Retrospective: Wonderfront Music Festival Still Working on Finding its Groove

Wonderfront returned to downtown’s Embarcadero in May for its third year and attendees experienced both improvements and setbacks. You’d hope this time would be the charm, but it’s clear the music fest is still working on finding its groove.

Assessing the pros and cons, it seems natural to start with the venue’s footprint, which is predominantly a sliver of land between the marina and San Diego Bay. Beautiful? Absolutely. Tight quarters for 15,000 people (Friday’s capacity crowd)? You betcha.

This year, most of the main stages were concentrated within this space. The only outliers were two free stages in Seaport Village and the one on the Adventure Hornblower Boat Cruises located a considerable distance down the boardwalk.

One of the worst aspects of any music festival with a spacious footprint is having to hike from stage to stage — especially when you’re going against the crowd like salmon swimming upstream. Wonderfront 2022’s layout certainly required more of this (who remembers having to traverse the makeshift pedestrian bridge?). This year’s more compact layout reduced travel time, a significant improvement, but it also kept everyone in the same tight corral for the majority of the day and night.

As in previous years, the two main stages were side by side at the end of the strip. Ultra-convenient if you wanted to see Briston Maroney play on the Marina stage and then, five minutes later, watch Milky Chance perform on the Ocean stage. If you positioned yourself just right between the two stages, you wouldn’t have to budge between acts.

That said, since the bigger names played both these stages, everyone wanting to see the headliners ended up crammed into the same corner, which often made for a crowded experience. You might think it would make sense to place one of these main stages at the opposite end of the strip to spread out the crowd, but since there is only one entrance into the venue, that would create a bottleneck of epic proportions.

Speaking of such, by far the worst part of Wonderfront 2024 was the Friday afternoon Will Call experience. Hundreds of people who simply wanted to pick up their pre-purchased wristbands wrapped around Ruocco Park in a serpentine line, taking one to two hours just to collect their entry card. But wait…not so fast. The line to the main entrance was actually longer — stretching from the heart of Seaport Village almost all the way down to the USS Midway Museum.

It was at this point when I realized I would not be getting in to see T-Pain at 3:40, the first act on my agenda. As I followed the line down to its end, I contemplated simply aborting the mission and going home. I was not interested in spending another hour-plus inching my way up to the entrance.

Thankfully, I stumbled upon the Hornblower Boat, which few seemed to notice, so I quickly boarded. Along with no more than 25 others on the upper deck, I enjoyed a sun-filled, 40-minute cruise to the Coronado Bridge and back — all set to the sultry sounds of psychedelic dream pop band Amo Amo.

The remainder of the night and weekend went considerably smoother. While acts like Dominic Fike and Joey Bada$$ fired up the throng stationed in front of the two main stages, I found myself even more drawn to the smaller (yet less congested) Park and Club stages situated near the entrance, where I enjoyed spirited sets from Dayglow on Friday and The Saint Cecilia on Saturday. With this year’s lineup more dedicated to emerging acts, I can say Wonderfront succeeded at introducing me to bands like IDKHOW and Paris Texas, which now appear in my playlists.

While Wonderfront might have difficulty addressing issues related to its footprint (to a certain degree, it is what it is), they definitely could do something about the quality and price of their food and beverages. Domestic beers and basic burritos shouldn’t approach $20 each. Savvy attendees were wise to slip out to nearby Seaport Village eateries, like the Hess Brewing/City Tacos collab, where you could get two craft beers and three top-notch tacos for less. Wonderfront should consider borrowing a page from Austin City Limits’ playbook and host a caravan of the city’s best food trucks, bringing balance to the quality vs. cost ratio.

When Wonderfront debuted in 2019, it was clear the festival had promise. After all, it has a lot going for it that is unique to our city. Three years in, they still have some kinks to work out, but I’ll be there next year to see what 2025 holds.

Donovan Roche, a San Diego-based writer/editor, has covered the music, entertainment, and arts scene for more than 30 years. Send your story ideas to droche17@cox.net.