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cover story “I had been telling Chris about the festival and he really wanted to be a part of it but he didn’t really like that it was in Lacombe,” Jones said. “So when the decision was made to move it to Slidell (its present location since 2015), he said, ‘Yeah, let me do it.’” And so the two men who have known each other since junior high school teamed up to stage the festival in its new location, Heritage Park in Slidell, with each of them bringing their fields of expertise into two of the key components of the event. Jones, a rap musician, promoter and producer who had done shows with Coolio and Snoop Dogg on the West Coast, brought his expertise and connections in the music business into the booking of top-name entertainment. Gabel, a mechanic and vintage car restorer, brought in the festival’s popular car show. This year’s St. Tammany Crab Festival will be held over the weekend of September 9-10 in the spacious park that sits on the banks of Bayou Bonfouca, just two blocks from Slidell’s Front Street (U.S. Highway 11). Headlining the entertainment will be the Meters guitarist Leo Nocentelli, Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. and the Zydeco Twisters and fiddler/vocalist Amanda Shaw, plus Al B. Sure!, Pokey Bear and Tucka. The featured attraction at the car show will be a “Rat-Rod,” which is being built from scratch by Gabel from a design in a comic book series called “Rockabilly Road Trip.” The comic series is co-written and published by Preston Asevedo, who is also the artist for this year’s festival poster which spotlights the three musical headliners. “Our mission is to create the largest event on the North Shore and I have no doubt in my mind that we can do it,” Jones said. “We want local businesses to benefit from this event the way New Orleans benefits from the JazzFest. We want people to know that when the Crab Fest comes around businesses will need to stock up on materials because their business is going up.” Echoing and elaborating on that objective, Gabel said, “The one thing that me and DJ don’t want is for the festival to stay the same every year. Where you come in and it’s the same artists; the same layout. So every year we try to add something else to the show that benefits the people of St. Tammany.” Among this year’s new attractions are horse and buggy rides, the BMX Stunt Bike Team and stunt skateboarders and new activities and play equipment for the festival’s kids’ area brought in by the Covington-based entertainment company, X-Fusion. A popular attraction added to last year’s festival offerings, scenic boat rides on the bayou steered by Captain Dave of Cat’s Meow Fishing Charters, will continue this year. The two principals also take pride in offering space, free of charge, to local nonprofit organizations promoting the services they provide. The nonprofits are allowed to keep a portion of the festival tickets they sell, plus the proceeds of merchandise they might sell on the festival grounds. Roughly 20-25 nonprofits are given this opportunity each year, Jones said. Explaining the decision to change the festival’s location, Jones noted that the site in Lacombe had become too small to accommodate the record crowds that were attending. He attributed the expanding crowd size largely to higher level of quality entertainment he was bringing in. The previous festival managers, he said, “never really emphasized the entertainment. The festival was pretty much an event that had been going on so long that people were coming just because it was there. So I started bringing in the big acts and the crowds started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It got so big that it was unsafe to have for the size of the crowd that was coming. So I had to make the decision to move it to Slidell.” With the added festival space, Gabel, who was the head chairman of World of Wheels shows at the Superdome from 2008-2012, was able to bring in as many as 80-85 vintage cars, plus other attractions that included Al Copeland’s championship speedboat, Sudden Impact Monster Trucks, a helicopter and even a restored German tank from World War II. Reminiscing back to their earliest experiences together, Jones and Gabel spoke about the time they spent in a “Yes Class” for at-risk students at Slidell’s Boyette Junior High School. Both of them were facing emotional issues related to unfortunate circumstances happening in their lives at the time, especially Gabel who was having difficulty processing the fallout from a major tragedy in his life. J U LY / AU G U S T 2 0 1 7 breakthrumediamagazine.com | BREAKTHRU MEDIA | 17


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