Crushing Krisis

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A Stage On Our Lawn, pt. 2

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Let’s see, where did we leave off?

It’s August, 2007. Lyndzapalooza (LP) has a Board of Directors, a to-do list over a hundred lines long, and isn’t planning on having another festival for nine months.

It was a strange position to be in – all of this person-power, tons of bright ideas, and nothing tangible on the horizon for an entire pregnancy worth of time.

Yet, if we really wanted to evolve, LP had to be about more than just the tangible. We started three parallel initiatives that would help us understand our roles and what we were trying to accomplish as an organization.

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The first task – a communications survey – was primarily my job.

It sounds like such a dorky task, and… well… if you’re not me maybe it is dorky. But, it was also crucially important, because in our post-mortem we realized that we didn’t know all that much about the LP audience, other than that they liked music.

What sort of music did they like? How frequently did they go out to see it? Did they enjoy Lyndzapalooza, or just come out of some sense of duty?

I spent a month working with the Board to devise a incisive list of questions that participants could whiz through in twelve minutes or less. I did a competitive analysis of survey services. I coded all of the answers so Lindsay could make groovy charts out of them.

We learned a lot about our audience. They wanted even more genres of music – especially classic rock! They liked to buy drinks and t-shirts, but they were mostly interested in music. And, they were open to coming to more than one of our shows every year.

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The second task we undertook together, because it was about defining LP and defining ourselves: we needed a mission statement, and job titles!

A mission statement was of key importance to us. “Lyndzapalooza” had always been synonymous with “birthday party,” even though it was really only that for the first year or two of its life. Yet, even at the Evolve festival we kept hearing “happy birthday Lindsay” from the bands – even bands who were new to the festival! We needed to attached a firm definition to the evolved LP, or else it would always just be a birthday party.

After some deliberation we arrived – quite unanimously – at the following

Lyndzapalooza celebrates diverse music, creative community, and equal-opportunity expression.

It’s not a typical mission statement, I suppose. It doesn’t come right out and say “presenting new music to audiences.” But, LP has never really been just that. It’s been about bringing together a staggeringly wide range of musicians and fans together to enjoy music. And I think the statement definitely says that.

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The third task was planning our first farm-based music festival, and tomorrow I’ll tell you how we got from there to having a stage on our lawn, rather in in our cornfield.

Until then, you can purchase or reserve tickets on the web at TicketLeap. And, trust me, you’re never going to get a chance to see these fourteen artists on a single lawn ever again.

A Stage On Our Lawn, pt. 1

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This is the first in a potential series of posts about There’s a Stage on My Lawn, a DIY music festival presented this weekend by Lyndzapalooza (LP).

In past years planning for a LP festival has effectively consisted of the eponymous Lindsay and myself trading frequent, frantic emails about everything from sound design to fine points of invitation etiquette, increasingly including Dante Bucci as the event approached, and culminating in a massive equipment order from Musician’s Friend to ensure we’d be able to amplify all of our artists.

For five years it’s resulted in a full day of music with nary a hiccup.

However, even sans hiccups the production of last year’s Evolve festival was one of the most overwhelming tasks I’ve ever taken on, privately or professionally. I can’t speak for Lindsay or Dante, but my role had expanded from engineering sound for the event to also include interviewing artists, working on our web presence, drafting schedules, and printing our 16-page program – and that’s just what I was doing the week before the event!

After Evolve was over we kept coming back to the word. I originally egged on Lindsay to choose it for the fortuitous synergy with our roman numeral V, but the festival wound up as a serious improvement over previous years. Yet, should our evolution really cease with two stages and an inclement weather hotline?

In my mind it was meant to be indicative of something more – that LP was going to be more than just a once-a-year party, both to our audience and to our musicians.

Lindsay and Dante agreed, and “evolve” quickly became our mantra. After the event we compiled a massive list of post-mortem items – over 100 topics amassed in two long-ranging meetings between the three of us, plus Lindsay’s partner (and now my co-worker) Kate.

