Houston's Music Festival

The ultimate guide to Free Press Summer Fest's food: Eat like a rock star

So what is your plan for eating and drinking this weekend at Free Press Summer Fest, Houston? Are you going to throw down a blanket, take your shoes off, and camp out in front of the Mars stage all day, hopping up intermittently for bathroom breaks and a huge slice of pizza?

Are you going to roam around and try a little bit of everything in small amounts?

Want my advice? Don’t commit to either! Play it smart and map something out with the FPSF app, but don’t etch anything in stone. This is a festival, after all. A festival in Houston, put on by Houstonians. You’d be doing yourself a disservice by committing to any one section of Eleanor Tinsley Park.

You don’t want to be stuck waiting in line for a mediocre sub from Jersey Mike’s when you could be grabbing a Vietnamese sandwich.

But where to begin? There are plenty of choices this year, and you don’t want to be stuck waiting in line for a mediocre sub from Jersey Mike’s when you could be grabbing a Vietnamese sandwich from the MuSuBi food truck . . .

To assist you in your Free Press Summer Fest 2013 experience, here is my humble compilation of food, drink and assorted concessions to get you started. You’ll be glad you discovered these this weekend.

Wild Bill’s Olde Fashioned Soda

Crafty, classic suds in a refillable tin mug etched with the FPSF logo? Can’t miss! This booth was a hidden gem on Saturday last year, but by Sunday, everybody and their mother armed themselves with those 36-ounce tin mugs and lined up all day long for some delicious Sarsaparilla Six-Shooters and Outlaw Orange sodas.

Buy a mug on Saturday before the lines get too long, and just like they tell you in the voting booth, refill early and often. Look for the booth buried between all sorts of food goodness along the main drag between the festival stages. You are bound to hear some good music while you’re waiting for an ice cold soda pop.

MuSuBi Food Truck

Food trucks are parking at the festival this year! This move seems like a no-brainer, and I’m very happy to see the food truck community taking an active role at Free Press Summer Fest. As for my personal favorite, MuSuBi will be parked directly across from the Neptune stage near the Taft entrance, so you don’t have to miss Geto Boys' set while waiting for a crispy baguette full of ginger garlic meatball with sweet Vietnamese chili sauce. A family recipe, I’m told. Well done, Houston.

Saint Arnold White Noise

Not only is this beer — a Belgian Wit full of bright flavors — perfect for a hot June day in Houston, it also goes far to debunk the myth that a music festival experience has to include crappy, overpriced beer. Keeping FPSF local is what this weekend is all about, and I’m thrilled to hear that Saint Arnold Brewing Company is doing this. You can find these beers in the Fancy Pants tents as well as the craft beer wall on the festival grounds.

In the spirit of its name, I’m inviting you to enjoy White Noise with me while listening to the blistering sonic assault coming from the Jupiter stage during A Place To Bury Strangers’ set on Saturday evening.

(Pro Tip: A little bird named Lennie tells me that using the hasthag #WhiteNoiseatFPSF or posting pictures on Saint Arnold's Facebook wall while enjoying the beer might just give you a shot at a nice prize.)

Tiff’s Treats

There is often a time at a festivals when, inevitably, you might crave some sweet munchies. When that happens, Look to the cookie! Tiff’s Treats is there for you this year, Houston. Their brick and mortar shop at Greenway Plaza has been a personal favorite of mine for a while now, so when I saw their name on the FPSF app this year, I couldn’t resist.

Trust me, after toughing out two days of sweltering heat and the dizzying effects of music on music on music, you deserve a cookie. They will be offering a few of their classic cookie recipes near the Saturn stage as well as their ice cream filled Tiffwich sandwich and their brownie-forward masterpiece, the Tiffblitz.

For Artists Only:Greenway Coffee Co.and Blacksmith Coffee Bar

I have it on good faith that the guys from Greenway and Blacksmith are offering their fantastic coffee drinks to the Paul Walls and the Chan Marshalls of the world in the artist tent. I feel bad mentioning this one, because it is off limits to fans, but since I’m in that boat too, we can all marvel at this concept together from afar.

