Downtown library to launch Meet Me at Main music festival

The bookshelves are alive with the sound of music—well, soon, anyway. Two weekends from now, head to the downtown branch of the Cincinnati Public Library for the inaugural Meet Me at Main Music Festival, where live music will abound throughout the building to celebrate three years of the downtown library branch’s re-opening.

Fritz Pape, a South Building supervisor and event programmer for the library’s main branch, has brought in bands of all sorts to capture Cincinnati’s expansive and unique local music scene.

“I’ve been in our local music scene for a long time … I was really hoping to have it be as diverse of a lineup as I can to really like explore as diverse of a music scene as we have,” he said. “I really wanted some quieter, folky stuff, some baroque pop, and then some louder, stranger stuff.”

Pape has already turned the library into a musical hub thanks to “Sunday on the Stairs,” an event series featuring musicians performing on the library’s stairs on the last Sunday of every month. The event has been incredibly successful, but library staff wanted to take the idea even further—so the Meet Me at Main festival was born, which promises a more esoteric lineup of musicians than their usual events when it begins on Saturday, July 11.

“We’ve been doing performances here at the main library for decades, right? It’s always been a space for live music, and we really just kind of wanted to go all in on it … with Sunday on the Stairs, we’ve had guidelines set up for those days that inherently don’t include everybody in the scene,” he said. “So I’ve always just wanted to feature like the incredible folks that I see when I go out to play shows. As somebody working at the library, if I have this opportunity to provide a space for them to do their art, I am so excited to do such a thing.”

The flyer for “Meet Me at Main” at the Cincinnati Public Library’s downtown branch. Photo provided | The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

The festival begins at 10 a.m. on Saturday, July 11 with some family-friendly fun, including a picnic and a “Peanut Butter & Jams” performance on the stairs. From noon to 6 p.m., the library will have musicians performing all over the building, including the reading garden, the south plaza and the branch’s main social stairs. The library will briefly close before re-opening for an “after hours” set that will run until 9 p.m., featuring well-known local acts BEEF and Fruit LoOops.

On Sunday, the festival continues with an educational panel about the Jockey Club, a legendary music venue in Newport, KY that Pape describes as “the CBGB of the Midwest” thanks to iconic 80s bands like The Ramones, Husker Du and Black Flag making early appearances at the venue. The panel will feature artists who performed there and employees who worked there, plus Kelli Evans—the author of “It’s A Freak Show Ace!,” a new art book revolving around the club’s flyers.

Mackenzie Manley, a content specialist at the library, said the festival fills a need that the local area is sorely lacking.

“I think there are so few spaces that aren’t bars for local music, and so it’s really awesome for the library to be this accessible point for folks to share their music and connect with the community in that way,” she said.

At future iterations of Meet Me at Main, Pape hopes to continue the festival in such a way that pays tribute to our region’s musical past while looking ahead to what’s next.

“We want Saturdays to be this really great showcase of local bands who are popular now and Sunday to feature a historical look back at our music scene. For example, I’d love to do something about Sudsy Malone’s or Rake’s End,” he said. “As a city that has such a robust music history, like with King Records and everything, it’s worth continuing to not just look at the past history of the music in the city, but history as it’s happening right now… The theme of the festival is the past, present and future of music in Cincinnati, and the library being a space for all of that to happen.”

For more information on Meet Me at Main, visit the official website of the Cincinnati Public Library. The library’s main Downtown branch is located at 800 Vine St. The festival’s full lineup is below:

Family-Friendly Fun