Send Yr Favorite Locals to Bonnaroo!: Fiesta Movement Battle of the Bands, Tomorrow

Another one I’m woefully behind on mentioning here, I’m afraid… There’s a Battle of the Bands show going on tomorrow at the Warehouse Live, sponsored by this Ford Fiesta Movement thing, and it sounds pretty damn cool.

The gist is that a decent-sized pile of local Houston bands — some of whom I’m already a big fan — will be playing for a chance to play at this year’s Bonnaroo festival (which, fwiw, really shouldn’t be held in freaking Tennessee, but in someplace more appropriate for the festival, like, say, Adelaide; there are no kangaroos in Tennessee, as far as I’m aware). Not that whoever wins the battle itself will automatically go, but that the battle will pick the band that gets the chance to go…if Houston beats out other cities.

So, yeah, it’s a teensy bit of a longshot (although I hear H-town’s up near the front of the pack), and winning is going to require that large numbers of people:

1. people RSVP for tomorrow’s BotB — and no, RSVPing on Facebook does not count; you have to RSVP on the Fiesta Movement site
2. text the word “rockstar” to 44144
3. use the Foursquare app to check-in when you actually go to the show.

And yes, for Houston to beat the rest, you should tell all your friends to do all those things, too. And then, obviously, make it out to the show, a prospect which is made fairly pleasant by virtue of the lineup:

I don’t know all of the bands above real well, but I fucking love The Tontons & Robert Ellis, and am pretty impressed by both Peekaoo Theory & Tyagaraja — they’re all four good shit. Beyond that, though, hell, I’d love to see any of these bands make it to the Bonnaroo stage. That’s a pretty awesome thing to be able to make happen. Most of the rest of the things I’ve seen like this over the years have had a craptacular pile of suck-ass bands vying for the chance to play some big-name festival somewhere, so it’s extremely cool to see that the Houston Fiesta Movement team’s put together such a worthy slate of candidates.

So get on out there & support this deal, eh? Do Houston proud. Oh, and if you, like me, are confused as hell as to what this whole “Fiesta Movement” thing is, well, I pestered Team Houston co-captain and local show photographer extraordinaire Mark Austin about what the heck it is he and his partner, Amber Roussel, are doing with this and what it all means. Here’s his response:

Thanks for the response. Kinda hard to describe in a email, but basically a grass roots market effort by Ford to promote the new 2010 Ford Fiesta – which pulls in teams of 2 people from 20 cities to compete against one another to showcase their home city – winner wins 2 2010 Ford Fiestas (which we have dedicated one of our potential cars to local charity Noah’s Kitchen).

4 missions to pimp Houston. Mission #2 is to promote one local band. If Team Houston drives the most impressions, our band plays Bonnaroo this summer. We know and work with so many bands, that we chose to do a battle that was complete open to the public and judge throughout by a panel of local music professionals. We want Houston’s best band to play Bonnaroo.

Scoring of this is driven by sheer # of RSVPs to our battle, SMS code texting and Foursquare checkins at our event. Although Team Houston won Mission #1 of the Movement and are currently in first place, we are trailing Dallas in the Mission #2 scoring and we need some serious help to blow them out of the water and send a Houston band to play Bonnaroo (rather than the crappy one band they have).

We only have 5 days left to close the door on Dallas. Chron is supposed to run a piece tomorrow and we should have radio spots on 94.5 this week, but we could definitely use your help in getting the word out. This lineup is sick and hopefully one of them gets the chance.

So, there you go. Yeah, there is a wee smidge of corporate-ness about the whole thing, but fuck it; who cares? H-town is Corporate City, anyway, and this is a deal that’ll benefit Noah’s Kitchen, a worthy charity, some excellent local band, and Houston as a whole (’cause you can bet that it’ll make the national music news if H-town wins). Again: get out & support, folks.