Festival guide: Center of the Universe

An hour-by-hour itinerary, plus some musicians and veteran festival-goers give advice on how to have the best time possible.

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Conflicting set times and you

If you’ve ever been to a music festival that’s spread across several stages, you know your experience will be defined just as much by which acts you don’t see as the ones you do.  It’s inevitable that the excitement you feel while reading the initial lineup will be replaced with some anxiety-inducing difficult decisions at least, and possibly utter heartbreak the dreaded day the schedule is released. It’s the nature of the beast that all music festivals have scheduling conflicts. There will always come a time when you’ll wish you could be in two (or five) places at once. Center of the Universe Festival 2014 proves no different.

With over 100 bands playing in the Brady District over the weekend, there’s a lot of good music to choose from.  At any given moment, wherever you are, it’s a safe bet there’s a show just down the block that you could be enjoying equally as much as the one you’ve chosen. But then there are the big conflicts, when it seems as if whoever was in charge of scheduling bands did so just to ruin your day. These are the times you’ll see your fellow festivalgoers sprinting between venues in a vain attempt to see and hear it all. (Pro-tip: Seeing a full performance from beginning to end is almost always preferable to trying to catch bits of two or more shows.) CotU has two of these major conflicts, one for each day.

On Friday night, between 11:15 and 12:15, how, dear reader, will you ever choose between the ethereal psychedelia of Deerpeople at the Hunt Club, folksy sweethearts Desi & Cody at Laffa, the string-laden pop of We the Ghost at Majestic, the triumphant garage shredding of Lizard Police, and the swampy, haunted sax and lap steel wailing of Gogo Plumbay at Yeti? Likewise, when the clock strikes 9 on Saturday, will you go to Majestic for the lush, progressive pop of Tallows, whose debut album “Memory Marrow” was chosen as the Local Album of 2013 by the Oklahoma Gazette, the Tulsa World Stage for the spacious psych-folk of Horse Thief, the Vanguard for the speed and flow of OKC rhymesmith Josh Sallee, Mason’s for the rockabilly thunder and lightning of The Fabulous Minx, or the Guthrie Green Stage for the undeniable funk power of Yo Mama’s Big Fat Booty Band? We can offer you no answers here, only commiseration for the impossible decisions ahead of us all.

If this is all too much for you, there is one way to have a full weekend of great music while avoiding tough decision-making entirely: stay at Soundpony. While it’s great fun to see the Brady District transformed into Tulsa’s biggest all-ages venue, if there’s one thing about CotU that makes it no different than any other weekend, it’s that the highest concentration of great shows will be found at Soundpony.  Their lineup—Mexican Cartel, Guardant, Lizard Police, Pinkish Black, Bitchcraft, Verse & The Vapors, and Radioactivity—is better than any other venue, including the Main Stage. The Pony will never steer you wrong.