Spring Crawl Doesn't Pass Go, Fails To Collect $200

\ Mar 20, 2008

3 min read

The queries started trickling in a few months ago. (That is to say: The e-mails that made it past my bloodthirsty spamtrap were few. If you didn’t hear back from me, try calling instead.) Now they’re torrential. "Spring Crawl" and "Spring Crawl 2008" are two of the most popular searches at alibi.com. You want us to hurry up and get to the point about Spring Crawl—what day we’re planning it for, who’s on the bill, how to get your band booked, all the important stuff.

And I haven’t said anything until now because, honestly, we weren’t sure ourselves. There are always a frightening number of unknowns leading up to Crawl time—that’s just the nature of this beast. But this time was different. We’d been looking forward to changing the event since Fall Crawl 2007, and we were experimenting with new formats. But everything was still up in the air.

And then all hell broke lose. The Golden West burned down. With it went our hope for a Spring Crawl in 2008.

Not only has the Golden West been wiped off the face of Albuquerque, but the Launchpad and El Rey are out of commission for the foreseeable future. El Rey looks like it might be back on its feet before summer, but the same can’t be said for the Launchpad, which suffered about as much peripheral damage as you can imagine, from ruined sound and electrical systems to the crumbling wall it shared with the GW.

Joe Anderson and his crew are working full-time trying to find alternate rooms for hundreds of bands they had booked at the Launchpad through the spring. The morning of the fire, the Launchpad people were standing in the parking lot behind the El Rey text messaging agents. It hasn’t slowed since. This brings the Alibi to another worrisome problem.

Since the very first Crawl in 1999, Joe was the nerve center of the festivals. Although each venue determines the lineup of bands they’d like to have during Crawl, Joe’s the one that actually books all the bands, orchestrates the impossible task of organizing them into rooms and time slots, and ties up all the loose ends that inevitably unravel in the process. There are 15 or 20 other things he and the Launchpad crew do that are too unglamorous to even get into here. We’re just glad they’ve been able to do it this long.

The Alibi thanks its lucky stars it can slap its name on what’s become the crown jewel of live music events in Albuquerque. But let’s not kid ourselves—Joe and the Launchpad folks do the heavy lifting. And at this moment, they need all the strength they have to get through their own massive booking and rebuilding issues.

Now to get to that point about Spring Crawl: There won’t be one. The timing just couldn’t have been worse. We apologize if this throws a wrench in your plans—it certainly has for us and other Downtown businesses. We’ll have another big event ready to go in the Fall, but chalk this one up to technical difficulties. Thank you for bearing with us.