The four of us were enthusiastic and optimistic, but once the list was compiled we realized that LP had grown a lot larger than just the four of us. We wanted everything to get bigger and better, including hosting a future spring festival at a local farm, but we could see the limitations of our time and resources looming ahead.

We evolved some more. We established a board of eight Directors, adding more science-minded friends to our media-savvy foursome. From underwriting to applications chemistry, our newly formed octet ran the gamut of backgrounds and influences, and was more than well-equipped to push LP even further in 2008 and beyond.

A scant five days out from this event and I’m amazed by how far we’ve come in less than a year, but I’ll get into those details in my next post.

I hope that if you live in the Philadelphia area you’ll find a chance this Saturday to check out There’s a Stage on My Lawn! You can purchase discounted tickets on the web through Friday, or buy at the door for $12. That’s less than the price of a new CD for over seven hours of original, local, live music!

There’s a Stage on My Lawn!

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This is perennially either the longest or the hardest couple of week of my year. Sometimes both.

Intense rehearsals, losing my voice, drums and drawing blood, chairing my own mixing committee, penning artist interviews while working to re-debut Arcati Crisis…

Sound familiar?

It should, because the third weekend of May is traditionally our Lyndzapalooza (LP) annual spring festival, and 2008 is no exception – LP presents There’s a Stage on My Lawn! this Saturday in Yardley, PA.

I’ve been chewing on a lot of LP-related thoughts for the past year, so my next few posts will be about some of the behind-the-scenes of planning the festival. In the meantime, I’m also posting artist interviews on our MySpace blog with Geoff Ednie, Dante Bucci, Brian Flannagan, Jesse Schurr, Just Like Me, Arcati Crisis, and Lindsay Wilhelmi.

Visit our website and click on the tickets link for discounted presale tickets, details on food and drink, camping reservations, and how you can make your own gear!

in which I am a smoke-filled room

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At the moment I am beat.

Yesterday I proceeded straight out of that last post into my daily exercise block, which is already starting to feel like a tough-but-feasible challenge instead of a life-or-death struggle.

With barely time for a shower and a bite to eat I public transited to a lengthy Arcati Crisis rehearsal, where we banged on Gina’s “Brother John” and my “Love Me Love Me Not” from every possible angle.

The former is now a staggering seven minutes long (twice the length of the majority of our tunes), and features me playing riffs and singing harmony that are both far outside of my normal comfort zone.

The latter is a weird amalgam of Animals-style sixties riffing and chugging Fall Out Boy alterna-rock, and is so much easier to sing with someone else doing some of the heavier lifting on guitar (even if my lifting really hasn’t changed at all). My previously hard-to-sing single bar of “detox tea” has now extended into a five measure wail during which my diaphragm is all like, “see, I told you I had a purpose other than wobbling around under your fake vibrato.”

Afterwards I ran for my life to catch two trains, the second of which I nearly boarded in-motion, to make it to Buckets for Lindsay guest-hosting the open mic. I met lots of cool new performers, and spent much of the night promoting my ass off on the behalf of our upcoming music festival, and drinking cocktails with Bill McConney, who comes off as a modern update on Nick Drake (aka, pretty great).

Over the course of the evening I played two sets, rocking my now-standard opening duo of “Icy Cold” and “Like a Virgin,” and debuting my new tentatively-titled “Not David Bowie” as well as a cover of “High and Dry.” My latter set was around 1:30 a.m. and featured me wailing “With or Without You,” which was wise to save until after the falsetto-palooza of H&D, but not wise to sing directly before “Love Me Not,” because the five-measure wail was nowhere in evidence.

Afterwards we walked back up the hill to Lindsay’s house and, for reasons unknown to me, I smoked a clove cigarette. Actually, they’re not unknown – an occasional clove when out with friends was one of my only vices in high school, and after a day of physically and vocally pushing myself it seemed like a decent way to relax.

