Philly Music Fest Founder Explains How the Two-Day, All-Local Festival Demonstrates the City 'Jumping Up' a Level
It's hardly been a secret these last few years that Philadelphia has
emerged as one of the epicenters of underground rock -- home to a wide
variety of local and imported indie and alternative acts who have taken
advantage of the city's burgeoning live and studio infrastructure (as
well as lower rent and real estate prices) and brought its rock scene
out of New York's shadow and into the spotlight.
This
Friday and Saturday (Sept. 22-23), at the World Cafe Live venue, the
city will host its first two-day festival of all local bands,
appropriately called the Philly Music Fest.
Though the non-profit fest is relatively lacking in proven A-list names
-- the two headliners, Cayetana and Strand of Oaks, are both acclaimed
artists with cult followings, but neither have yet notched an LP on the
Billboard 200 albums chart -- the depth and variety is highly impressive
for an all-Philly roster, anchored in alt-rock but also stretching to
hip-hop, R&B, folk and alt-country across its 26 acts.
Greg
Seltzer, Philly Music Fest's founder and curator (who will turn 41 on
day one of the Fest), is hardly the sort of underground entrepreneur
you'd expect to be helming such an endeavor: He's a partner at
Philadelphia's Ballard Spahr LLP law firm, known among colleagues as
"the bearded deal lawyer that wears jeans and sneakers to work." A
Philly native who has remained devoted to the city's music culture and
live scene, Seltzer noticed the city's growing musical culture (and
national impact) and wanted to help it along -- which he decided he
could best do with a non-profit festival that supported local artists,
funneling proceeds to venues and local music programs.
"The kernel
of my idea was, I want to start at the bottom," he explains. "I want to
get more to the kids that are growing up in Philly... If we ingrain in
kids that music is really part of the fabric of Philadelphia, maybe
they’ll be starting bands. And if they’re not musically inclined,
they’ll be going to venues and feeling like it’s a part of their scene,
like Nashville and these other cities."
Though his ambitions for
the Fest are modest in year one -- essentially, prove the all-local
concept is a solid and practical one for Philly, and make sure all the
artists get paid -- Seltzer hopes that once established, the fest can
add additional venues and nationally recognized acts in years to come.
"My goal and vision would be that this thing culminates at the Mann
[Center]," he says of his future plans, "with the War on Drugs or
whoever is the biggest act we have playing the main stage."
Ahead of the festival this weekend, Billboard
talked with Seltzer about his Philly roots, why he thinks the time is
right for an all-Philly fest, and the challenges that such a festival
faces in its inaugural year.
Why don’t you start by
talking about the genesis of the festival -- how the inspiration came
about, and the first couple pieces that fell into place for it?
The
genesis of the festival was just the lifelong passion for music and
wanting to get involved in promoting the local music scene, as simple a
kernel as that. If you look back five or six years with the breakout of
War on Drugs, Dr. Dog, Kurt Vile, even Clap Your Hands Say Yeah way back
before that, and it was kind of like — the question I posed to myself
was, “Do we have a music scene in Philly that should or might be
garnering national attention?”
And then I just dove in, and what
really blew me away was the depth that we have. Yeah, now we have the
aforementioned acts, but now we have Strand of Oaks and Waxahatchee and
Sheer Mag; we have Japanese Breakfast, and we have these bands that are
coming up. But what intrigued me was the depth of the mid-tier and
smaller bands that are behind that. So this might be a longwinded
answer, but I started thinking to myself, “What is going on here? I’m
not seeing other cities in the country becoming music hubs. It’s just
the typical Chicago, Nashville, L.A, New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, but
why is Philly jumping into the ring?"
Being a lawyer and a
business student, I naturally took a little bit of a different approach,
and I started looking at residential real estate prices. And I started
looking at commercial real estate pricing compared to the rest of the
country. And I started looking at the public radio stations that we
have: WXPN, Drexel has a station, WRTI at Temple, Penn has a student
radio station... and we have an excellent circuit of small independent
venues that can put local music acts on Monday through Friday.
And
then, really importantly, you have studios popping up. We never really
had a local studio culture in Philly. And now you have people actually
being able to make records. They don’t have to run up to Brooklyn.
They’re making really high-quality records in Philly, and you have
labels like Lame-O Records that does the Modern Baseball stuff and the
side projects... And that’s because they could afford space now. And you
have a local radio station dedicated to championing this local music.
So I kind of looked at that and I was like, “Wow, there may be the
trappings here of an actual growth in our music scene.” And then what I
said to myself was, again, back to the beginning, “How can I help?”
So
the mission I had was, let’s put on a music festival, a nonprofit music
festival. Let’s generate a bunch of profits and proceeds, and let’s get
the money to two places. One is into the musicians’ pockets, because
that’s where it needs to go. So we’re paying a really nice wage to
everyone playing the festival. And then the second thing is, let’s take
the proceeds and funnel that to music education, charitable
organizations like LiveConnections, Settlement Music School, even art
programs like Mural Arts, and let’s ingrain in middle school kids and
high school kids that music is part of the fabric of Philadelphia.
Because it once was.
