After a brief break, Extreme Thing is back with a bang

Extreme Thing is back, and Brian Saliba’s excited. Guessing he’s not alone.

Last year, as you probably noticed, the festival, organized annually by Clark County Parks & Recreation department, was conspicuously absent from the calendar of events. According to Saliba, a program supervisor who handles marketing and special events for the department, the department lost some of its staff and needed time to regroup.

“We were down two people in my unit, and with the volume of events that we have, it was just physically impossible to take that on and do it properly,” says Saliba, noting how the event takes anywhere from six to eight months of the year to organize.

And so after presenting a successful edition of Extreme Thing in 2014, Saliba and his team took a year off, which gave plenty of time to focus on this year’s festival.

“Now all staff positions have been filled and we’re a hundred percent. So now it’s much easier to maintain, not just this event, but our annual programming calendar.”

A year later, Extreme Thing is back on track and raring to go with a stacked lineup that includes locals such as Be Like Max, Violent New Breed and Louder Than Words, adding to a healthy list of other headliners from out of town this year at Desert Breeze Park this Saturday.

There are five stages this year, including the XPOZ stage, which is dedicated to showcasing eight Las Vegas bands (Almost Awake, EKOH, Irie, Nations, Shotty, Social Amnesia, the CG’s and A Poison Alibi), who each earned their slots by besting a slew of other hopefuls in a battle of the fans contest sponsored by Clark County Parks & Recreation.

The turnout this year is expected to be slightly less than it was in years past, as the department specifically sets its sights on managing the growth of the festival, regrowing it “slowly and carefully,” as Saliba puts it. At its peak, Extreme Thing, which featured bigger-name touring acts such as Taking Back Sunday, The Used, Bring Me The Horizon, Killswitch Engage, Of Mice & Men, Emmure, Finch and Animals As Leaders, drew 25,000.

That’s an impressive turnout for pretty much any festival, much less one founded and run by a local parks and recreation department. It’s also a long way from where the event first started nearly 20 years ago, when the name was much longer and the crowds were, well, much smaller.

The festival got its start as a small community event at the Whitney Community Center in 1996. It was known then as The Whitney Teen Extreme Thing and Bike Rodeo. “It was more of a lifestyle thing,” Saliba says. “It was just trying to create something for the kids.” The first couple of years, the festival drew several hundred local fans and just kept growing.

About five years later, the center closed thanks to the presence of asbestos, and the festival was moved over to Desert Breeze skate park, which had just been built. When that happened, the name was shortened to Extreme Thing. But while the handle was abbreviated, extreme sports was still a very vital part of the festival; in fact, that aspect of the event ended up being expanded, thanks to the change of venue.

In the early years, there was a local skate shop called Sub Skates that set up a street course for the event, trucking in the ramps it owned. “This was before the valley had any concrete skate parks,” Saliba remembers. By 2001, not only did local skaters have a 12,000-square-foot skate park of their own to shred but they also had a pretty hellacious hybrid event to look forward to every year, one that was created just for them.

Music, of course, is the other important part of that equation. In that regard, the marquee names Extreme Thing have hosted over the years have been impressive. From snagging acts such as Reel Big Fish, the Toasters, Voodoo Glowskulls, Yellowcard, My Chemical Romance and Rise Against in the early years, to landing bands such as Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet for My Valentine, Pennywise, Bad Religion and Escape the Fate in later years, to most recently, booking bands such as the Used, Five Finger Death Punch, Taking Back Sunday, Killswitch Engage and Underoath, the lineups have been laudable. Saliba is the man responsible for that.

Although he later joined the parks and recreation department full time, Saliba was enlisted early on by Sean McInerney to help with the event, because of his extensive experience in concert promotions. After booking bands and promoting parties in college at UNLV, Saliba worked as a talent buyer with Fremont Street Experience in the mid ’90s. Impressed with his work on the festival, parks and recreation department offered Saliba a job heading up its special events unit, an opportunity he accepted.

Since that time, Saliba has helped Extreme Thing evolve. The first year at Desert Breeze in 2001, the festival drew 5,000 people, and from there it has grown exponentially each year. A big part of putting on the event has been managing the finances and making sure it’s sustainable. Although the county continues to underwrite the event, “at the same time,” Saliba stresses, “we look at it like a business. Can the program be self-sustaining and not be a burden on taxpayer dollars? And as we grew the event, we had to grow it very cautiously to make sure the growth was keeping up with the valley and that the revenue that was coming in from the event was sustaining.”

Part of that sustainability plan this year involves scaling the event back slightly with a smaller footprint and some other changes. Just the same, the level of talent hasn’t tapered. If you haven’t seen it yet, headliners this year include Mayday Parade, Saosin, Jedi Mind Tricks, Dance Gavin Dance, the Story So Far, Bayside, Bless the Fall, Chelsea Grin, the Maine, Escape the Fate and much more.

Gates open at 11 a.m. Saturday, and tickets range from $20-$50. See the full lineup, along with a list of what you can and can’t bring in at ExtremeThing.com. Oh and one other important note if you plan on attending: The entrance this year is off of Durango Drive directly west of the ball fields and not Spring Mountain Road.

Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com/music. Contact him directly at dherrera@reviewjournal.com or follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.