How would you like to go to a five-day music festival where you could take in the likes of Slant 6, Yo La Tengo, Karp, Codeine, Neutral Milk Hotel, Beck, Quasi, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, Lync, and the Halo Benders? Even better, how would you like to see all these bands, plus about three dozen others, for an annual ticket price of $50, in a small town less than two hours south of Seattle?

Well, if you began in 1994 and traveled back through Olympia's four previous Yoyo a Go Go festivals, you'd get all that, as well as the opportunity to enjoy a shaved steak sandwich (yes, even in hyper-veggie Olympia), take a ride on the Zipper, and watch one of the more freakish small-town parades this side of Little Rock. Every two or three years, Yoyo's indie-punkapalooza collides gleefully with the town's annual Capital Lakefair festival, creating a temporary intermingling of small-town Americana and an edgy, alt-rock milieu--a surprisingly satisfying coexistence that is one of the more worthwhile reasons to abandon our jaded, overcrowded club scene and head south for five days.

The festival was originally envisioned by friends Patrick Maley and Michelle Noel. Maley owns the Yoyo a Go Go record label, which subsequently releases compilations of highlights from each festival. "The thing I've noticed about bands who play at Yoyo," says Maley, "is that when they stand in front of a thousand fans from all over the world in our big old beautiful theater, they seem to play as if it really mattered." At the first Yoyo, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl played together for the first time since Kurt Cobain's death, spontaneously sharing the stage with the Stinky Puffs. The second festival in 1997 was particularly memorable because of the presence of bands who had either evolved into more promising collectives (Excuse 17 and Heavens to Betsy had recently forged together to become Sleater-Kinney), or were really starting to hit their stride artistically (Modest Mouse impressed the hell out of everyone that year, especially Built to Spill's Doug Martsch).

With all that hipster cachet floating around, there are bound to be encounters with some of the more irritating elements of Olympia's insular clique-ishness. Rumors about secret shows and private house parties fly regularly, and unless you run with the right sect of the underground, you're going to have a hard time getting into them. Unfortunately, this means a lot of the genuine, diehard fans who have traveled from as far away as Australia and Japan get left out of some great moments. Such elitist attitudes are apparently what keeps famous former resident Kathleen Hanna and her Le Tigre cohorts far away from our state's capital, and may leave first-time attendees feeling that they're missing out on something they just aren't cool enough to know about. There's also the redundancy of some of the booking choices: At least 12 of the bands that are playing this year have played at one, if not all of the previous festivals. The mutual-appreciation-society factor runs high here. In many ways, Yoyo is an unabashed exercise in self-promotion for Oly-based record labels.

But from a music lovers' perspective, who really cares? Lord knows Seattle perpetuates the "too cool for school" attitude to a similar degree, and Olympia is internationally recognized as a petri dish of subversive, risk-taking art rock for a damn good reason. Besides all that, it's quite economical; there are certainly more than $50 worth of good bands to watch. Recommendations for this year's festival include openers Get the Hell out of the Way of the Volcano and the bayou-bluesy riot of the Gossip on Tuesday; Wednesday's performance by the highly touted soul outfit Now Time Delegation; the belligerent, interactive demands of the Evaporators on Thursday; and Unwound's 10-year anniversary show on Friday. In addition to ingesting one of the aforementioned shaved steak sandwiches, I would advise you to figure out who the hell Romantic Retard Nation is on Tuesday (for no other reason than the band's name) and keep your eye on the TBA slots at the Capitol Theater on Thursday and Saturday. There's always a surprise act that's worth ferreting out, and you don't need no stinkin' hipster credentials to make time for that.