North By Midwest

The annual South By Southwest film and music festival gets underway in Austin, Texas next weekend. As always, they have an interesting lineup of musical acts.

It occurred to me, though, that we have had a pretty remarkable music festival of our own here in Madison over the past few weeks. Tom Morello, Wayne Kramer, the Street Dogs, Peter Yarrow, Michelle Shocked, and Ryan Bingham, among others, have played to huge crowds (outdoors in February and March, no less).  We have also had well-known speakers like Jesse Jackson (who could practically qualify as a Madison resident by now, he's spent so much time here), Michael Moore, Jim Hightower (who will speak at the Barrymore this Saturday night) and, on the other side of the aisle, Joe the Plumber (who has been in town on two separate weekends).

I wonder what it would take to get Muse here.  Because that would be really cool.