lyndzapalooza

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.

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!

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!