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Bay Weekly Crooked Fest June 1 is a whole new entry in Chesapeake Country’s calendar of festivals. Tell us its story.
Daniel Messeca My partners in Crooked Crab Brewery and I wanted to create a really fun event to celebrate our other two great loves besides beer: music and community.
Music is especially important to me as partner Alex Josephs and I are both guitarists and have been playing together for over 16 years. I feel it’s my duty to showcase some of the best I believe Maryland has to offer.
Community, because I wanted to create an event that was old school — you’ll have an actual ticket to this event — and invited people to separate from their phones and connect on a personal level at an event in their backyard that partners local music and good times.
Bay WeeklyDid your musical partnership lead you into brewery partnership?
Daniel Messeca
Bay WeeklyTell us about the music we’ll hear Saturday, June 1.
Daniel Messeca We based some of the choices on musicians who had played at Crooked Crab. Some are crowd favorites, and some are my personal favorites.
Joey Harkum is an Anne Arundel County institution. He and fellow act Justin Shapiro are singer-songwriters specializing in well-crafted and original acoustic music with memorable hooks and meaningful lyrics. Jimmie’s Chicken Shack is another local institution you can count on for a good show.
Yellow Dubmarine is not hyper local, playing more in greater Maryland, but a reggae Beatles tribute band that I like and feel will fit the local spirit and vibe. Stolen Rhodes, who I saw play at Filmore in Silver Spring, has a southern rock vibe everyone will love. Burt the Dirt brings an awesome rootsy Americana sound that you don’t hear too often around here. They’re going to bring a little twang to the lineup.
Bay Weekly What kind of beer can we expect at an event created by a brewery?
Daniel Messeca
Bay Weekly What’s the crowd you’d like to see at a brand-new festival?
Daniel Messeca I’m hoping to see a strong local crowd from across Anne Arundel County and beyond! If you’re asking for a number, we’re hoping to see between 500 and 1,000 people.
Bay Weekly We know that rain can fall on even the best-planned festival. Are you singing Rain, rain go away or do you have other schemes to persuade Mother Nature to cooperate?
Daniel Messeca We are hoping that Mother Nature smiles down on us on June 1, but we’re going to rock, rain or shine. Rainy days sometimes make for the most memorable music festivals.
Bay Weekly
Daniel Messeca Our all-from-Maryland theme and the idea of locality shaped the kind of charity we thought deserving of this event’s focus. To me nothing seemed so local as the Chesapeake Bay. The Oyster Recovery Partnership works directly to improve its health. Team that up with the Partnership’s location in Annapolis and the fact that the Crooked Crab brewer’s wife Melanie Osborn works with oysters, and it was a no-brainer.
Saturday, June 1, 2-9pm, AACo. Fairgrounds, Crownsville, ages 21+, $35 w/discounts, rsvp: www.getcrookedfest.eventbrite.com.