by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Judging by the photos on social media, the crowd showed up early for Maha 2025, held this past Saturday for the first time at RiverFront Park in downtown Omaha.  

Little Brazil, who kicked off the festival at 2 p.m., was pictured playing in front of a small group huddled in front of the stage, while off in the near distance, the lawn-chair area already had begun to fill – a stark contrast to Maha Festivals in years past, where the only crowd for the opening bands was volunteers fixing signage and unfurling trash-can liners like black flags in the wind.

There was concern from the Maha founders – back in the Maha fold after three years of earnestly trying to get the Outlandia Festival off the ground – that people might not come downtown after Maha was moved from its long-standing home at Stinson Park in Aksarben Village. Would Maha suffer the same fate as Outlandia, which could never get people to make the 20-minute drive from Omaha to Falconwood Park in Bellevue? 

Mike App, one of the Maha founders who was working as part of this year’s Maha team, said 4,353 tickets were processed through the gates at Maha. How many of those tickets were actually purchased by the ticket holders versus provided to sponsors and donors? App would not say.

But leading up to Maha, the founders had said they’d be happy if they sold 3,000 tickets to the festival, and odds are they passed that threshold. There seemed to be a “make or break” attitude about having a crowd in excess of 4,000 for a festival that costs “just a tick over a million dollars” to put on. That number also was exceeded.

Despite that, App would not say if Maha will be back next year, though T.J. Twit, the head of the Maha Board, said in an article in the Flatwater Free Press that a date had been secured for RiverFront Park for 2026. No doubt part of the decision will be based on revenues generated from beer and concession sales. Merch sales appeared to be robust, judging by the number of Pixies bags and T-shirts I saw being carried around the compound and the fact that I couldn’t even get close to the front of the merch table when I went to check out Maha T-shirts. 

The Festival Experience

Concerns about parking downtown appeared to be unwarranted. When we arrived at around 7 p.m., we drove right up to CHI Lot A, as had been suggested by Maha, paid our $10 event parking fee and drove right into a lot that was only 3/4 filled. It took about five minutes to walk to the park gates. 

Still, others who had ignored Maha’s suggestion had complained that they parked blocks and blocks away. They should have done their research. 

With lawn chairs hoisted over our shoulders, it took only a couple minutes to get through security and the ticket taker line, where we were greeted by the Shangri-La that is Heartland of America Park. Even way in the back, the crowd was dense but not uncomfortably so. 

I was told “good luck with those lawn chairs” and indeed, there was bumper-to-bumper lawn chair action throughout the center of the park, but within a couple minutes we found a great spot just outside the entrance to the VIP section that had a clear view of the stage. No problem.

Compared to Stinson Park, RiverFront Park is strangely narrow, its lawn bordered on either side by loose-rock paths, ornate landscaping and lots of park furniture. Everywhere you looked, drowsy slacker-youth lounged in hammocks. That narrowness makes everything feel more crowded and compact, especially in the lawn-chair area that stretched back approximately 30 yards from the stage. 

The “no lawn-chair area” was much less crowded and I was surprised that I could walk almost directly up to the stage just prior to Waxahatchee’s set – another contrast to the crazy crush mob in front of the stage for past Maha headliners. 

Another contrast – in years past, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into a bright, shiny, T-shirt-clad Maha volunteer. This year, Maha got rid of the 500-strong volunteer army and replaced it with much less conspicuous hired staff, and somehow, things turned out just fine. I wonder how many of those former volunteers, who had been comped in years past, bought a ticket to this year’s festival.

The Concert

Waxahatchee took the stage right at 7:30, just as the sun was beginning to set, forcing frontwoman Katie Crutchfield and her band to stare directly into it throughout the first part of their performance. If it bothered them, they never mentioned it while they rifled through a 19-song set that included Waxahatchee favorites along with a couple songs from Crutchfield’s side project, Plains. 

