Comic-Con MTV Fandom Fest to star Echosmith, Bleachers at Petco Park

July 20, 2017 5:55 PM PT

Echosmith and Bleachers will perform at San Diego’s Petco Park Friday night as the headliners at MTV’s Fandom Fest. Admission is free to all Comic-Con badge-holders.

The four-hour event will begin at 7 p.m. Friday, with a live stream of highlights set to begin 30 minutes later.

“Teen Wolf” TV star Tyler Posey will serve as the host. He also hosted last year’s edition of Fandom Fest - which featured a performance by San Diego’s Pierce The Veil - and co-hosted the 2015 Fan Fest (as the event was then known).

Posey and the cast of “Teen Wolf” will sign limited edition posters Friday at 10 a.m. Friday at the Fox TV booth at Comic-Con. “Teen Wolf” begins its sixth and final season for Fox on July 30. MTV is hoping to launch a reboot of the series, replete with a new cast and setting.

Fandom Fest headliner Echosmith is now a trio, following the November departure of guitarist Jamie Sierota. The group features his siblings, Sydney, Jamie and Graham. The Chino-bred group will release its second album, “Inside a Dream,” on Sept. 29 and is set to perform Oct. 21 at San Diego’s Music Box as part of a fall tour.

Bleachers will also visit San Diego this fall.

The group will perform Sept. 27 at Observatory North Park in support of “Gone Now,” its second album. The band is led by former fun. member Jack Antonoff. He is best known for co-writing the Grammy-winning fun. hit “We Are Young” and for co-writing Sara Bareilles‘ “Brave,” Taylor Swift’s “Out of the Woods,” Lorde’s “Green Light” and One Direction alum Zayn Malik’s “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever.”

MTV launched Fan Fest at Petco Park in 2014, when Linkin Park topped the bill. Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington was found dead Thursday in Los Angeles and his death is being investigated as a possible suicide. He was 41.

The 2015 editon of Fan Fest featured the pop-punk band All-Time Low and rapper Flo Rida.

Things To Do

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”