Is this something that you have
experience with doing? Have you put together festivals or big-scale
events like this before, that you can kind of look to for an example of
how to do something like this?
I have not produced a
festival or curated a festival before. But I do some legal work in the
music industry. I [have] represented Jay Sweet of the Newport Folk
Festival for nine years now, and his work. He books Pilgrimage, which is
next weekend in Nashville. So I do Jay Sweet’s legal work, and a
consequence of that is I’ve been around Newport Folk for nine years.
I’ve been backstage for nine years, and more importantly, I’ve
interacted with Jay in his planning. And he is as good, in my opinion --
and I go to a lot of festivals -- he is as good of an executive
producer as we have in this country right now... So to be honest with
you, I’ve learned a lot from watching him.
To your
knowledge, has anyone attempted something like this before in
Philadelphia? Is there a precedent you can look toward and see what they
did well and what could’ve worked better?
A couple people -- I met with Dan Deluca from the Philadelphia Inquirer and
some other folks around town, and they said, “Yeah, there was something
in the ‘90s..." But it was not a nonprofit, and they were not paying
the musicians very well. It was not focused on Philly music. The attempt
was a mini South by Southwest in Philly, that had some music
conferences... But I think it lasted like three years and it didn’t
really work.
But [as far as I know], this is the first attempt at a
full-scale, only-Philly music, the largest scale of one city’s bands
coming together. And you can fact-check this much better than I could,
but I’ve been told by a few folks that they think it’s one of the
largest gatherings of one city’s bands over a weekend. There’s not many
music festivals that have 26 bands over two days, that only focus on one
city’s music.
Why do you think that is?
Well,
there’s only, I would say, half a dozen music scenes in the country
that have the depth to put that on. We have a couple bands that are on
their first EP, that are really not generally touring yet, but everyone
on our slate has experience touring nationally, either as an opener or
as a headliner. So these bands are legit bands. This isn’t just like
putting a bunch of bar bands together. Could you do this in Chicago?
Absolutely. Seattle? Yeah. Portland, Oregon? Probably, I don’t know if
you’d get that deep. New York, clearly. Nashville is a yes. Austin is a
yes. But the point is that Philly is now jumping up, in my opinion.
It’s one of the majors.
Yeah,
and you know as well as I do that it wasn’t before, and something’s
brewing. And there’s been some people writing some articles about it,
like, “What’s going on?” And my thesis is, as I said in the outset, a
bunch of these factors coming together, and it’s resulting in a little
scene brewing.... A lot of the scenes that we’re talking about have a
sound, and the interesting thing about Philly is it hasn’t really locked
in on “What’s the Philly sound?” It’s still pretty diverse. Son Little
is R&B. We have rap and hip-hop, Lil Uzi Vert. Soul, we have that.
We have really strong indie rock. We have really, really strong
female-fronted indie rock in Philly. Is that our sound? I have no idea,
but it’s interesting to kind of monitor it and see what kind of a Philly
sound from this era is gonna be.
You said most of the
artists on the lineup come from your personal taste. Are you pretty
plugged into the live scene and the indie rock scene in the city?
Yeah.
I’m not gonna say I’m as plugged in as anyone, but I’m going to shows,
I’m plugged in. But I did gravitate away from my tastes a bit, and the
goal of the lineup curation was to have it mirror or have it be a
microcosm of the Philly scene.
And the list is incredible, of the
bands that we have coming up in Philly. And like I said, I’m sure there
are other cities that have several hundred bands. But someone said to
me, “What about next year? Are you thinking about next year?” Because
this person knows me well and knows that I’m already planning next year.
And they said, “You think any of these bands from 2017 will play 2018?”
And the look on my face apparently was like, “No! Of course not! Why
would any of these…?” And they were like, “Well you gotta get 25 new
bands.” I’m like, “I could plan this thing for five years and not have
one repeat.”
You said the hope is that if this year goes
well, you can kind of bump up the headliners. A lot of the bands this
year might be locally well known, but they’re not quite national names
for the most part. Is the hope that next year, you can get kind of a War
on Drugs or Modern Baseball-type band, on that level of national
renown?
Yeah, absolutely. We didn’t have a negative
response from a single act. Girlpool wanted to play. Sheer Mag is on the
West Coast. Waxahatchee and the Districts would’ve played; they’re in
Europe. Everyone was kind of a “yes,” and it wasn’t a money thing. It
was more of a scheduling thing. So yeah, we’re gonna have those folks,
in terms of like Kurt Vile, War on Drugs, Dr. Dog, Hop Along -- we’re
gonna have those, but we need to prove the concept in year one. Because
when you go out to these bands and you pitch them this concept, I don’t
blame them. They’re initially skeptical.
But these people are on
the road, probably getting screwed in every city that they go to.
They’re getting screwed by labels, they’re getting screwed by big
touring companies. So we’ve got to prove to them this year that we’re
legit, that we executed on this festival. Every single artist got paid;
we already have the cash in hand to pay the artists on Friday and
Saturday... And once we prove it to them this year, then yeah, next year
when we go back out to Kurt Vile, he’ll be like, “Yeah man, I heard
that was a great time. I’ll definitely do that.” So I think we’ll step
up in year two.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments Are Moderated And Saved