Maha’s stage is big and uncomplicated, bordered by the usual sponsor banners, with standard festival lighting except for the giant Pixies “Flying P”. Waxahatchee’s no-nonsense renditions sounded just like the recordings, and Crutchfield kept the between-song banter to a minimum. 

Sight lines from my vantage point were as good as anything in the VIP area. Maha limited VIP tickets to just 500, probably to keep congestion down in the pen located off stage right, cordoned in by metal fencing that ran up to the edge of the stage. 

And while the sight lines were fine from the back of the park (thanks to the raised stage and RiverFront Park’s overall flatness), the band looked like ants. These days, large screens are standard issue at most music festivals. Not at Maha. Another cost-cutting measure or an oversight? They definitely had screens back at Maha 2023. 

I got to see Maha’s security in action while waiting up front 15 minutes prior to Pixies’ set. A gigantic very drunk dude, probably in his late 30s or early 40s, stumbled into the crowd and proceeded to bounce off people as he struggled to stay on his feet. “Keep your head on a swivel,” I told a friend. “That guy’s out of control.”

Within minutes an even bigger dude in a STAFF T-shirt ambled up to the drunk, quietly telling him to get his shit together. But the drunk dude just could not do it, and before long, he was escorted away, hopefully to a Hold Steady-like “Chillout Tent.”

Like clockwork, Black Francis and company hit the stage at 9:30 to the strains of “Gouge Away.” And the crowd went wild. 

It’s hard to explain how different and subversive Pixies music felt when Surfer Rosa came out in 1988. At a time when George Michael and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack were at the top of the charts, Pixies sounded like groovy aliens that came down from space to party. They even shook up an indie music scene that was dominated by overcast, sad-sack artists like Galaxie 500 and Dinosaur Jr. Pixies could be as experimental as, say, Sonic Youth but still have an embraceable melody anchored in heavy surf guitar. What they were singing about, I still don’t know.

Thirty-some-odd years later, Pixies has become purely a nostalgia act and judging from the performance Saturday night, the band knows it. Of course they sounded great, but I got a sense that this was just another gig in a lifetime of gigs.  I never once heard Frank Black acknowledge the crowd.

We stuck around long enough to hear my favorite, “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” and all the way up to “Velouria,” but packed when they started playing “Chicken” from the latest album, The Night the Zombies Came. We weren’t alone. The band would go on to play a full 26-song set that ended with “Debaser.” 

Afterthoughts

It would be hard to not look at this year’s Maha Festival as a success. From everything I heard and saw, it came off without a hitch. I’m told the only technical problem happened during Silversun Pickups’ set, and that had to do with their use of a non-redundant wi-fi-powered in-ear monitoring system used only by them. 

A friend complained that food trucks had run out of food by mid-afternoon, but when I looked, more than half the trucks were serving food, including the Javi Taco truck (and who needs anything other than tacos, right?). The Kros Strain tent was abandoned when we arrived, but there was plenty of Boulevard Wheat (along with Coors and other brands) at the other tents. The beer lines were quick and efficient, and I paid with cash – which is almost unheard of these days. 

The best part – it was easy to get around. The park as a whole was comfortably crowded, which made for happy concert-goers. 

Still, the festival only drew 4,400 people, far fewer than the usual estimated 8,000 that attended during Saturdays at the old Stinson Park location. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of room for growth at RiverFront Park before things start to get too crowded. 

This was a one-day 6-band event, which makes it more like an afternoon park concert than a festival. Initial plans made back in 2023 for the never held 2024 RiverFront Maha Festival called for two days, with two stages up front and a third stage in back dedicated to local bands. While that sounds awesome, is RiverFront big enough to handle something like that, especially if they luck out and get a Lizzo-type situation like they had in 2019?

Ironically, Saturday’s crowd was exactly what the Outlandia Festival organizers had hoped for and never quite achieved at Falconwood Park with the capacity for three times the crowd. With all its landscaping and narrow green spaces, is the RiverFront the right spot for Maha? Something tells me we’ll have another year to find out. 

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2025 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.