At least there are Anvil cocktails in the Fancy Pants tent to sip on. Just imagine if Tom Waits was in the lineup this year! Houston could be in the midst of a recreation of the classic Tom & Iggy vignette from the Jim Jarmusch film Coffee and Cigarettes.

In any case, it’s great that Greenway and Blacksmith are showcasing Houston’s coffee culture for all of the artists that make this festival possible.

Tiff's Treats will be on-hand for sweet munchies, like the Tiffwich ice cream sandwich.

Tiff's Treats

Tiff's Treats will be on-hand for sweet munchies, like the Tiffwich ice cream sandwich.

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la flame gets burned

Houston rapper Travis Scott targeted by new Netflix doc and biting diss track

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

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Here’s where we are so far in the bad month local rap god/aspiring WWE heel Travis Scott has been having lately:

It all started a couple of Tuesdays ago when Netflix reminded people of Scott’s darkest hour with Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy, the latest entry in the streamer’s Trainwreck documentary series. This installment takes you back to the first night of Scott’s Astroworld Festival in 2021, when Scott’s headlining performance resulted in a fatal crowd crush and ten people – aged 9 to 27 – dying from compressive asphyxiation.

The doc, which includes interviews with attendees who survived the crush but lost a loved one, basically echoes what a Houston grand jury found in 2023: no single person was responsible for the deaths. Scott is just as much to blame as Live Nation, the live-event empire that teamed up with Scott in (poorly) organizing that year’s festival. (As someone who attended the first two, casualty-free Astroworld fests, I can say things were a lot less clumsy and dangerous before Live Nation showed up.)

For local rap enthusiast/podcaster Donnie Houston, Trainwreck gave him what he already suspected. “I feel like, after watching the documentary – and with what I felt before – this thing was bigger than one person,” says Houston. “It was bigger than Travis Scott.”

If that wasn’t enough for our boy, Pusha T of the Virginia rap duo Clipse has been making his feelings known about La Flame — and it’s not good. Last week, he and his twin brother Malice dropped the single “So Be It,” from their upcoming Let God Sort Em Out album. During one verse, Pusha throws a lot of lyrical daggers at Scott:

You cried in front of me, you died in front of me
Calabasas took your b***h and your pride in front of me
Heard Utopia had moved right up the street
And her lip gloss was poppin', she ain't need you to eat
The 'net gon' call it the way that they see it
But I got the video, I can share and A.E. it

Pusha has also been making the press rounds, explaining his beef with Scott. It goes back to “Meltdown,” a track from Scott’s 2023 album Utopia. The song features a guest verse from Drake, who takes shots at former foe Pusha and longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams. “I melt down the chains that I bought from your boss, give a f**k about all of that heritage s**t,” he raps, referring to the jewelry the part-time Houstonian bought through Pharrell’s Joopiter auction site.

Pusha took umbrage with the verse, especially since Scott flew to Paris to play “Meltdown” and other tracks for WIlliams (who produced a track on Utopia). “He interrupted a session,” Pusha said in a GQ interview. “He sees me and Malice there. He's like, ‘Oh, man, everybody's here,’ he's smiling, laughing, jumping around, doing his f***ing monkey dance. We weren't into the music, but he wanted to play it, wanted to film [us and Pharrell listening to it]. And then a week later you hear ‘Meltdown,’ which he didn’t play. He played the song, but not [Drake’s verse].”

Pusha also calls out Scott for his lack of loyalty. “I don't play how y'all play. To me, that really was just like…he's a whore. He's a whore.”

While Pusha has been doubling down on the Scott hate, the social-media world is waiting for Scott to respond — and possibly set off another, high-profile rap feud. Even though Bun B recently said he believes Scott will most likely have something to say soon, Donnie thinks this beef has already run its course. “I expect something like this, honestly, to blow over,” he says. “Like, I don't see this turning into anything nowhere near the magnitude of a Kendrick and Drake situation.”

Even with all the haterade surrounding him, Houston predicta Scott will rise above it. “I think this documentary dropping may have, you know, reminded some people of some things that may provoke certain feelings,” he says. “But I think Travis is gonna be alright, man. Like, the kid's a megastar, younowhamsayin. I think that the people that follow him genuinely follow him. And even if he loses a couple people here and there, his following is so strong and so tied in with everything he has going on, and he'll be alright.”

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