For love, not money

SITTING at the breakfast counter of Millie’s restaurant in Silver Lake, Keith Morris is too wrapped up in his conversation with Sean Carlson, the 22-year-old creator of underground music/art/comedy extravaganza the F-Yeah Fest, to notice that his oatmeal is getting cold. “It might go Circle Jerks, Bad Religion and Pennywise,” Morris, the Circle Jerks’ dreadlocked singer, tells Carlson, “Or Bad Religion, Circle Jerks, Pennywise.”

“I heard it was Circle Jerks, Dickies, Pennywise and Bad Religion,” Carlson replies.

“No,” Morris says. “Bad Religion and Pennywise are playing on the main stage with Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.”

If their conversation sounds like a punk-rock riff on “Who’s on First?,” there is good reason: On Saturday, Morris will be dividing his time between the Home Depot Center, where the Circle Jerks will join those other punk-rock stalwarts on the bill of the 2007 Warped Tour finale, and Echo Park, where the two-day F-Yeah Fest will be kicking off.

“I’ll probably get to the F-Yeah Fest just in time to shake people’s hands as they’re leaving,” Morris predicts.

The 52-year-old punk veteran, who co-curated F-Yeah with Carlson, makes no bones about his preference for the scrappy 4-year-old Echo Park event over Warped’s big-budget traveling circus.

“The Warped Tour is a completely different world, with all the sponsors, all the record labels competing to get their bands on the tour. Normally, we just drive in with our equipment, unload the equipment and just hang by the stage where we’re going to play,” he says. “There aren’t any bubbling-under bands, bands that are on, like, Joe and Fred’s label that they’re running out of their garage in Echo Park.”

“There’s a lot of money to be pushed on the bands on the Warped Tour and there’s a lot of favors to be returned,” Carlson says. “Our good friends the Mean Reds, their record label had ties to the Warped Tour. Their record label sends two bands a year on the whole entire tour, but those bands didn’t know they’d be playing on no stage, basically, on concrete, and playing to 10 or 12 kids a day, out of 10,000 customers, because there’s so much going on at once. It’s a Disneyland for these kids. When there’s nine stages -- how do you focus? It’s too much.”

Not that there isn’t an embarrassment of riches on offer at this year’s F-Yeah Fest, albeit on a much smaller scale. About 30 bands, including the Fuse, Deerhunter, Foreign Born, Lavender Diamond, the Mae Shi, Midnight Movies and Langhorne Slim, as well as a slew of comedians such as Bob Odenkirk, Jonah Ray and Josh Fadem, will be appearing in five all-ages venues.

“One of my favorite bands on the lineup, the Explosion, was actually on the Warped Tour and got kicked off,” Morris says. “They got kicked off because they were bad-mouthing the other bands, which can be a real easy thing to do. The whole idea is camaraderie, but if you’re on a bus with some kid who’s being sponsored by Xbox and Monster drinks and some really bad clothing company, and the record company is making sure they’ve got hotels every night, that’s not really paying any kind of dues, that’s not any real character-building. That’s not really experiencing things that are worthy of writing about. They’re actually closed off from the world.”

Yet one notable change in this year’s F-Yeah Fest is the participation of corporate sponsors Dewars, Paul Frank and SuperDeluxe. Carlson dismisses the potential grousing this move might incite in the punk community. “If tickets aren’t like, $4, if the alcohol’s not free, if there’s a good sound system, you’re a sellout,” he says. “They can go to a warehouse, I don’t care.

“You can’t win. We tried to make everyone happy, but I’ve given up on that. Last year, I got so much flak. We had to do a $20 ticket and no one understood that when we set out to do the festival it was a $12 ticket, but at the last minute we couldn’t use one of the venues due to construction. . . . We had to cut the capacity in half. But cutting the capacity in half, we had to double the ticket price so we could make ends meet.

“The festival still sold out all three days, but we didn’t make a dime.

“And this kid came up to me and goes, ‘Why’d you charge 20 bucks?’ You don’t even know. I spent eight months working on this and I didn’t make a dollar. I lost money on a sold-out festival. So I don’t want to hear it. I want to do this because I love it.”

pauline.oconnor@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Punk rock weekend

Warped Tour

What: Final stop of the 2007 tour featuring Bad Religion, Tiger Army, New Found Glory, Hawthorne Heights and many others

Also: Warped has added a special “Old School Stage” featuring the Dickies, Circle Jerks, Manic Hispanic, the Adolescents and Agent Orange

Where: Home Depot Center, 18400 Avalon Blvd., Carson

When: 11 a.m. Saturday

Price: $32.75

Info: Lineup: www.goldenvoice .com/images/artists/warped _la_updated.jpg. Tickets: (213) 480-3232; www.ticketmaster.com

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F-Yeah Fest

What: Music featuring the Explosion, Lavender Diamond, Busdriver, Deerhunter, No Age, Midnight Movies, the Blood Arm and many others; comedy featuring Bob Odenkirk, Fred Belford, Josh Fadem and others; art by Raymond Pettibon, Milano Chow and others

Where: Five venues in Echo Park, including the Echo and Echoplex, 1822 Sunset Blvd

When: 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Price: $13 per day; $24 for a two-day pass

Info: www.fyeahfest.net