In September 2003, I was fortunate enough to attend the Austin City Limits Music Festival in Austin, Texas.
The lineup was a testament to why Austin considers itself the “Music Capital of the World.” Each night had a different headliner and included the soulful Al Green, alt-pioneers R.E.M. and jam band String Cheese Incident. No need to pigeonhole itself with a particular label, the festival only asked that the music was good.
On the second night of the festival I ventured with my friends into the downtown area of 6th Street (similar to Lincoln’s O Street, just bigger) and was in awe of the environment the people of Austin allow for themselves. There were music venues at every turn. Hardly any of the bars had yet to resort to the touch screen jukeboxes that only have a song or two from each of the major label artists within the machine.
I missed Austin the minute we hit the freeway to head north.
A while later, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Laura Knaus, entertainment chair for the University Program Council. We discussed the student body’s perception of what UPC does with student fees and what it really takes to get things to happen around here.
Afterward, Laura suggested that if I had any ideas to throw them the way of UPC.
The exact moment I’ll never know, but at some point I found myself consistently daydreaming about hooking up an event similar to what goes in Austin up here in Lincoln. We have a good number of music venues downtown and the local music community does anything and everything it can to get as many people involved in the Lincoln music scene.
I spoke with some of the local venue owners and band members to see what they thought of the idea and everyone was receptive.
We wanted to call it Lincoln Calling.
I took that idea back to UPC: Let’s get a bunch of venues to host a bunch of shows concurrently with the best relatively unknown talent the Midwest has to offer.
They liked the idea and asked me to write a proposal describing what I intended to accomplish. That was simple: to set up an event that anyone could be a part of as long as they understood the game. It’s all about the music. A concert ticket doesn’t have to be $50 for the band to be good.
When UPC had its fall budget meeting, they decided to invest in Lincoln Calling to the degree they felt comfortable with, so it wouldn’t inhibit bringing in any of the other events they wanted to plan. For this chance I am grateful.
See, the idea is that most people don’t have enough time in a day to spend drudging through the crap in order to find the treasure chests. Rather, they accept putting the radio on constant scan mode and relegating music’s role to white noise.
In my life music is too important to disregard. But I can understand that people have busy lives. Lincoln Calling was set up to do the drudgework for you. We put the work into finding the treasure chests. We listened to countless bands from all over the Midwest. We talked to entertainment writers from the Midwest’s bigger cities to see which bands were great but still somehow unknown. We went to shows and watched the crowd’s reaction to the bands on stage. And then we made a wish list.
What we’ve come up with: 25 bands from here, there and everywhere, five downtown venues that were cool with taking a risk on this idea and a three-day weekend with no Nebraska football to distract us so we can dedicate ourselves to making Lincoln a more music-friendly place.
I can’t explain how many times I’ve looked on Pollstar.com (a concert-listing Web site) and saw that a band was playing in Denver and then in Minneapolis with a day off in between. Hello! We’re halfway in between. But maybe they have a point. Maybe Lincoln isn’t a music-friendly enough place for bands to make it worth their while.
Let’s make it worth it for the music we deserve to hear.
Lincoln Calling really invigorated my sense of the human faith over the last few months. Everyone involved in this project helped out because they believed in the idea, from the venues to the bands to UPC to the Ross to the downtown restaurants that are helping feed the bands to those of you who show your support in the scene by going to shows.
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, it’s showtime.
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