Except, my pack-a-year clove habit is almost a decade old, and dovetailed with the height of my slothful anorexia and complete lack of vocal talents, so I really didn’t have a frame of reference about how it would feel to the new-and-improved version of physically- and vocally-active me. I woke up with my lungs feeling weird and slept-in, exactly like the unmade bed I was rising from.

The feeling didn’t do me any favors physically or vocally, as I discovered on the train and walk home. I wasn’t exactly wheezing, but I couldn’t find a good walking rhythm, and my vocals are unexpectedly squeaky in places, like a guitar string that’s not quite settled into it’s notch on the saddle (I’m sure the Bono-vocals have some bearing as that as well).

After an unexpected and delightful nap my lungs feel back to normal, and now we are about to depart to see the Curtis Symphony Orchestra at the Kimmel Center.

How To Edit Your MySpace Music Profile

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Editor’s Note: This brief article has helped thousands of musicians begin to gain control over their MySpace pages. If it also helps you please consider friending me on MySpace! In your “ADD ME” note make sure to mention that you found me through my blog. Or, comment below, including your url, to share further tips or tricks you may have uncovered.



I just spent a boggling amount of time (inclusive of intensive brain-process time while asleep) trying to learn how to update the layout of my MySpace music profile.

I won’t bore you with all the gory details. The upshot is, MySpace operates on its own peculiar set of rules, and 99% of websites proffering updated MySpace layouts (AKA “MySpace Codes”) do not care one iota if you understand them. They just want you to pick your layout and be happy.

(Even if you’re a savvy web-user it might not be immediately obvious where you paste the layout, as there is no obvious “backstage” area of MySpace. Improbably, any code alterations get pasted into your About Me box – or, if you’re a Band, your Bio box.)

My problems were twofold:
(a) We all know I can’t be happy until I understand how something works.
(b) Normal profile codes and editors don’t necessarily work they way you want them to on a Band profile.

Now, allow me to provide other musicians with the benefit of my 16 hours of experience in this field. It’s not a tutorial, so much as a guidebook. For this to be of any use you should have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, and a high capacity for trial and error testing.



First: Understand what you’re getting into. Read an awesome article by Mike Davidson that gives a detailed overview of how MySpace layouts work, and what you have to do to alter them. They’re effectively a series of nested tables altered by simplistic CSS code – not so bad, right?

Next: See Mike’s explanation at play. Visit Views Under Construction and then visit their sample profile and band profile. Now you understand the degree of manipulation you can put your profile through!

Then: Look before you leap. Dip your toe in the alteration waters by checking out some isolated edits you can make at Pimp Web Page, pasting them into your profile to see their effects. Note that you can do more than just change colors – you can resize, move, and hide most elements of a profile.

Finally: Head to the best editor I found, Real Editor. It’s meant for normal profiles, but you can still load up your band file. Here you can tweak just about any element of your page!

My suggestion? After you’re through playing around copy out the complete code for reference. If there’s any of it that doesn’t make sense, go back and work out one element at a time. Each time you finish an element, get the HTML. It will have some other junk in it, but it should be easy to pull out the one element of the code you actually altered. After a few iterations you’ll begin to understand what’s what. Try starting with your Contact Table, which is called contactTable in CSS.

When In Doubt: It’s not always obvious what certain page elements are named, or how they’re manipulated. If you’re stumped on how to get your intended result, trying viewing the source code of your profile, or another profile that you like. Zero in on the thing you’re trying to change.

If it’s an element like your top friends, search for text inside that table – you’ll discover the table class is friendSpace. If you’re viewing a cool profile that has altered that particular element, search again – this time for the name of that class. Now you should see the CSS that’s driving their manipulation.

If what you like is a minor element, like a certain border or text treatment, try searching for that color’s hex value (grab it beforehand by taking a screenshot and using an eyedropper tool in Photoshop, or similar).

And: Every time you arrive at a non-objectionable result copy out your code into a text file and save it before you keep working. If you’re having trouble with one tricky element, just work on that element in an otherwise blank About Me box, and add it to the rest of your saved code once you get it right.

Hope this helps!