from working with the U.S. Air Guitar Championship tour, but the majority of its clients are musicians like Editors and The Boy Least Likely To.
“There's been a learning curve, but it's been cool,” Shuffitt said.
Added Russell: “They've been taking care of some of the logistical stuff, like dealing with the venues, and that's freed me and Scott up to focus on what we can do to make the events more fun, what can we do to bring it up to the next level. Bowling pin suits. I mean, the valkyrie ring toss might not have happened if we'd been booking all the venues.”
The tour will include a road manager, and Shuffitt said they'll take a laissez-faire approach to how each festival is set up — flexibility that might compensate for those unforseeable logistical problems.
Success will depend on the Achievers, whose dedication to all things Lebowski has been the fuel that's fed Lebowski Fest so far. Hell, who'd be surprised if Achievers started following Speed of Sound like it were a Phish concert? (None have committed to this — so far.)
“Each city has it's own party,” Russell said. “That's the thing about Lebowski Fest — it's not really a performance, like a band. It's more about the crowd. It's up to the crowd to bring the party. Each crowd is kind of unique. Some cities might have eight Jesuses running around, all in character and yelling out the lines. But there are some cities where you have no Jesuses.”
The Speed of Sound tour is something of a test run for Hays. If successful, Hays sees Lebowski Fests flung even wider across the globe — dates in Europe, perhaps, to follow up on 2007's fests in the United Kingdom. Or, if some of the dates are sparsly attended, fewer but bigger events might be held, he said. Not getting too far ahead of themselves has worked well for Russell and Shuffitt, and they're making no promises for a 2010 tour.
“We kind of take it a year at a time,” Russell said. “One of the things we get asked a lot is, ‘When is this thing going to end?' We don't know. It's still going, but I could've seen it ending five years ago. It's kind of the spirit of the thing — we started it on a lark, sort of as a joke.”
